Toward a People’s History of Western Music

his essay began as an idealistic response to a practical problem.I had recently stepped into a full-time, contingent position at a large school of music at a public university.Along with other teaching duties, I was tasked with the second half of the two-semester sequence in Western art music.I was lucky to have supportive senior colleagues in my area, and my area director gave me free reign to teach the class as I saw fit.There were, however, constraints.The textbook was determined for the year.The date range and conceptual geography were prescribed by course title as it appeared in the catalog: "History of Western Music, Classical Era to the Present." Many of my colleagues expected their students to have a basic competence with canonic styles of Western art music, and some students shared this expectation.Reasons for dissatisfaction with surveys are many and understandable.The practical problem of "coverage"-how is one to fit hundreds of years and thousands of works into a few months?-dovetails with the suspicion of grand narratives in critical inquiry that has grown steadily since the 1970s across the humanities. 1 Indeed, musical narratives that traffic in ideas of evolution and historical inevitability not only silence the richness of historical contingency, but also affirm the outcomes of the very worst historical processes-colonialism, white supremacy, European (and later American) hegemony-without calling these processes into question.This will be a familiar set of issues for many musicology and music history faculty, as will be institutional responses to them.Some elite institutions My deep gratitude goes to Willie Dasinger, who introduced me to the work of Howard Zinn, and to Marianna Ritchey for her thoughtful feedback and encouragement on an earlier draft of this article.I also wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of this