<i>Expanding the Music Theory Canon: Inclusive Examples for Analysis from the Common Practice Period</i>, by Paula Maust; <i>Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy</i>, by Ayana O. Smith; <i>Sound Pedagogy: Radical Ca

For education to be transformative, educators must be open to conflict and understand pedagogy as both teaching methods and social praxis. As espoused initially by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and extended by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, pedagogy and education are not neutral.1 Pedagogies reflect teachers’ ideals and impart values to students who interpret lessons through their own worldviews. Teaching through difference accepts dissonance as natural and celebrates it as an opportunity for change. Neutrality assumes a “view from nowhere,” projecting “local values as neutrally universal ones” onto learners.2 Simply put, teachers’ and students’ lived experiences shape their values and inform their education.Dialogics liberate. Antidialogics oppress.3 Disagreement, then, can bring people together through their differences to effect change. Without conflict, only one version of a story exists. As people and their ideas enter and exit postsecondary institutions, individuals encounter others who are like and different from them and, ideally, through the free exchange of dialogics, the spaces themselves are changed. Dialogues in music studies such as Vincenzo Galilei’s 1581/82 Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music and Giovanni Artusi’s 1600 L’Artusi, overo delle imperfettioni della moderna musica have been used as tools in music history education to teach students the art of intellectual discourse, to support, dispute, and expand others’ ideas, thereby advancing thought through harmonies of agreement and tensions of disagreement. One new music theory and two new musicology resources put dialogue into practice by emphasizing human difference: Paula Maust’s anthology with commentary, Expanding the Music Theory Canon: Inclusive Examples for Analysis from the Common Practice Period; Ayana O. Smith’s Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy; and Colleen Renihan, John Spilker, and Trudi Wright’s coedited volume, Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music. In each text, the authors and editors acknowledge the persistent stronghold of centuries-old systemic oppression; they move beyond what Sara Ahmed has exposed as performative diversity goals to active and ethical antiracism, antimisogyny, and antihomophobia practices.4 Contributors to these new resources demonstrate how the college music classroom mediates conflict that necessarily arises from dialoguing about radical change as a means to ensure transformative education.In an age of a more attuned focus to intersectionality, dialogics over the Western art music canon have produced significant scholarship and new areas of critical inquiry: music and class, disability, the environment, ethnicity, gender, labor, nationalism, race, sexuality––who people are as musicians and how they practice musicking in the human and nonhuman world.5 Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary diversity in music fields has transformed individuals, communities, and music disciplines themselves. Rather than eschewing or dismantling canons to sidestep systems of oppression, these authors and editors enter the fray from the position that postsecondary spaces were established in the United States exclusively to educate white men. They unabashedly flex their savvy of the canon as an intellectual idea in the life of the mind rather than as a repertoire of music compositions to be disciplined. They acknowledge the canon and invoke it in dialogue with minoritized musics, musicians, and musickings.Paula Maust’s anthology, Expanding the Music Theory Canon, advocates for belonging through dialogue to help instructors “teach works from the canon alongside [little-known] works” (p. 2). Maust puts into conversation canonic “common practice period” compositions from ca. 1600 to 1920 with previously unrecognized ones by women and people of color. 255 manuscript, unpublished, and even unfinished excerpts from music compositions by sixty-seven women and people of color are directly connected to lessons in leading music theory textbooks. In painstakingly detailed tables, Maust pairs her excerpts with textbook topics such that instructors can readily enhance inclusion in their teaching.6 For example, she illustrates lessons on simple meter by means of “Danse des lutins” for harp by Henriette Renié; Étude no. 1, op. 33, a violin duo by José White; and the first movement from String Quartet no. 4, op. 1 (Allegro moderato) by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (pp. 29–31). These examples can be paired with any number of music theory textbook modules to teach simple meter.Maust’s thirty-three chapters are organized into four large parts: “Fundamentals,” “Embellishing Tones,” “Harmonic Progressions,” and “Formal Structures.” She includes biographies as well as a bibliography that directs readers to additional sources on each composer. Moreover, she frames each chapter with a series of analytical questions. For example, in chapter 19, “Augmented Sixth Chords,” she asks a series of questions designed to help students think through how augmented sixth chords work in each example (p. 149). Maust’s 2021 article, “Racism and Sexism Remain Pervasive in Western Classical Music Instruction,” which was inspired by Philip A. Ewell’s “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” informed her book.7 She documents her anthology’s reception with survey responses of university students from ages eighteen to thirty-five who have used it. Respondents “indicated that studying Western classical music by historical composers who shared an underrepresented aspect of their identity was a critical, career-defining moment” (p. 1). Maust explains that this anthology does not simply fill a lacuna. Rather, it discloses a wealth of important pre-twentieth-century music by underrepresented composers from Western Europe, women of color, and composers from the Americas (p. 1–2). She moves beyond enlarging the canon to instead put musics by previously ignored musicians into dialogue with those that are well known. While the current market supports numerous music theory anthologies, Maust’s will no doubt be widely used by instructors of core, elective, and review courses for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Her important contribution reminds us that omission is a form of censorship.In Inclusive Music Histories, Smith’s leading-edge research underpins her teaching strategies for ethically conceived and diverse music histories. She creates a dialogic at the outset by asking questions about how to ethically teach a predominantly white canon built from cultural and economic oppression, colonization, and slavery while avoiding tokenism, increasing inclusion, and “prepar[ing] students for a rapidly changing professional world” (p. 1). Smith urges researchers and teachers to be intentional. Critiquing a binary view of diversity and tradition as limited, she observes that diversity does not cancel but rather enriches tradition: “diversity is not anathema to tradition; diversity is part of tradition; we just have been taught not to recognize it” (p. 3). In an introduction and four chapters, she narrates ways that musical diversity and tradition appropriate, authenticate, intersect, layer, mock, shadow, and ultimately enrich each other.Smith calls for redefining how and why we teach what we do. She theorizes new conceptual frameworks of what she refers to as “layered pathways,” “origin myths and shadow histories,” “mimesis to mockery,” and “appropriation and authenticity” as means of shifting our thinking and approaches from a “curricular paradigm of ‘core repertory’ to one of ‘intersectional/historical’ motivations” (pp. 6–13). Sophisticated critical theory underpins Smith’s dialogic pedagogy and informs the content and teaching practices she has created. She has contributed a veritable method book that models advanced inclusive musicology research and teaching tools that facilitate belonging. Chapters include concrete resources for teachers, an historical overview, case studies, assignments and class activities around analysis, listening, and discussion, suggestions for syllabus design, lecture preparation tips, and an annotated bibliography.A comprehensive approach to inclusive pedagogy necessitates consideration of musics from multiple perspectives. Smith demonstrates this in her assignment on William Grant Still and his Symphony no. 1 (“Afro-American”), an artist and work frequently tokenized as exemplars of Black music. Smith points out the injustice of studying Still’s symphony in isolation, explaining how fixating on his use of banjo and twelve-bar blues collapses his composition into a trope of idealized and mythologized Africanisms (pp. 10–13). Such an approach neglects Still’s significant contributions to developing compositional technique and ignores intersections with contemporaries such as Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Duke Ellington, and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Smith encourages critique and comparison of scholarly sources on Still that discuss his study with Edgard Varèse versus those on Varèse that omit mentions of Still as Varèse’s student—sources that recognize artistic and cultural transmissions from teacher to student but not the other way around. Rather than searching for essentialized Black idioms of dance, genre, and timbre in commonly marginalized musics, Smith enriches our understanding by putting these attributes and repertoires in dialogue with canonic music.Smith’s subject matter includes Jewish and Christian chant, Sephardic songs from Spain, Baroque opera, modern American music, and much more. Pairing Josquin des Prez and Danger Mouse expands understandings of motets and mashups. Case studies of artists, musicians, and writers such as Élisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Florence Price, George Gershwin and his singers, Muddy Waters, Augusta Savage, Palmer Hayden, Romare Bearden, and Duke Ellington highlight how musicians and their work interconnect with their contemporaries. Smith advocates for addressing deeply oppressive and racist practices such as blackface and minstrelsy in mediums and genres of dance, opera, vaudeville, and others. She explains that, while these topics may not be suitable for every class, they are significant parts of the stories of European and American marginalized musicians and musical practices, canonic musicians and traditions, and exchanges between each. According to her, ethical, inclusive histories will result not from merely changing topics but from “reforming why and how we teach our repertory” (p. 1).Freire, hooks, Maust, and Smith advocate for inclusion through dialogic pedagogy. Renihan, Spilker, and Wright’s invaluable edited collection, Sound Pedagogy, responds to the call for inclusion by conceptualizing, theorizing, and offering practices of care pedagogy. Since the book was conceived in 2018, the need for care pedagogy in music has increased exponentially. As the editors articulate, “We need care, and we need it now” (p. 1). What remains of this review will focus on this collection.Sound Pedagogy comprises three sections with sixteen essays written by a university administrator, ethno/musicologists, a licensed therapist, and music educators, as well as an introduction and epilogue by the editors. William Cheng’s foreword encapsulates the relevance and significance of the collection: “Every chapter here pulses with accessible, actionable wisdoms into not just how we teach music but also why we still teach this thing called music at all, what with our world on literal fire and our species at never-ending war” (p. xii). The volume contributes resources, theories, and practices of care. Throughout the book, individual identity, belonging, community, the ways that people are represented in academic courses, curricula, settings, sources, and wellbeing in higher education are expertly explored and lovingly nuanced. The bibliographies alone are wellsprings of knowledge and instruction.In part 1, “The Heart of Curricular Interventions,” authors detail how they work with students to address real-world problems in their classes. Sara Haefeli reenchants music history through her call for “loving-as-knowing” (pp. 39, 42). Reframing Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking”—which recognizes music as a social practice rather than as an aesthetic object—she narrates her disenchantment from three different perspectives: as a professor during Black Lives Matter protests on her campus, as a teacher of Morton Feldman’s Projection I, and as a graduate student studying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of classical music as cultural capital (p. 38). Recognizing increasing faculty and student disenchantment with traditional music history pedagogy, Haefeli also reengages Freire, noting that knowledge is power, teaching is a political act, and teaching and learning may contribute to social justice; however, love, she suggests, is a greater power that can reenchant (p. 45).In the collection’s second chapter, Molly M. Breckling contextualizes a study conducted by her students of social media critiques of Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning DAMN within a local setting in Newnan, Georgia. At the time that she and her students were studying racism and the Pulitzer Prize competition, the city of Newnan was subsidizing and hosting a white-supremacy rally. Within this local context, her students appraised Lamar’s DAMN as a concept album and song cycle against the backdrop of the Pulitzer rubrics. They highlighted that his work was the first by an African American musician to be nominated for the award since the Pulitzer Prize board’s racist dismissal of Duke Ellington from consideration in 1965.Addressing an “empathy crisis” in her chapter “Empathy in Opera,” Colleen Renihan observes that “our ability to feel with and for others is crucial” (p. 62). Viewing empathy as a pedagogical intervention to “mobilize conversations” about systemic racism and cultural appropriation that hurt her students (p. 63), she brilliantly notes that empathy is radical and complicated, and if offered to students or colleagues as pity, can operate as superiority. Moreover, empathy can be taught and learned, and beyond the complexity of the term, Renihan demonstrates that it can be a means for supporting productive discussions about affect and audience behavior in relation to opera. 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