FINDING THE ZULUS' TCHAIKOVSKY AND THE PAPUANS' POULENC?

Orchestral music, and musical composition, might have become part of a division of labor made possible by metallurgy (otherwise no woodwinds or brass) and commercial institutions that made patrons of the arts well-off enough to invest in composers and orchestras.  That history, though, isn't woke enough.  (And, yes, the received forms of Serious Music might seem dated and off-putting.)

The music faculty at Northern Illinois University appear to be taking some of the wokesters' suggestions seriously.

Following the death of Floyd, [music school director Andrew] Glendening said he and Reggie Thomas, jazz professor and chairman for the Diversity, Equity and Belonging committee, decided not to publish a press release that sounds nice and doesn’t accomplish any changes in response to Black Lives Matter.

They formed a Think Tank Committee, composed of faculty, and established a Black Lives Matter statement that was approved by the entire staff, as well as five pledges for diversity that faculty members will incorporate into their curriculum. Faculty have reported what the statement means to them, and they will be required to submit how they’ve incorporated diversity into their teaching as part of the faculty service report.

The Think Tank also recommended five additional committees to create change.

The way to ensure that change doesn't take place in higher education is to create additional committees.

On the other hand, updating the repertoire, or finding creative ways that new people use the tools of melody, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, what have you, to keep the curriculum fresh is what scholars do.

The fifth committee, which studies bias in the music core curriculum, is composed of 10 people — all Music Theory and Music History area faculty, and two NIU alumni advisers. It was formed at the very end of the fall semester, Chairperson Lucia Matos said.

Their mission is to “examine [the] curriculum for implicit bias and move toward inclusive repertoire and approaches to teaching,” Matos said. They will submit recommendations by the end of the spring semester.

“One of the topics, for example, is the fact that textbooks focus almost exclusively on Western classical music,” Matos said. “We also started doing individual examinations of topics, concepts and musical examples from our classes, looking for opportunities to broaden these, especially by adding historical context.”

Next week they will be working in two groups, one for Music History and Literature and another for Music Theory.

Glendenning said if historical topics are inappropriate, they shouldn’t be in there, just because they’re artifacts of history. “If we can’t remove them, let’s either have some auxiliary materials or let’s put some context around them,” he said.

[Music education major Kee] Taylor said music history professors have included non-white composers, but in one of the classes they took, the professor segregated the days that they talked about Black people versus white people, and didn’t join the two.

Courses in music history and theory, however, prepare students to take a graduate exam to get into a master’s program, and those tests include more Beethoven and old music, Glendening said. “So, if we move some things and eliminate some of these things, it may cause some problems,” he said. A solution looks to be teaching this material for the exams but acknowledging the awful things the composers did throughout history.

Director of Percussion Studies Gregory Beyer said for his percussion ensemble, the core curriculum includes a course on Afro-Cuban percussion and Afro-Brazilian percussion.

He is actively bringing guest artists of “Afro-descent,” such as alumni, to come and speak to his students on how to get started in the percussion field.

“Institutions like this don’t exactly turn on a dime,” Glendening said. He is expecting a report by the end of the year by faculty and what they’ve succeeded in doing, and if it’s not good enough faculty will be asked to come back and strategize how to move the needle, Glendening said.

Looking at the report after this year, Glendening will decide whether faculty introduced diversity in such a way that they did not “other” musicians of color. “We don’t really want to have Black music day and kind of, you know, isolate that,” he said.

Wouldn't it be nice to identify some new Rising Stars or some innovators, and make use of their work, without indulging in presentism, or without making the new stars look like tokens?