Deforming/Reforming the Canon: Challenges of a Multicultural Music History Course

Abstract

Almost ten years have passed since Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) drew attention to what now is obviously a shift in the paradigm by which the nature of and history of the Western world is understood in American higher education. This change in perspective is due in large part to the emergence of a perspective that all sides in the resultant culture wars have labeled multiculturalism. By now it is surely obvious that the debate over the merits (and meaning) of multiculturalism is in reality a response to a profound transformation of American society as a whole resulting from a variety of demographic, economic, and social developments, both national and international. The merits of multiculturalism have been argued in numerous publications and at many conferences. Not limited to academia, this issue has been debated in the national media by politicians and pundits of all ideological persuasions. Signs of change have included calls for curricular reform within various colleges and universities. Discussion has now reached the point where virtually all academicians have taken a position on this issue. Where demands for reform have led to changes in the curricular policies of particular institutions, faculty have been compelled to leave the comfortable domain of philosophical/polemical discourse concering multiculturalism (which, as academicians know, requires no real action) and to enter the problematical arena of discussions of implemenCHRISTOPHER WILKINSON is associate professor of music history in the Division of Music, West Virginia University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1976. His area of research is jazz history between the two World Wars. He is currently writing a biography of trumpet player and bandleader Don Albert. In addition to the course discussed here, he teaches courses in jazz history at the undergraduate level, graduate seminars on aspects of twentieth-century music, and an introductory course in music for the general student.