Theodore Kim
V00960161
Music 116
Dr. Patrick Boyle
November 4, 2020

Blog Prompt 6

I think a university music school of the near future should offer teachings of music from a wide variety of cultures, allowing the student to study multiple musical cultures, or specialize in one. The school should allocate equal resources to the various musical cultures.

An event that might support the dismantling of the white racial frame of music theory and history would be the equivalent of ‘club day’ for a diverse range of cultural music and instruments. Students of all faculties could circulate among stalls that each show off a particular culture’s music and, perhaps, most popular instruments. Students would be invited to try the instruments, and taught some playing techniques. This could encourage students to further explore these instruments, and even pursue serious study of them. This idea could be expanded to become a convention of different musical cultures that is open to the public.

An effort to create, and encourage the creation of collaborative music among instruments from various cultures may also combat the white supremacist undertones of music theory and history. Apart from promoting the creation of new and fascinating musical works, and the interaction of various musical cultures, the production of new repertoire may be appealing to prospective students of these different musical cultures.

The quote, “the practice that neutralizes the common sense intuition of the most privileged members of society as objective knowledge,” relates to my work on my instrument in that I exclusively play western classical music. This exclusion of the music of other cultures causes it to fall by the wayside. Thus, it becomes easy to use a general term like ‘music theory’ to refer to ‘western classical’ music theory, and wrongly assume that it applies to the music of all cultures, because it is the only type of music I am aware of. I can begin to combat this problem by making a distinction between western classical music theory and the music theory of other cultures, and attempting to explore different musical cultures and their instruments.