Multicultural Musical Role Models: Inspiring Diverse Students through Engaged Listening


Whether we teach general music or performing ensembles, elementary or secondary school, vo- cal or instrumental music, music listening is an important part of our curricula. Music listening has many clear benefits, such as hearing musi- cal concepts in action, developing aural acuity, emotionally connecting with great music, and building aspirations for future music making. It is this last aspect that has interested me most in planning my listening selections. Te more my students find personal connections with high-quality, professional-level music, the more excited they are about making music themselves. In this way, the musicians who perform the lis- tening selections in my classroom act as musical role models for my students. Tis has been true at every level at which I have taught, from pre-K through grade 12.


Among Kodály educators, we oſten hear about presenting “masterworks” and “art music”— those pieces that we liſt up as the very best, or music at its finest. However, I have some concerns about the way we represent music at its best. Specifically, I have noticed a pervasive Euro-centrism, elitism, and patriarchy in much of our “masterworks” repertoire. In research- ing this phenomenon, I did a survey of some popular listening curricula that are designed for general classroom use and compared the repre- sentation of cultures and genders to the demo- graphics of my student body, shown in Table 1. TABLE 1: PERCENTAGE OF RACES AND GENDERS REPRESENTED


Race


E Somerville Community School Students1


African American 4.4 Asian


Hispanic [Latino/a] 71.3 Native American


3.2 0.0


White [European origin]


Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander


Multi-Race, Non- Hispanic


Gender Male


Female


18.6 0.1 2.3


51.6 48.4


Somerville Public Schools Students2 9.9 7.4


43.0 0.0


36.5 0.0 3.2


53.7 46.3


Massachusetts Public School Students3


8.9 6.7


19.4 0.2


61.3 0.1 3.4


51.3 48.7


U.S. Residents4


13.3 5.7


17.8 1.3


61.3 0.2 2.6


49.2 50.8


Composers of Music Listening Selections from Surveyed Curricula (averaged)5 4.0 0.3 0.9 0.0


94.8 0.0


N/A


99.1 0.9


Adam N. Epstein


Te listening curricula surveyed clearly demon- strate a strong bias toward European classical music composed by men. Tere are, of course, exceptions to this in the form of specialized listening curricula that focus on other musical styles or in commercial textbook series that represent a diversity of cultures. Notwithstand- ing, the above data show that these listening curricula are strikingly out of step with the demographics of our schools and of our nation. While American general music educators would seem to excel at incorporating multicultural folk music material for performance repertoire, our listening repertoire sometimes feels stuck in mid-20th century Europe. Te bottom line is this: I cannot in good faith liſt up my own ancestral music as masterwork to the exclusion of virtually all others when there is so much high quality music of different origin that has great relevance to my student body.


Tis brings me to some general principles that guide my thinking about my listening curricu- lum:


1. Just like the folk music repertoire we choose for our student body, there should be some connection between the cultures of our students and the cultures represented in our music listening selections. Students need to see themselves in our curricula in some way.


2. In our multicultural country and global com- munity, it is our moral imperative to teach about music from many different styles with respect for their cultures of origin and those cultures’ particular standards of artistry.


3. Tere should be equal gender representation. 4. “If Europe had not existed between the years 1600 and 1900, there would still be music in this world” (Anonymous).


20


General Music


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