Uprooting music education pedagogies and curricula: Becoming-musician and the Deleuzian refrain

Abstract

Based on the British choralism movement of the nineteenth century, the historical legacy of music education in Canada and the US is one of social control. By the twentieth century, North American music educators used choral singing and music listening to teach music literacy skills to groups assumed to be in need of ‘improvement’: the working class, immigrants, and school-age children. Deploying so-called good music to improve moral character and instill national pride, their goal was to create docile citizens content with their place in society and committed to hard work. Exclusions, stereotyping, and arbitrary standards in music education still construct acceptable musics and musical behaviours along lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality that support the status quo and maintain social order. Uprooting music education practices from these manifestations of the Deleuzian refrain that constrains the profession opens spaces for transformative musical and educational potentialities.

Keywords:

• music education
• pedagogies
• curricula
• social control
• Deleuzian refrain
• exclusions

Notes

1. By which Deleuze and Guattari mean the refrain.

2. Curwen borrowed heavily from, adapted and popularized as his own Sarah Glover's Norwich sol-fa method (Bennett, 1984).

3. These discourses are not so different today. At the 2010 Race, Erasure, and Equity in Music Education Conference, hosted by the Consortium on Research on Equity in Music Education (CRÈME), keynote speaker Gloria Ladson-Billings spoke at some length about the ‘humanizing’ effects of music—as an argument not only for teaching it in schools, but for teaching it for those very effects which are assumed to be inherent in it. Her comments were met with rapturous applause from the audience comprised of mostly university music education professors and graduate students.

4. See, as well, websites of professional organizations such as Gender Research in Music Education-International (http://post.queensu.ca/~grime/), and the MayDay Group (http://www.maydaygroup.org/).

5. It is, of course, not by accident that the most memorable melodic material, commonly known as the ‘hook’ of most popular music is invariably the chorus (refrain).

6. See http://www.coalitionformusiced.ca/; also may be accessed (as of 13 July 2011) at the url, weallneedmusic.ca.