ABSTRACT
Many of the normalized values and assumptions found in Western classical music education, which permeates both Western and non-Western music classrooms, are tied to racist and colonial histories. These assumptions are perpetuated because of colonial-blind, color-blind, and universalist beliefs that Western classical music and the performance practices, aesthetics, and values with which it is associated can transcend differences of race, culture, and worldview. Students for whom a Eurocentric musical epistemology is not relevant receive and internalize an implicit message, based upon the absence of their own musical epistemologies in the music classroom, that their musical worldviews are inappropriate for this particular music setting. This silencing is visceral and a violent rejection of students’ musical-cultural identities.
Scholars who have applied culturally responsive pedagogy to music education have illuminated the ways in which a Western classical paradigm in pedagogy and content impedes culturally responsive music teaching. This chapter provides a synthesis of their work as well as discussions about the “White gaze,” the “new mainstream,” “epistemologies of ignorance,” and “listening and whiteness” as a means to interrogate music teaching practices and ideology that allow for perpetuated exclusion. To address the exclusion that continues to take place in music classrooms, culturally sustaining music pedagogy, a new theoretical and pedagogical framework based upon Paris’ (2012) theoretical framework of culturally sustaining pedagogy is introduced.
