In the wake of the recent controversy over music theory’s white racial frame, there is heightened awareness among musicologists of the need for anti-racist research and pedagogy. One type of anti-racism has taken the form of removing “Western music” from the academic lexicon (a project begun in global music history; see Irving 2019), much as “Westernization” and the “West” were previously discursively redacted, because the former is oppressive, and the latter is over-generalized. Against this background, consider three historical developments: the dissemination of European music to East and Southeast Asia since the 1800s; the diversification of the Singaporean high school curriculum around 2000 from 100% Western music to 60%, with 40% newly-introduced Asian musics; the establishment of the Tianjin Julliard School in China in 2019. What all this points to is the historical fact of Western music’s expansion and contraction in the global arena. The ease with which the term “Western music” is dropped points in part to the gap between musicological research and musicologist-designed course syllabi, versus the material world of global musical practices, far removed from the pages of US musicology journals and from US music classrooms. Though it is possible to replace “Western” with words like “modern” and “cosmopolitan” to describe global musical practices, these terms refer to the positionality rather than sounds of musicians performing the same four notes of Beethoven Fifth. Discursive redaction of Western music in US academia has little effect on sounds from across the Pacific Ocean; consider that of the nine oldest conservatories in China, only China Conservatory is dedicated to Chinese music, with the rest competing to produce the next Lang Lang. (For the purposes of this short post, I am considering only US musicology and not other musicologies.)
I make the foregoing argument not to detract from US musicology’s anti-racist efforts, but to point out the ways in which such efforts ultimately reflect US priorities, namely, the urgent need for a concrete response to the violence of racism, horrifically evidenced in the murder of George Floyd. Racism is one of the reasons why conceptual revision in disciplinary and curricular reform—including in the form of discursive redaction—are sometimes emphasized over the actual history of global music that would require a reliably specific musical nonmenclature for naming the (Western, modern, cosmopolitan?) sounds that are impacted by waves of westernization, dewesternization, and rewesternization (corresponding respectively to the three historical developments listed in the opening paragraph). Discursive redaction has been given new life in the age of social media, but it is rooted in post-structuralist approaches in which there has long been a tension between naming and redacting a marginalized identity, where the former alternately allows for the object to be named (for the purposes of resistance) and reified (as an unchanging essence), while the latter points to a future in which oppression of that identity has ceased and thus the identity itself becomes obsolete.
After redacting “Western,” “music history” itself could become the object of musicological study and teaching. In theory, this could take the form of emphasizing and expanding the lessons of new musicology: non-teleological historiography refuting “heights” of musical development by geniuses such as Beethoven; refusal of historiography itself as overly generalized, focusing instead on “centuries”-framed cultural studies (18th-, 19th-, 20th-centuries). In theory, that is, the new music history could end up like much of the New Musicology of the 90s—examining primarily Europe and North America. Against this possibility, there is some utility in arguing explicitly for the inclusion of global, non-European, and non-North American locations in the new music history.
Despite the redaction in “Western music history,” a contradiction persists in that such history typically redacts "Western music" that has been sounded globally e.g. in East and Southeast Asia since the 1800s, but projects a US redactional construction of anti-racist music history over the global history of Western music. I would argue that the ability to articulate such contradictions are necessary to a responsible anti-racist musicological agenda. Consider another contradiction: the complexities of racism are such that even global sounds, when included as tokenism in a conservatory environment, can—in that specific setting—become part of the apparatus of institutional racism. That is to say, it is not Western or global musics that are essentially racist or anti-racist, but discourses that construct musics as racist or anti-racist. It is often easier to redact terms than to address pervasive, often clandestine ideologies that are intertwined with various histories and historiographies.
Indeed, the vagaries of history begin with the very concept of history, which is tied up with the racist bifurcation between Western music, literacy (notation), and history, on the one hand, versus global music, orality, and ethnography (which emerged in the age of European imperialism), on the other. Even assuming that the problematics of history have been resolved and we can proceed with music history, problems can easily occur without a comprehensive global historiographical framework. An anti-racist music history that is entirely methodological in its revisionary efforts might end up focusing on postcolonial issues such as Western musical orientalism, without stepping out of Europe and North America, or it may do so only minimally. Even a diversified history can still be Eurocentric if it commences with chants (folding outward from Gregorian to e.g. Buddhist chants) that constitute the conventional originary point for European but not global music histories. Such a chronological history can reproduce Eurocentrism in the periodization of everything before 1500s as the Middle Ages, whereas it is only Europe that was in the “middle” of the fall of the Roman empire and Europe’s recovery.
From a pedagogical perspective, in many cases, the primary purpose of the undergraduate Western music history survey was never to teach about music history per se (archival research, historiography), but to provide a diachronic array of chronologically-ordered background contexts in which musical works are foregrounded (this is not necessarily a problem from a pedagogical point of view, as long as there is an understanding that music and "context" are co-constituting, e.g. Chinese composers's symphonies co-constructed Chinese modernity). If the pedagogical necessity of history proper is asserted, this needs to be clarified in the light of the racist conceptual bifurcation of Western music notation's historical trace and global musics's orality. I would point to the common undergraduate pedagogical ground of context for both Western and global musics, since the latter are presented in a “synchronic” array of contexts in which social function is emphasized (c.f. diachronic contexts of Western music). This raises the issue (and the promises and dangers) of merging musical disciplines and courses, which may be inevitable for anti-racist music research and teaching.
