| Education and the Diversity Dilemma, Pt. 2 |
| Monday, 16 July 2007 | |
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Education and the Diversity Dilemma (con't) Belated, but nonetheless welcome, news is that the standard music history textbook, Grout’s A History of Western Music—nearly bereft of discussion of African-American composers as recently as the 1990s—has, in its sixth and seventh editions, broadened and deepened its attention to black America’s contributions. The New Grove has done an admirable job as well. I believe that public school textbook writers notice that people are doing in higher education, and that, over time, their projects will reflect the integration of African American contributions in their curricula. Meanwhile, several conservatories have launched jazz programs, with separate faculties. Is this cause for rejoicing? Not necessarily. This movement could be construed as another form of segregation, once again sidestepping African Americans’ contributions to music as a whole and perpetuating the old divisions between “high” and “low” art that have dogged African American music and American music since the beginning of the construction of the European musical canon in the United States. At the same time, most schools of music are adding a course or two in world music. Adding such courses to the curriculum seems a positive move on its face; but, with all due respect, I maintain that the study of the music of various parts of Asia and Africa will not contribute substantially to people of color in this culture as long as the profession continues to give U.S. black music token treatment. The reasons for this state of affairs are complex; arguments against expanding knowledge and equity, such as “I don’t have time” are sometimes disingenuous, designed to protect the curriculum from interlopers or to protect the works that much of academe deems sacred. But isn’t it important that in our institutions of higher learning, students learn what they need to know to traverse the unbounded world of new musical fare? Isn’t it also important that we each learn what it is that each of us differently love? Isn’t to do less, to cheat those whom we teach? Today, handful of organizations—some of which are situated outside of academe—probably work the hardest to promote diversity in classical music, often among young performers rather than among future scholars. Among the most notable of these are the National Association for the Study and Performance of African American Music (NASPAAM); the Sphinx Organization; the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation; and the organization in which I have been involved, the Center for Black Music research. But most of these organizations are not widely known, are not adequately supported, and are sometimes even attacked. (Witness the March 22 article in the ultraconservative American Spector, in which Christopher Orlet contemptuously dismisses Sphinx founder Aaron Dworkin’s affirmative action efforts as the cynical attempts of someone who “pays himself a lot of money to ‘build diversity in classical music’,” someone who is “perhaps the biggest bigot of all.”) But for the most part, the story of resistance to programs like Dworkin’s is not one of racism; it’s one of a rigid status quo and a much-too-conservative intellectual social climate that devalues the arts and does not encourage youngsters to pursue performance in the classical realm. This climate is virtually the same as that which allows the percentage of African American musicologists to remain at just one and a half percent of scholars in the profession, African American ethnomusicologists at the level of 2.8 percent of the society’s membership, and African American music librarians as less than one percent of its whole.* Ironically, even African American corporations, businesses, fraternities and social groups fail to support efforts that would eradicate these problems. There’s a lack of interest in the very initiatives that would guarantee progress. So the answer does not rest only in forming orchestras to offset the lack of training and inspiration, nor in screens behind which anonymous performers play auditions, or in the now-so-popular calls for role-modeling and mentoring. The answer rests in actively seeking out and training cream-of-the-crop intellect and talent and training it to compete at the highest level of intellectual and musical performance. Such a task would be easy to accomplish if those who truly care and who have the financial resources that could make this happen would demonstrate their concern by supporting efforts that could change the climate and correct the imbalance. one way of doing this is for foundations and other funding agencies to offer Requests for Proposals for pilot projects addressing this gravely important problem—projects in which solid cultivation, recruitment, teaching and training is done, taking place in venues where knowledgeable staff, professors, and in-residence teachers reside. *The percentages given for musicology and music librarians are estimates based on my observation and intimate knowledge of the African American participation in the profession. The figure for ethnomusicology is taken from Travis Jackson’s citation (Ethnomusicology, Spring-Summer 2006, vol. 50, no. 2:282) of Timothy Rice’s report entitled “SEM Sound Bites: How is SEM Doing on Diversity,” published in the Society for Ethnomusicology Newsletter, vol. 38, no. 4:3. (reprinted with the permission of Chamber Music magazine and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.) |
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