Secondary Musical Languages: Modeling Multicultural Music Curricula after Foreign Language Education

Music conservatories and university music departments around the world have recently begun to introduce additional musics outside the Western art music traditions into their required curricula, including non-Western traditions and Western vernacular traditions. While preprofessional training in Western art music remains the primary objective, these institutions are modifying curricula in order to expose their students to a broader scope of musics and cultivate an awareness of global musical diversity. However, many newly developed programs and course models that integrate additional musics fail to illustrate these “other” musics as complete artistic entities in and of themselves. To propose a more comprehensive approach to diversifying conservatory curricula, this paper analogizes discrete musical traditions to foreign spoken languages and draws on the established models of foreign language studies in the language departments of higher education. The three proposed course models derived from foreign language study can be applied in great extent to “musical languages”: a linguistic anthropology model, a living language model, and a musical immersion model. This paper outlines the general parameters of each model and discusses the learning opportunities and challenges specific to each, as well as possible adjustments to accommodate the resources and needs of a given institution. The purpose of this paper is to offer a variety of methods by which to approach non-Western and Western vernacular musical traditions as independent equals of Western art music, even within institutions where Western art music is the primary focus.