ABSTRACT
The National Association for Music Education, in partnership with the Library of Congress of the United States, developed music teaching curricula. The following exercise will apply the same reflective, analytical approach used in the previous exercise to a critical investigation of lesson plans and methods. The epistemological limitations of the curricula overview are also evident within the individual units. The following analysis of two units from this curriculum project will shed light on the ways in which assumptions that are normalized within a specific musical epistemology manifest in curriculum. A Western classical musical epistemology prioritizes the composer, the score, and a musician’s ability to read and accurately represent that which the composer notated. The first unit, a pre-high school choral unit on African American spirituals, demonstrates the ways in which the limitations of a Eurocentric musical epistemology fails to account for the epistemic specificities of this African American musical tradition.
