Drifters and the Dancing Mad: The Public School Music Curriculum and the Fabrication of Boundaries for Participation

Abstract

Recent reforms in the general music curriculum have, for the most part, failed to lessen the attrition rates of African Americans from public school music programs. In this article I assert that an embodied ideal of cultural nobility, exemplified by Auguste Rodin's famous statue, The Thinker, has unconsciously operated as a template for participation. As a model comportment in the Western musical tradition, The Thinker has a broader relevance insofar as other school subjects emerged from similar cultural ideals.Beginning with the early period of public music instruction up to the present, I examine the construction of racial boundaries by linking a specific body comportment hailed as worthy by the music curriculum to historically constructed notions of Whiteness. This issue has been underexplored in research in both music and general education. For that reason, this article examines overlapping systems of reasoning about music, comportment, class, religion, language, nationality, and race in professional and popular texts from the early 1800s to the present. This positions public music instruction as authored, not by pedagogical insight alone, but through changes in musical taste, social practices, strategies of governing populations, and definitions of worthy citizenship.There are three levels of analysis. The first is a personal account of the early manifestations of attrition of African Americans from school music programs. The second level of analysis brings the problem of equity into proximity with the tradition of genteel comportment that permeated the training of the good ear or listener and the fabrication of the bona fide citizen. These, I argue are congruent with the historical construction of Whiteness as a standard mark of worthiness. At the third level of analysis, I take up present-day curriculum designs. This section discusses how the language of the music curriculum continues to draw boundaries for participation through protocols that regulate musical response. Here, I argue that the exclusion of popular genres such as hip-hop should be rethought in light of the evidence that shifting historical definitions for music fabricated an overly restrictive template for comportment, recognizing the prototype of Whiteness as the sole embodiment of merit.

Ubiquitous Music Learning in a Postperformance World

“…The history of promoting racial distinctions of musical worth goes back at least as far as Herbert Spencer who, despite his progressive leanings, offered a classification of music ranging from savage to civilized, correlated along racial and ethnic lines (Spencer, 1857(Spencer, /1966. Ruth Gustafson's (2008) work locates Spencer as only one of many to promote the concept of Whiteness as the musical ideal over the centuries. This same work documented subtle but systemic privileging of Whiteness in elementary general music classrooms in Wisconsin.…”

Music Technology and the Hip Hop Beat Making Tradition: A History and Typology of Equipment for Music Therapy

“…Scholars have argued this relates both to the fact that its practices challenge the dominant narrative of Western musical excellence (Hein, 2018;Williams, 2011), and because it is a Black artform (Koza, 2009;Perry, 2004). Both are said to have contributed to its positioning as a redundant or inferior artistic practice (both culturally and technically) and its subsequent exclusion from musical curriculums (Gustafson, 2008). Nevertheless, as participants in Schloss' (2014) ethnographic study showed, to become a respected beat maker requires years of dedicated learning and skill development, and standards within the community can be uncompromising.…”

Interrogating the Grammars of Institutions and Injustice

“…As music educators, we cannot overlook the seemingly omnipresent everyday racism, the racial grammar within institutional structures and curricula that continue to discourage and disadvantage students of colour (Koza 2008, Gustafson 2008, nor does acknowledg-6 ing the enormous complexity of the issues absolve us from complicity with the perpetuation of that racial grammar.…”