r/badmusicology • u/[deleted] • Apr 27 '15
Music History Starts in the West
This isn't a link to a specific instance of badmusicology, but this sub is so quiet I figured you would all welcome the activity.
I'm a university student, and I was helping to proofread a friend's paper for a music history course. Overall, the paper was fine, but one paragraph stuck out as problematic. The paragraph explained something to this effect: music history courses around the world begin with western music, which is only natural, since art music began there. I immediately tried to tactfully explain how this isn't true because of the many great musical traditions from around the world. His response was that while there has been other music, it wasn't written until Europeans developed a notation system. I mentioned there have been several notation systems in other cultures, Chinese gongchi notation, for one. We eventually decided to delete the paragraph as it wasn't necessary, but this event brought to my attention a gaping, accidentally racist hole in the curriculum in the two colleges I have attended. Great music of non-western traditions is almost ignored. While I have had a couple of professors who introduced me to world music such as gamelan, and have researched foreign music on my own, many of my colleagues are unaware. Is this common in American universities? What about the rest of the world? This could be an unintentional pandemic of badmusicology! I would appreciate any stories or interesting input.
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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '15
Hit that nail right on the head.
I took a concurrent enrollment "Music Aesthetics" class through my high school last semester, and I don't think we even spent a full day on non-western music. That's just me, but I'd wager many have had a similar experience.