What Does Race Have to Do With Music Libraries and the Performing Arts?

Abstract

What Does Race Have to Do With Music Libraries and the Performing Arts?1 Loren Kajikawa (bio) Most US music departments were founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they reflected the standards and tastes of Anglo-Saxon elites who believed that European art music possessed qualities separating it from the music of darker-skinned, lower-class Americans. The founding of music schools on college campuses coincided with a period of mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe, as well as Asia, that threatened to remake the cultural landscape of US metropolitan areas. As cultural elites worried openly about the racial integrity of the United States, classical music was swept into a process of cultural gerrymandering that sought to maintain Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Historian Lawrence Levine explains in his landmark study of cultural hierarchy in the US how Anglo-Saxon elites troubled by the influx of immigrants sought to maintain order and control by imposing their values on public spaces, such as art museums, parks, and of course theaters and concert halls. Levine documents in detail how modern cultural institutions were founded in the image of Euro-American upper classes and used as a disciplining force against putatively undesirable elements in the American populace. As the works of select European composers were enshrined as the epitome of civilization, American classical music emerged as one pillar of a “high art” culture that defined itself against popular entertainment of the day (e.g., jazz, dance music, movies, etc.). Not surprisingly, the aesthetic qualities prized in symphonic music—melodic and harmonic development—were found to be missing in the music of more “primitive” peoples. The adjectives used to describe classical music and its others took their names from contemporary racial science. The term “highbrow” (in opposition to “lowbrow”) comes from the phrenologist’s lexicon and describes the supposedly superior cranial shape of Northern Europeans. In this way, classical music and Whiteness were “co-productive,” meaning [End Page 314] that they defined and reinforced one another through a shared opposition to undesirable racial, ethnic, and class groups. By maintaining this strict separation between classical music and its others well into the twenty-first century, music departments practice a thinly-veiled form of segregation. The School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon, my employer at the time I began writing on this subject, advertises that its core values are “grounded in the strength of the traditional canon,” a phrase that serves as a euphemism for music written by White European male composers. Thus, the study of performance is not a neutral commitment to great music (great music, after all, being a matter of perspective). Instead, appeals to the “traditional canon,” or other laudatory terms, such as “masterworks,” represent racially exclusionary statements of value. In similar fashion, the terminology used by schools and departments of music to describe their core curricula also exemplifies the use of euphemistic, race-neutral language. Departments of music teach courses named “keyboard skills,” “aural skills,” “musicianship,” and “music theory,” implying a universal approach to musical cultivation even as they focus exclusively on notated, Enlightenment-era ideas about proficiency. Although music curricula avoid mentioning race explicitly, they tend to prioritize approaches to hearing, performing, and understanding music that reinforce the cultural superiority of Western classical music. This status quo has led to a predicament for music departments now situated on university campuses where diversity and inclusion have become buzzwords: in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, music schools remain committed to a curriculum that often implies Black people do not. Certainly, a large part of the blame lies with colorblind ideology. As previously discussed, music departments present themselves and the subjects they teach in race-neutral language, obscuring the extent to which their institutions rest on racially exclusive foundations. But this answer alone is not fully satisfactory. In my experience, students, professors, and administrators are often painfully aware of the lack of diversity in their curricula and amongst their faculty. Yet they do very little to make substantive change, suggesting that the problem is more than an inability to recognize race. In attempting to understand this paradox, I’ve found the work of critical race scholars, such as...