Philip Taylor, ‘Navigating the global turn in Western music history pedagogy’

International Musicological Society, Sunday 21st June 2015, Juilliard School, New York

What versions of the West do we construct when we teach western music history outside the

West? I’ve been thinking about this question in my work at KM Music Conservatory in

Chennai, India, where I teach music history courses as part of a transnational programme

with Middlesex University in London, UK. Perhaps inevitably this situation has prompted

reflection on teaching methods, resources, and the more fundamental question of how the

European canon of dead white composers speaks to Indian students in the 21st century. My

aim has been to try and reduce the sense of dislocation experienced in international

education by relating historical knowledge to the realities of musical culture in modern

India, making connections between inside and outside the classroom. This involves

confronting some sensitive issues: just a few miles from my workplace is the location of the

birthplace of the British Empire, where the East India Company established their first

permanent trading post in 1639. Today Westerners travel to India to trade in qualifications

rather than spices, but the historical experience of colonialism remains relevant, perhaps

more so than higher education policymakers might like to admit. So, most of what follows is

inspired by a sense of postcolonial guilt offset by a conviction in the value of historical

knowledge for Indian music students.

As we know, the internationalisation of higher education is transforming learning and

teaching in arts and humanities disciplines such as musicology, including: increased

movement of students, faculty and curriculum across borders; a diversifying student

demographic; pressure on academics to orientate course offerings towards a more or less

vaguely defined form of global citizenship; and, the trend for universities establishing

overseas campuses and institutional partnerships, such as the one in which I am involved.

This global agenda has been particularly influential in the UK, US and Australia, but its

ramifications are being felt everywhere. Whilst at times it feels as if the push to ‘go global’ is

simply fashionable marketing spin, the concept of globalisation has had a notable impact on

the discourse of Anglophone musicology, affecting not only ethnomusicology but also music

history, analysis and education. For music history pedagogy, the coincidence of this critical

turn towards the global and the broader process of rampant corporatisation in higher

education poses challenges as we think about the changing institutional and financial

contexts in which learning takes place.

Still, the conceptual vagueness of globalisation does little to help with the practicalities of

designing effective music history courses, particularly as education policies are normally

determined at national, rather than international, level. So, whose global vision are we

supposed to be adopting? As critics of the global education agenda have noted, what

appears as an egalitarian ideology often serves as a mechanism for maintaining unequal

power relations between the West and the rest. Thinking and acting globally relies on

wielding the economic power to impose your ideas onto others. And of course, attitudes

towards globalisation are highly subjective, appearing differently to students, faculty and

recruitment staff around the world.

In India, many of the challenges in teaching music history are similar to those posed by

international students in the West, involving different abilities and understandings in

musical literacy, critical thinking and academic integrity, conventions for academic writing

and referencing, and so on. Significant economic disparities create difficulties for providing

print and online resources, such as academic monographs or a subscription to Grove Music

Online. The textbooks we do use can be problematic for non-Western readers due to their

complex prose, range of cultural reference, and the feeling they are telling someone else’s

story: Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music is a case in point, though I would

add that it can be a fantastic resource if approached in the right way. Students are also

simply less familiar with the sounds of Western art music, due to the relative lack of access to

conventional public frameworks such as broadcasting, public concerts and amateur music-

making.

So, how can we create a western music history curriculum that responds to the distinctive

cultural position of Indian students, and those from the Indian diaspora in Asia, Europe and

the U.S., whilst also providing them with the skills and knowledge that will allow them to

establish parity with their peers in the West? The spread of western music around the globe

from the early modern era onwards provides the opportunity to adapt the conventional

Eurocentric narrative into a more international social history of music; including, for

instance, the ways in which Western music was projected into India through the spread of

Christianity and colonialism. This involves reducing lecture content on great composers and

their works to allow for more discussion of amateur musical activity and the historical

influence of western paradigms such as staff notation, concert performance and canonicity.

However we theorise these connections, as cross cultural encounter, or intercultural transfer,

the aim is to help students build a historical context that explains something of the

complexity of musical culture in south India today. I will illustrate this with a very brief

example.

In 18th century India, European musical practices were closely implicated in the spread of

military culture and the leisure activities of the European and Anglo-Indian communities.

Western music also became popular with members of the Indian courtly elite, who were

attracted to the art form’s connotations of wealth, power and social status. In the 1790s, the

Maratha Prince Sarabhojhi II assembled a European instrumental ensemble at his court in

Tanjore, an important intellectual and cultural centre in South India. The Prince compiled a

library of printed songs and music theory books obtained from London. He also composed

his own instrumental marches and musical dramas, which were transcribed in western

notation and performed by his musicians. The introduction of these Western modes of

composition and performance, staff notation, the work concept, and instruments such as the

violin and clarinet, had a transformative impact on South Indian musical culture,

influencing the modernisation of Carnatic classical music in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

For my students with previous training in Carnatic music, discussing these developments

helps to form connections between western music history and their own cultural heritage, as

well as showing how music has been implicated in significant moments of change in Indian

society.

In the 19th century, the city of Madras replaced Tanjore as the dominant commercial and

cultural centre in South India, and western classical music became embedded into the

cultural practices of the city’s European and Indian Christian communities. In 1842 a

musical instrument shop was opened to furnish the colonial society with western

instruments, and since 1906 it has been delivering instrumental tuition and examinations in

association with Trinity College, London; several of my students began their western music

education there. The Madras Musical Association, founded in 1893, runs an amateur choral

society that still gives regular concerts of sacred music. Earlier this year I attended a

performance of extracts from Handel’s Messiah, with several of my students in the audience

and a few playing in the orchestra. This tradition raises some fascinating questions about the

global reception of Western music (for example, why do the audience stand during the

Hallelujah chorus?) that can only be addressed through the historical study of music as a

social phenomenon.

These amateur activities have sustained a significant marginal presence for western music in

modern Chennai, which is enhanced by the work of European cultural organisations such as

the Goethe Institut, Alliance Française and British Council. These organisations host live

performances from touring artists and promote ‘digital concert hall’ broadcasts of archive

performances by symphony orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker. Here Western

classical music operates as a form of diplomatic soft power, promoting European language

and culture to India’s urban middle classes. Again, providing appropriate historical context

contributes to students’ awareness of not only the music that is being performed, but the

human developments that have shaped the institutions and practices that dictate Western

music’s role in contemporary Indian society.

In summary, making space for comparative approaches alongside mainstream European

music history can provide a way of helping students to balance the global with the local in

their transnational education experience. We can’t escape the paradox that the creation of

global music history narratives is itself a phenomenon exclusive to Western musicology, and

an expression of the intellectual power claimed by Western traditions of scholarship. We can,

however, acknowledge that learning and teaching music history is a political act, involving

decision making that shapes and reflects our local, regional and national identities.

Hopefully, actively engaging students in this process will help them to foster a critical

awareness of the cultural history that informs their performing, composing and listening

activities.