The Colonialization of Music in Theory and Practice

African-American oboist and Principal Oboe of the Nashville Symphony Titus Underwood discusses historically ingrained biases and prejudices when hiring and managing orchestras which have largely grown out of a place of extreme discriminatory privilege. We will also examine Matthew Morrison’s article “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musical Discourse.”

Pianist Byron Schenkman centers the conversation in this episode around the pitfalls of overlooking historically antisemitic and discriminatory texts and composers of the “canonized” previous centuries when programming in the 21st century. As a starting point, they’ll use Jeffrey Sposato’s book The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the 19th Century Anti-Semitic Tradition.

Music theory professor Phillip Ewell joins us in a conversation about his own text Music Theory and the White Racial Frame and his upcoming monograph On Music Theory, And Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, available Spring 2023 from the University of Michigan Press.

Costa Rican baroque bassoonist and arts entrepreneur Catalina Klein leads a discussion about creating spaces for hopeful resistance in educational projects and supporting female empowerment while referring to essays from the book edited by Wayne Wu, Rethinking Multicultural Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice.

Diné pianist and scholar Renata Yazzie and Karuk baroque violist and ethnomusicologist Breana McCullough discuss ways in which to bring Indigenous perspectives into the interpretation of art music and pedagogy, using Dylan Robinson’s book Hungry Listening as a starting point.