Decolonizing music education: Moving beyond tokenism

Curriculum as a hierarchy of knowledge: Music curricula in Canada

Many music curricula across Canada designate Western classical music as the music most worthy of study. They emphasize Western standard musical notation and specific Western constructs for expressing meter, dynamics, and articulations and highlight these elements of music as those musical concepts most essential to learn in schools. Conversely, musics such as popular music or “world” ¹ musics that may use alternative transmission practices, express elements of music differently, or possibly utilize informal learning strategies, find a marginal place in the curriculum. Western classical music is constructed as “natural,” and the curriculum tokenizes alternative practices by making them tangential to the main curriculum. In many respects, Western music in music education acts as a colonizer.

Despite the way the curriculum is constructed, many music teachers in Canada strive to create diverse programs for their students. In her examination of women’s studies programs, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) puts forward three curricular models that describe the manner in which “Other” subject material is engaged in the curriculum within the discipline of women’s studies. I rethink her pedagogical models and apply them to music education. Mohanty’s first two models are more tokenistic in nature while the third model is comparative. While there are benefits to the first two models, the third, when applied to music, reveals that musics are better understood relationally. Additionally, understanding musics relationally allows students and teachers to also come to know themselves relationally. Music is, by nature, a social practice to be understood in context and there is much potential in Mohanty’s final model to understand music in this manner. The curriculum, as it stands is narrow in scope. This paper explores ways that we, as music educators, may be able to broaden the curriculum from its specific emphasis on Western classical music to include different musics in a way that ultimately does not tokenize or trivialize them.

Curriculum as colonizer: Reinforcing dominant power structures

The curriculum documents across Canada focus largely on Western classical music and Western notation-based musical study. As such, teaching the curriculum in its current incarnation actually reinforces dominant power relations. The curriculum, in many ways, reflects Western music and its “others.” In the Grade 5 ² music curriculum from Ontario, Canada, for example, the first expectation listed for the students is “sing and/or play, in tune, from musical notation, unison and two-part music with accompaniments, from a wide variety of cultures, styles, and historical periods” (Government of Ontario, 2009, p. 114). While the expectation seems to embrace a range of cultures, styles, and historical periods, it limits the choices to what students can perform “in tune, from [Western standard] musical notation” – eliminating a wealth of musics including many global musics and aspects of popular music. Musical constructs outside of Western classical music are mentioned for the first time in the fifth expectation in the Grade 5 curriculum. That expectation references guitar tablature as a symbol system and the following expectation asks students: “How do you feel when you hear the music of a steel band?” followed immediately by “What in the ‘Spring’ movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons makes you think of spring?” (p. 115). Musics outside of Western classical music feel very peripheral to this curriculum and the Grade 5 curriculum is typical of this elementary government curriculum document that spans eight years of school.

As they currently stand, music curriculum documents in Canada tend to include musics “Other than” Western classical music as tokens. These “other” musics include musics from around the world in various forms including different kinds of fusion and also extend beyond world musics to popular music, including Western popular music. As Yaroslav Senyshyn (2004) contends in his discussion of popular music and intolerance in the music classroom, racist intolerance may be “an unconscious dimension in musical style intolerance” (p. 110). The connection he makes here is powerful. Many popular musics, after all, have their roots unmistakably in Africa. The dismissal of popular music as “Other” or somehow less worthy is easily as racially motivated as the casting off of musics from countries outside of Western Europe. The connections are clear, whether they are more direct like in a genre such as Rhythm and Blues or more subtle, such as an underlying 3–2 line in the rhythm section in a pop song.

This “Other” category then encompasses musics in a range of styles with roots in places “Other than” Western Europe. It is a broad category that includes music learned formally and informally, music with a variety of transmission practices that may or may not include written aspects, and music that may be fused with other music or be an entity unto itself. What links this disparate category together is that despite the fact that it includes musics that are drastically different from one another, they are marked “Other” to Western classical music by virtue of their place in the “hierarchy of civilizations” – always already inferior to the West, and thus also to Western classical music. The school curriculum’s privileging of Western classical music marginalizes all “Other” musics, effectively arranging them around the Western classical center in such a way that affirms and reinforces racial hierarchies.

This privileging of Western classical music in school curricula becomes intriguing within the Canadian context. In 1970, Canada enacted an official policy of multiculturalism under the Trudeau government, outwardly displaying Canada as a tolerant and all-embracing nation. Bannerji argues that such multiculturalism is “tolerated” as “non-threatening” as long as it

only skims the surface of society, expressing itself as traditional ethics, such as arranged marriages, and ethnic food, clothes, songs and dances (thus facilitating tourism) … But if the demands go a little deeper than that (e.g. teaching “other” religions or languages), they produce a violent reaction, indicating a deep resentment towards funding “others’” arts and cultures. (2000, p. 79)

Canada deems itself a tolerant nation, but there is a limit to its “tolerance.” This tolerance extends to what Alibhai-Brown (2000) refers to as the “3S” model of multiculturalism – saris, samosas, and steel drums. As an entity unto itself, therefore, music (or steel drums in this metaphor) is actually intimately connected to the essentialization, trivialization, and marginalization of these “multicultures.” Music more generally is perceived as an expression of culture that is non-threatening. However, if all we ³ can see of these so-called “other” cultures is contained within the “3S” model then they become essentialized caricatures of themselves, reaffirming the dominant paradigm and encouraging self-congratulation (Said, 1978, p. 325) for tolerance of said cultures. While the “3S” model may point more directly to world music in its reference to steel drums than to Western popular music, what it really elucidates is the superficiality of this type of engagement. Given the manner and reasons for which they have been marked “Other,” world musics and popular musics are less distinct than it may initially appear.

In further examining Canadian multiculturalism, Bannerji (2000) also contends that “[d]ue to its selective modes of ethnicization, multiculturalism is itself a vehicle for racialization. It establishes Anglo-Canadian culture as the ethnic core culture while ‘tolerating’ and hierarchically arranging others around it as ‘multiculture’” (p. 78). ⁴ Considering Bannerji’s argument, it is clear that Canadian music curricula actually reflect Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism. In music classrooms all across Canada, Western classical music often becomes the “ethnic core music” while so-called “other” musics are arranged hierarchically around its periphery.

The other issue with creating a program in a manner consistent with the format of the typical Canadian music curriculum is that it does not address the students in the classroom. In many ways, a curriculum based in Western classical music is irrelevant to a diverse student population whose personal listening choices range across the full spectrum of styles. The consideration of student subjectivities is seemingly absent from curriculum models that reinforce Western classical music as dominant. Applying the work of Mohanty (2003) in women’s studies offers an interesting perspective on the lack of consideration of the individual. Mohanty (2003) speaks extensively in her work of a universal construction of the Third World woman (pp. 21–22) and argues that there can be no such construction. Universality is an impossibility; however, Canadian music curricula assumes a universal student – a “Canadian” (white, Western) student who will feel at “home” in the world of Western European music. The curriculum places this so-called universal student at the center and arranges “Others” around the periphery. Following Mohanty (2003), I contend that there is no such thing as a “universal music student.” Even those students of Western European descent are often no longer “at home” in Western classical music. Their individual subjectivities are simply not acknowledged. If, as music educators, we choose to insist on the exclusion of “Other” musics from the classroom, we must face the fact that much of the music of the curriculum is largely irrelevant to many of the students.

Shifting the curriculum: Mohanty’s tourist and explorer models

When faced with the curriculum’s establishment of Western classical music as the dominant music and the ensuing lack of recognition of the subjectivities of individual students, music teachers have worked hard to construct different types of programs that incorporate these so-called “Other” musics. I turn now to the pedagogical models of inclusion that Mohanty examines in her work on women’s studies courses. These models are somewhat tokenistic in nature, although they do serve to broaden the curriculum, even if superficially. I ultimately hope to show how the third model – a comparative and relational approach – offers a deeper understanding to all participants in music education.

Looking broadly at music programs around Canada, it appears that current practices to incorporate these musics in the curriculum often follow the first two curriculum models that Mohanty (2003) critiques in her thoughts on women’s studies courses. I rethink these models to reflect on music education classrooms. The first model Mohanty analyzes is the “Feminist-as-Tourist Model” (p. 239). This model

involves a pedagogical strategy in which brief forays are made into non-Euro-American cultures, and particular sexist cultural practices are addressed from an otherwise Eurocentric women’s studies gaze. … This is a perspective in which the primary Euro-American narrative of the syllabus remains untouched, and examples from non-Western or Third World/South Cultures are used to supplement and “add” to this narrative. … This strategy leaves power relations and hierarchies untouched since ideas about center and margin are reproduced along Eurocentric lines. (Mohanty, 2003, p. 239)

I would like to reposition this model as the “Musician-as-Tourist Model.” Many Canadian music curriculum documents encourage an “add world music and stir” approach to Western classical music (Morton, 1994), leaving the latter music intact as normative or naturalized. There is no questioning of the center; marginalized musics simply affirm it. Thinking concretely for a moment, what does musical tourism actually look like in an elementary music classroom? Tokenistic curricula tend to do things in isolation, out of context. For example, a teacher may choose to do a class or a unit on “African Drumming.” What commonly occurs when this activity takes place is that the teacher presents some drum circle techniques, which are an amalgamation of techniques from different countries in West Africa. They are not particularly culturally specific, nor would they be performed as such anywhere in West Africa. There would not be discussion of Africa or any critique or interrogation of the power relations involved in engaging in the activity or the nature of amalgamating traditions in such a manner. It would most likely simply be presented as a “fun” activity. Students would be thrilled with their “taste of the exotic,” as would their parents at the obligatory end-of-term concert. There would be no attempt to integrate this unit with the rest of the curriculum or open up discussions or comparisons. There is also sometimes a question of timing. Why, for example, do the African drums come out in February in Canadian classrooms for “Black History Month”? When we, as educators, give black history a tiny moment in the year as an interruption to our Western classical program, we tokenize and temporally marginalize it. This unit becomes an add-on – an unnecessary frill to the rest of the program. This feeling of a frill is then communicated to and absorbed by the students. A unit on Rock ‘n’ Roll may be similarly presented. Devoid of its context and its linkage to African American music, like the unit in “African Drumming,” such a unit would also likely be presented as simply “fun.”

This additive approach then does not exclude Other musics; rather, it uses them to reinforce the dominant Self, perhaps even unintentionally. Aoyama (2009) explores cultural tourism extensively in her study on Flamenco tourism in Spain. According to Aoyama, cultural tourism “emphasizes a pursuit of exoticism and cultural authenticity … [It] focuses on engagement with quotidien regional culture and seeks experiences that are distinctive, and often exclusively offered by the region” (p. 82). Although her study takes place in Spain and she speaks of the act of physically traveling to engage in cultural tourism, I contend that cultural tourism and musical tourism do not need to take place in a remote setting. We can pursue the exotic in an elementary school classroom, simply making it tangential to the curriculum – introducing a bit of “spice” as hooks (1992, p. 21) so aptly put it, while not displacing dominant culture. As Angela Davis (1996) suggests,

[m]ulticulturalism has acquired a quality akin to spectacle. The metaphor that has displaced the melting pot is the salad. A salad consists of many ingredients, is colorful and beautiful, and it is to be consumed by someone. Who consumes multiculturalism is a question begging to be asked. (Davis 1996, p. 45, as cited in Bannerji, 2000, p. 15)

The elementary classroom consumes multiculturalism, but music offers something unique. An additive or touristic approach allows a “taste” of a range of musics – a little bit of consumption to whet the appetite. Such an approach to curriculum might bring in “‘diverse’ people [and introduce] ‘different’ curriculum units without ever shifting the normative-culture-vs.-sub-cultures paradigm” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 211). Engaging in a “Musician-as-Tourist Model” is often quite consistent with the approach music programs take to music beyond Western classical.

Mohanty’s (2003) second model is the “Feminist-as-Explorer Model”:

This particular pedagogical perspective originates in the area studies, where the “foreign” woman is the object and subject of knowledge and the larger intellectual project is entirely about countries other than the United States. Thus, here the local and the global are both defined as non-Euro-American. The focus on the international implies that it exists outside the U.S. nation-state. Women’s, gender, and feminist issues are based on spatial/geographical and temporal/historical categories located elsewhere. (p. 240)

Again, I rethink this model as a “Musician-as-Explorer Model.” This curricular model is a step up from the touristic model. While valuing “foreign” perspectives, it does nothing to interrupt the dominant paradigm. Both of these models include “outside” material. While the tourist model does so in a supplementary manner, the explorer model excludes “home” (i.e., Canada) from the program, assuming only hooks’ (1992) “spice” (p. 21) is worthy of study.

A “Musician-as-Explorer” model may go deeper contextually into so-called “other” musics, but its exclusion of the Western classical “home” music normalizes it and reinforces dominant power relations. Going back to the earlier example of the drumming unit, the musician-as-explorer classroom might also look at “African Drumming” in a similar manner, followed by perhaps a unit on Japanese Taiko Drumming, then the Blues, then Rock ‘n’ Roll, then Afro-Cuban folkloric music, and so on. What is notable about this particular model is that it moves from place to place, studying the music of “exotic elsewheres” and music that is generally removed from the present context. While this model may touch on musics that relate to genres that are relevant to and popular with the students, connections are not drawn either between genres and movements of music or to the students’ present realities, musical and otherwise.

These two curricular models, while seemingly attempting to remedy the dominant place of classical music in the curriculum, actually reinscribe the hierarchy that places the West at the top. However, while limited, the touristic and explorer models do offer the music student a sense that there is a larger world out there, although there is a danger of essentialization of the cultures and musics studied. While these two models are perhaps more open than teaching centered solely on the Western classical canon, they do not necessarily allow students to think relationally and learn to think critically about power relations and hierarchies in the world. Nor do they help us understand music as a social practice. Mohanty’s third pedagogical model for women’s studies courses offers a way to work with music with an eye on relationships and on power. In the next section then, I explore what I will refer to as creating a program from the “ground up.” I use that terminology to mean a curriculum that carefully considers the subjectivities and sensibilities of the students in the classroom and is constructed based on these considerations.

Curriculum from the “ground up”: Modelling a new curriculum

I begin then with Mohanty’s (2003) third pedagogical model for women’s studies, “The Comparative Feminist Studies Model.” Mohanty says:

This curricular strategy is based on the premise that the local and global are not defined in terms of physical geography or territory but exist simultaneously and constitute each other. It is then the links, the relationships, between the local in the global that are foregrounded, and these links are conceptual, material, temporal, contextual, and so on. This framework assumes a comparative focus and analysis of the directionality of power no matter what the object of women’s studies course is – and it assumes both distance and proximity (specific/universal) as its analytic strategy. Differences and commonalities thus exist in relation and tension with each other in all contexts. (p. 242)

Repositioning this model as the Comparative Musics Model, a music curriculum following this model would not take an additive approach to music education. Nor would it assume that only “Other” musics are worthy of study, normalizing Western classical music in the process. Rather, such a course would be taught as a comparative course that emphasizes the interconnectedness between the musics and the contexts of the musics. It is also attentive to power relations, as Mohanty suggests (p. 242). Such a course will bring the intersections of race, class, gender, dis/ability, and nation to the forefront and focus on the way that these fluid categories intersect with each other and also the subject matter. Comparative teaching allows different musical traditions to inform each other. It allows teachers and students to consider the ways that West African music influenced samba, for example, and the connections of many popular styles to Africa. Teaching and thinking comparatively and relationally allows us to think broadly across categories, thinking through power relations as they pertain to the musics of the world and as they relate to bringing those musics into an elementary school classroom. Understanding musics relationally also allows students and teachers to come to know themselves relationally, as thinking in this manner facilitates the analysis of all relationships.

Mohanty (2003) looks to “create pedagogies that allow students to see the complexities, singularities, and interconnections … such that power, privilege, agency, and dissent can be made visible and engaged with” (pp. 243–244). We can create these same pedagogies for music education. Where tokenistic curricula take an additive approach, a comparative model takes an integrated approach. In this section, I follow two interrelated threads to think about the issues. This section will examine first, a different way of structuring curriculum and second, ways to recognize and consider student subjectivities within this newly conceptualized curriculum.

The curricular models discussed thus far constitute certain knowledge (i.e., Western classical music) as important and arrange Other knowledge hierarchically around the Western center. I now consider how it might be possible to construct the curriculum differently. What happens if we outright refuse the “exalted” status of Western music (Thobani, 2007)? Is it possible to create a curriculum rhizomatically instead of hierarchically (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) where knowledge is constructed horizontally as a series of plateaus instead of in an arboreal, hierarchical fashion with everything stemming from Western classical music? What would it look like to construct a program in this manner?

As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest, in a “hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior … The channels of transmission are pre-established: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place” (Rosenstiehl & Petitot, as cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 16). Can we conceive of curriculum as a complex web of plateaus where “neighbors” (and all knowledges are conceived as neighbors) dialogue with and inform each other? How can the study of Ghanaian music inform the study of hip-hop and the study of hip-hop inform the study of Western classical music and so on? Surely thinking about these knowledges in the contexts that produce them will lead to a broader understanding of music as a social practice. For music is, in fact, a social practice and needs to be understood in context. Western classical music is often taught devoid of its context, which helps to establish it at the top of the hierarchy of musics (and cultures). It too must be understood both as a social practice (Small, 1998) and through its relationships to other musics.

By contextualizing all musics and thinking about them in relation to each other within the curriculum, we begin to develop a deeper understanding of music as a social practice. A model such as the “Musician-as-Tourist” model uses an additive approach to a Western classical canon. The canon is an act of power in itself – it is the arboreal reinscription of Western classical music. It creates a center and forces outsiders to the margin. Employing a rhizomatic approach allows us to think relationally instead of in a binary manner and also allows the potential movement away from the automatic reinscription of Western classical music as normative. Learning in this manner allows us to see the strength of all musics and understand their role in their local and global environments. If we uproot arboreal hierarchies, we can replace them with rhizomatic networks where knowledge exists in plateaus and actively relates to all surrounding knowledges (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

As we reconceptualize school music rhizomatically, we must also strive for a deep recognition of student identities and the experiences they bring to the class, as well as the musics they consider their own. Perhaps, alongside the obligatory Western classical music we could include many other musics – those musics students associate with their identities. We could then arrange these musics non-hierarchically (i.e., rhizomatically) and provide a detailed context for all of them, allowing for and encouraging cross-cultural comparisons in ways that facilitate meaningful interconnections for the students. Each music studied could inform every other music in a manner that creates a web of the social context from which the music emerges. One thing that has become increasingly obvious over time is that musics constantly move and fuse; they travel and change as people travel and change and we need to reflect this movement and change in the classroom.

In thinking about which musics to include in the classroom, centering the student is essential. Afrocentric philosophy advocates placing the student at the center and locating them “within the context of their own cultural references so that they can relate socially and psychologically to other cultural perspectives” (Asante, 1991, p. 171). When we acknowledge and honor students’ cultural perspectives and affinities, we give them a firm foundation from which to explore the perspectives (and musics) of their classmates – perspectives which may, in fact, be unfamiliar, but will help students develop a deeper understanding of one another. When looking at student subjectivities, two types of musics surface – those musics to which the students choose to listen and those musics that emerge from their diverse cultural backgrounds. Both musics are often marked “Other” and they may or may not be the same for individual students. Canadian music curriculum documents generally exclude both types of music or include them in an additive manner.

It is important to include the students’ music – both popular and cultural – in the curriculum. Students are committed to their music; they are plugged into their iPods and their listening is of utmost importance to them. Listening logs, compiled over a six-year period with elementary students, reflected passionate connections to music and strong opinions as what qualified as “good” music. ⁵ How do we engage this passion for “Other” music in a classroom where the gap between curricular demands and the music that speaks to our students is always already far apart? Lucy Green explores this gap in the field of popular music through examining the musical lives of young popular musicians – both in and out of school. She found popular musicians were “largely alienated by having to study music or engage in musical practices to which they could not relate and through which they felt unable to progress” (Green, 2001, p. 177). This alienation from school music is a key reason to make the curriculum relevant to the students participating in it.

Disheartened by the curriculum, but inspired by Green (2001), Campbell (1995), and Allsup (2002), I implemented a “song-lifting” project in 2008, which involved the students lifting music off recordings to create a pseudo-“cover” version. ⁶ I wrote the following in my teaching journal that spring:

I am now at the culminating stage of Campbell’s song-lifting project with my intermediate students. Over the last month, my intermediates have literally taken a recording and attempted to emulate it on their instruments … The biggest challenge was the lack of practice space available where students would be able to hear each other adequately. One or two groups in the hallway, and one group in the practice room left three groups in the classroom to deal with sounds from other groups. That aside, what has come out of this project has been exceptional. I have had five students purchase guitars in the last three weeks; I routinely have six or seven children bringing guitars to school every day; I have had students who have never touched a piano learn to play a basic chord sequence in two weeks mostly by teaching themselves. Based on this experience, with slightly better facilities and greater numbers of instruments, this project is brilliant and the students have been very proud of their achievements, in no small part because they have been self-directed. (Hess, Teaching Journal Excerpt, Spring 2008)

“Other” musics deserve a place in the classroom – and not a place on the margin – and certainly not in a “bait and switch” capacity in order to get to Western classical music. Skills accrued through learning music informally, aurally, and through a range of different formal systems and notational practices are invaluable and should not rank as hierarchically inferior to skills that require Western notational literacy and formal learning settings. “Other” musics have much to offer both students and teachers. All 14 popular musicians in Green’s study “vigorously supported popular music as a practical classroom subject” (Green, 2001, p. 173; emphasis in original). Students are encultured in their music; it functions as a large part of their lives and deserves classroom recognition.

This curricular expansion is inclusive of all musics the students consider their own. Afrocentric philosophy and the thinking of Asante (1991) guides music educators to begin structuring the curriculum based on the musics represented by the students in the room. Depending on the population and affinities of the people in the classroom, this strategy of developing curriculum may or may not foster a rich and diverse curriculum. The point is not necessarily to stay with only these musics, but to begin with them. As Asante says, we must consider students within their own cultural contexts before we move to the unfamiliar. If the population of the class has largely Punjabi roots, for example, and the listening tastes include mainly hip-hop and Bhangra, then these are the musics with which to begin. After making sure the subjectivities in the class are represented to the degree that the students are comfortable, move out from there, drawing connections between musics and contextualizing as the learning continues. However, in order to bring the personal into the curriculum a respectful classroom environment must be established. Inclusivity is built on a community of trust that becomes diverse through both recognition and respect. However, it is also important to consider that what I propose in constructing a curriculum based on the students’ subjectivities and interests does not necessarily promote exploration of unfamiliar musics. We must keep in mind that between the myriad of cultural and popular styles represented by students in the class that there is much potential in this relational, integrative music education to foster recognition between students. From the musics of the students in the classroom, we can then move, as a respectful community, to the unfamiliar.

This consideration of the students’ subjectivities is vital to a successful and inclusive program. In Teaching to Transgress, a brilliant work on pedagogy, hooks (1994) urges us to consider the experiences that students bring to the classroom. One of the tenets of andragogy – adult education – calls on educators to recognize the wealth of experiences students bring to the table every time they approach the learning situation. This range of experiences is not exclusive to adults; children also have diverse experiences and rich histories that they bring to new learning situations. We need to consider who is in the room in order to create a curriculum that is relevant to all students. As teachers, it is our responsibility to consider the power relations at play in the classroom and in the relationships of the classroom. If we engage these power relations critically with our students, then those relations that were previously invisible may emerge for interrogation and possibly even subversion.

I have argued for an inclusive education model, however, there is a danger here of falling into the shallow Musician-as-Tourist or Musician-as-Explorer models. How do we move beyond the “3S” model of superficiality to build this curriculum that is relevant to our students? How do we escape the trappings of official multiculturalism to speak meaningfully to the students we have in the classroom? At the beginning of this section, I cited Mohanty (2003) who spoke to the importance of pedagogy that reveals the complexity and interconnections of subject material in such a way that power relations are made visible (pp. 243–244). A rhizomatic curriculum allows us to see those connections and relationships as well as acknowledge student subjectivities in the classroom.

The elementary curriculum emphasizes Western classical music in such a way that it is naturalized as dominant. The first two models Mohanty shares can act to reinscribe these power relations. So how can we address what we are legally bound to teach ⁷ while still deconstructing power relations that established the curriculum as such? As noted above, Western music often achieves its naturalized status through its acontextual presentation. The power relations that establish it as such are invisible. We need to make them visible, but how do we go about doing that when the curriculum clearly privileges Western music? Thinking relationally allows us to consider the power relations that place Western classical music at the top of the hierarchy of musics (and Western Europe and North America at the top of the hierarchy of civilizations) and interrogate those same relations.

Students find themselves actively working to make connections and uncover power relations, making the invisible visible as Western classical music simply becomes one of many musics, albeit a materially significant one due to its imperial history. In a rhizomatic curriculum, we can then explore Western music as simply one music among many and its use of notation and Western constructs such as dynamics and tempi as one way of learning music. Again, thinking non-hierarchically, we do need to teach these Western constructs as the government mandates that we do so through curriculum documents, which are legal documents; however, we can problematize the way that the curriculum privileges these constructs as the only truly valid way of knowing music. Thinking relationally gives us a tool to denaturalize the power relations at play in this privileging.

Thinking relationally: From theory to practice

We now have different possibilities that create a rhizomatic curriculum structure, acknowledge student subjectivities, and encourage consideration and critique of power relations. Thinking relationally not only helps us to better understand musics; it also helps us understand classroom relationships between students, between students and the teacher, and from all participants to the subject matter. At this point in the paper, these ideas are fairly abstract and theoretical. Practically, engaging in music comparatively or relationally addresses issues of tokenism within the music classroom, but how can one music be introduced and taught through this model in a manner that facilitates this type of teaching? Perhaps we can invoke Mantle Hood’s original model of performance-based study in ethnomusicology – the study group (Solís, 2004).

The intention of the study group in ethnomusicology was to facilitate the performance of music to gain familiarity with the context and engage with more than just book knowledge when studying ethnomusicology. Although it would certainly be possible to engage in a study group without a critique of power relations that brought such a group into the academy in the first place, the study group model is significant because it is not about public performance. That obligatory term-end concert inherent in the concept of the world music ensemble essentially presents the music of the “other” as simplistic; after all, students can “conquer” it in 12 weeks and perform for the public. A world music ensemble performance fits nicely into the “3S” model and does not interrupt power relations in any way. Conversely, students in the study group engage in performance to study music and to further their knowledge of their area of interest. The study group is largely disinterested in engaging in the “3S” model of superficiality; it does not look to trivialize the study for public display. Much of what is problematic in elementary education is based on that term-end concert. Teachers can easily (and unintentionally) facilitate the “eating of the other” (hooks, 1992, Ch. 2) – a literal consumption. However, perhaps we can take the study group model and problematize it so that we now consider the power relations that allow us to bring music that is not necessarily Western into a Western elementary school classroom. Then we may be able to use this non-performance/product-based model that encourages the study of music to simply know more about it and its context and combine it with the Comparative Musics Model. We can now engage musics comparatively and relationally, considering and critiquing the politics of knowledge. Students and teacher no longer need to “conquer” the knowledge – a reproduction of colonial relations at the elementary school level; they simply engage with it.

Within that study group model then, what is the role of the student? How do students engage with the musics they encounter? Musical encounters, after all, can take place in a number of different capacities – some of which very much replicate dominant power relations. Averill (2004) is deeply concerned with what he terms “musical transvestism” or “ethno-drag” – “donning the musical skin of the ‘Other’” (p. 100). Instead, Averill advocates Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to intercultural studies. He describes this approach as one that

privileges the space of the encounter rather than the mastery of the codes. For the world music ensemble to become such a space of encounter, performers are not expected to renounce their musical selves but to bring a set of cultural and individual experiences to the ensemble as a precursor to the production of genuine understanding of both cultural difference and commonality. The world music ensemble can thus be reconsidered as the context in which students engage in dialogue and collision with musical and cultural codes other than their “first-language” codes. (p. 101)

Averill’s (2004) understanding of dialogism in this context allows a space for the students’ subjectivities and experiences within the learning environment. Students can engage in comparative and relational learning that is not product/performance-oriented by placing their own experiences in dialogue and in tension with the musics of the now-expanded, non-hierarchical curriculum. After all, “[a] meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7). ⁸ Musics are better understood relationally. A non-hierarchical, inclusive, dialogical curriculum fosters student engagement with music and with issues of power related to music and also to capital. The benefits to such an approach are myriad. Aside from seeing themselves represented in their classroom programs, students learn to think critically and reveal interrelationships and connections between musics, amongst themselves, and between themselves and the musics. They also begin to interrogate power relationships and critique and dismantle the hierarchy of civilizations. In such a curriculum, the alienation from school music cited earlier by Green (2001, p. 177) cannot as readily come to fruition.

I envision a curriculum fraught with tension and critique and rich with dialogue and learning possibilities. As Mohanty (2003) notes, “[d]ifference seen as benign variation … rather than as a conflict, struggle, or the threat of disruption, bypasses power as well as history to suggest a harmonious, empty pluralism” (p. 193). “Harmonious, empty pluralism” is no longer an acceptable outcome; it occurs through engagement in the “3S” model and the tokenization of all musics “stirred” into Davis’ Western classical music “salad” (Davis, 1996, p. 45, as cited in Bannerji, 2000, p. 15). Thinking relationally allows us to offer our students so much more.