Guide to BIPOC musicians and related literature

Music curricula still fails to adequately represent Black music and musicians, resulting in inequities for Black students and Black music educators. The outcry from the #BlackLivesMatter movement has led to calls for institutional policies to combat violence and systemic racism towards Blacks. In this paper, I use Critical Race Theory to frame the discussion of oppressive structures that exist in music curricula, and propose Culturally Responsive Pedagogy as a means to create space for Black music in classrooms. I then present the notion, #BlackMusicMatters, calling for curriculum reform that includes Black music and suggest practical approaches for dismantling Anti-Black Racism in music education.

Current education systems place teachers and administrators in positions of ultimate power. Learning about and embracing the principles and practices of restorative justice in education provides us with an opportunity to adapt the actual structure. This article gives insight into one music educator's journey toward understanding how to connect music, restorative justice, and Indigenous education so that each pedagogy strengthens the other. Relationality and harmonious learning are highlighted, along with key information about the practice of circle keeping. From this learning, author Sarah McDonald has developed a web-based resource (www.restorativejusticemusiceducation.com) which is available to educators with all levels of understanding and experience in implementing Indigenous education-informed restorative justice classroom practices.

Roundtable Presentation: Society for Ethnomusicology 2020 Virtual Conference 30 October 2020 Roundtable Title: Many Voices at the Table: A Conversation About the Need for Equity in Canadian Ethnomusicology Of the Table: On Mediation and Inclusion. In what follows, I argue for a version of diversity that offers unmediated and unconditional access to resources and opportunities to everyone who attends the various spaces in ethnomusicology.

This article discusses the role of colonial oppression in creating conflicting perspectives in the reproduction of dance as Indigenous cultural heritage. The debate on kahiko, the ancient Hawaiian dance, of which practice was severely controlled and then revived through the cultural renaissance, demonstrates that the radical deprivation of the practice has created multiple understandings of the dance among different practitioners. Of primary importance in these respects is the intergenerational divide within the dance community, manifest in the critical perspective of the post-renaissance variant of kahiko, which highlights the “continuity” of the practice through the colonial rupture.

This study examines how music functions in relation to identity development for African-, Caribbean- and Black-identified emerging adults who have immigrated to Canada. Eleven ACB-identified emerging adults, recruited from music schools, community, and student organizations took part in semi-structured interviews adapted from McAdams’ Life Story Interview protocol to focus on music practices and memories. Thematic Analyses results suggest that transitioning to life in Canada necessitated learning new meanings of being and “becoming” Black. Participants described the influence of music on negotiating identity in a Canadian context. They described using music to resist racist and hegemonic narratives of Canadian Black identity, to connect to and celebrate their embodied Black identities, and establish self-continuity and coherence across histories and generations to connect with spiritual memories, land, and ancestors. We conclude by suggesting implications of this work for practice and developing research methodologies that resist whiteness.

Black creative educational experiences (BCEEs) are participatory, performative cultural experiences created by or for students, centering Black artistic expression, aesthetics, and engagement. Using African-centered frameworks, we provide a methodological guide for examining BCEEs in education research, which includes centering Black “ways of knowing,” validating creative expressions cultivated by and for Black people, acknowledging the influence of Black creative expression on research and practice, considering researcher positionalities as observers and cultivators of Black creative expression, and viewing Black creative expression as knowledge production. We found BCEEs are democratizing educational experiences rooted in intellectual and expressive freedom (freedom of movement/voice/tongue), and community building. BCEEs should be centered in education research, particularly postsecondary education, and prioritized in institutional programming, curricula, and high-impact practices.

Additionally, arts organizations and teaching associations are also doing their due diligence by providing educators with diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops and encouraging innovative research (e.g., National Association of Teachers of Singing). According to music educator and conductor Pratik Gandhi, young female or BIPOC musicians "are [unconsciously] made to feel that they do not belong in the band music community" by "not seeing themselves reflected in the music on their stands" (28-29). Together, the ensemble decided which grade levels would benefit most from this project, what materials and resources we wanted to include in the presentation and curriculum guide, and what musical works would help us meet the program's goals. Patinka (2021) writes that the Western classical canon is a "natural by-product of what was historically popular to perform or readily available," and its authority has been solidified through years of consistently "programming, listening, and performing" these works (163).

Electronic dance music (EDM) is a seven billion dollar global industry and its elements are core to mainstream popular music. However, the recognition and earnings elide the queer communities of color from which the genre originates. Therefore, this dissertation builds from Munoz’s (2005) minoritarian knowledge production, to reveal how this queer of color EDM aesthetic allow them to not only reclaim agency through everyday politics, but also create lives of pleasure that decenter oppression through resistance narratives. And in doing so, it reveals how Black DJs from the early days of EDM and younger generations of queer DJs of color make sense of how this genre transitioned from brown and Black queer subgenre in American urban centers to a “supergenre” popular within the significantly whiter and heteronormative audiences throughout the world. Moreover, it addresses how the participation of queer DJs of color is relegated only to source material for creation narratives surrounding EDM genres, at the expense of contemporary queer and of color scenes. This dissertation project builds on their frustration to highlight how underground networks of queer people of color are significant loci for the circulation of talent, cultural norms, music aesthetics, and economic opportunities. This dissertation also traces the formation of inter-musical and inter-texutal aural cultures through the use of various popular Afro- Diasporic musical and cultural aesthetics in EDM production. Therefore, this work is guided by these key questions: (1) what is the relationship over time between the musical and cultural aesthetic of queer of color communities to mainstream dance music industries?; (2) how do the music and production styles within these networks act as expressive extensions of the queer of color identity/experience; and (3) how do networks of underground queer collectives of color engage in “world-making” (Buckland 2002) to create spaces and cultural norms through underground industries and tightly knit networks within and between urban centers?

Latinx students are underrepresented among high school music students in the United States, nationally. However, localized demographics in some parts of the country reveal secondary music programs that are comprised nearly entirely of Latinx students. Still, the experiences of such a large and racially marginalized population as Latinx students remain under-researched in the field of music education. To explore how Latinx racial identity may inform the experiences of Latinx music students and their music teachers, I conducted a post-qualitative study of students and teachers in music classes at large secondary schools in which the Latinx population is 95 percent or more. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with music students and their teachers. To guide my thinking on the role of race in the lives of the participants, I incorporated Omi and Winant’s (2015) theory of racial formation throughout the data analysis. Overall findings indicated that race informs much of the experiences of the participants in varying, sometimes subtle ways. Through racism, racial resistance, the formation of racial identity, and the incorporation of both colorblind ideology and race consciousness, the participants provided nuance as to how we may regard the role and significance of race in music education. Implications for developing a racial-justice-oriented paradigm in music education are also discussed.

Canadian universities are under increasing pressure to address systemic exclusions of Indigenous peoples and knowledges, exclusions that have been perpetrated by residential schools, day schools, and universities. Canadian universities have, increasingly, begun to engage in Indigenization efforts; however, engagement in Indigenization efforts has been inconsistent and uneven within institutions and across the sector. Higher music education, in particular, has done little in terms of engaging in Indigenization, and this research seeks to address this gap. This research engages with six Indigenous musicians who each hold at least one university degree in music in order to hear their experiences in higher music education and to envision an Indigenized higher music education in Canadian universities. This research is, in part, a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action (2015c), specifically Call 62, ii.: We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, in consultation and collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal peoples, and educators, to: ii. Provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms (p. 331). Call to Action 62, ii provides a framework for thinking about and envisioning what higher music education—or post-secondary music programs—can do to respond to the TRC’s Calls to Action (2015c) in meaningful ways in collaboration with Indigenous peoples, communities, and Nations. This research engages with Ermine’s (2007) conceptualization of the ethical space and McCallum and Perry’s (2018) structures of indifference in order to conceptualize higher music education as structures of difference whereby Indigenous musics, musicians, knowledges, and musical practices are valued and included in ways that go well beyond Indigenous inclusion (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). The final chapter includes a lengthy list of recommendations, informed by the participants’ stories, for all stakeholders in higher music education, including deans and senior leadership, chairs, faculty, staff, students, patrons and donors, and audience members. The academy has undergone very little structural change (Ottmann, 2013) and the magnitude of what will be required of higher music education in the work of Indigenization will necessitate visionary and courageous leadership.

The Sámi are Indigenous peoples of northern Fenno-Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia). While today the political and cultural initiatives of the Sámi function both nationally and internationally, the Sámi are, and have always been, a group of peoples with their own internal diversity of language, traditions, and lifeways. Similarly to many other Indigenous groups around the world, colonization and exploitation have affected the Sámi, and their homeland Sápmi, since the seventeenth century. Popular genres of music have since the mid-twentieth century been outlets for protesting the unfair treatment of the Sámi, and remain vibrant modes of expression today, used to voice challenges against institutionalized colonialism and the stereotypes and expectations of Indigeneity. Previous scholars in musicology and anthropology have focused their research mostly on the iconic Sámi vocal tradition of joik or reindeer husbandry. However, this dissertation is concerned with how contemporary popular music and multimedia productions by and about Sámi artists, whether they include these explicit ethnic markers or not, engage in forms of decolonial activism or protest, particularly in relation to Sámi conceptions of intersectional ethnicity and gender. Sámi popular music now exists in a variety of multimedia forms, such as music videos, social media content and discourses, feature films, and multimodal activist collaborations with other Indigenous musicians and activists around the world. In these venues, the artists challenge ethnic and gendered assumptions, practice global Indigenous networking and solidarity, and contribute to goals expressed by the Sámi Parliaments such as language and cultural revitalization, environmental protection, and suicide prevention. Online and digital networks created by Indigenous activists often lead to collaborations in the corporeal world as well, where musicians and other artists collaborate as parts of larger projects and festivals. This dissertation examines the overlaying structures and issues, as well as several case studies, of each of these types of multimedia expressions, and provides insight into the topics, aesthetics, and political causes that are relevant to Sámi artists making music in twenty-first century Fenno-Scandinavia.

The dissertation focuses on developing a theory of Afrofuturist music. Afrofuturism is an umbrella term used to describe black cultural productions that reflect on the African diasporic culture of the past while imagining potential futures, often while appropriating imagery of technology and science-fiction tropes. With the intent of redefining notions of blackness, Afrofuturist artists create alternative historical narratives and speculative future projections. These productions create space that allows the Afrofuturist to discorporately negotiate the limits of black subjectivity. Using selections from popular artists Erykah Badu, OutKast, and Janelle Monáe as case studies, I demonstrate how these artists use Afrofuturist speculative thought to inform their music, videos, and overall aesthetic, especially as it relates to style, form, and temporality. Scholarship of black popular music in general, specifically rap and hip-hop, is typically musicological or ethnomusicological in nature, focusing on extra-musical aspects like history, linguistics, and cultural impact. This project incorporates theoretical analysis so as to bring into sharper relief the complex intertextualities within black popular music. My methodology melds pre-existing interdisciplinary literature with traditional and non-traditional musical analysis to better analyze unique sonic phenomena employed by Afrofuturist musicians as well as contextualizing these phenomena in what I call “Afrofuturist space.” These analyses demonstrate how future scholarship on Afrofuturist music can remain sensitive to its Afrofuturist context, while expanding theoretical frameworks to better deal with issues of teleology, cyclicity, and interconnected musical narrative in black popular music.

This is an ethnography of contemporary Ainu music; i.e. aural expression in the lives of people who identify as descendants of the original inhabitants of Hokkaido and other regions in and around northern Japan. Many of the Ainu people described here are activists who are committed to preserving their ancestors’ songs, which reference traditional human/animal relationships and pre-colonial ways of life. There are also Ainu people who are ambivalent towards this repertoire but nevertheless connect with their ancestral lands and align with current political debates through aural techniques that their ancestors developed and passed on. Importantly, this research is also about non-Ainu people, particularly environmentalists who are interested in, and committed to, learning Ainu traditions, often directly from Ainu people. In many cases, they view these traditions as closer to nature than their own customs for reasons discussed throughout. In the following pages, I address an influx of support for Ainu music among non-Ainu environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists, especially after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. I use ethnographic case studies to show how, even when Ainu aural expressions are misunderstood by outsiders, the intellectual legacy of Indigenous ancestors is accessible and presently undergoing rapid development by way of the music-making practices of contemporary Ainu people. While, as one Ainu language teacher put it, “Ainu are not ecologists,” my interlocutors have, indeed, encouraged many people in contemporary Japan to rethink categories like nature, music, and humanity.

This multiple-case study explores the intricacies of three Community Music (CM) initiatives in Puerto Rico—La Junta, Decimanía, and Taller Tambuyé—and realizes comparisons between them, specifically as related to theories of music pedagogy. The research focuses on the teaching and learning dynamics of three of Puerto Rico’s traditional musical genres—Plena, Bomba, and Música Campesina—which have survived for centuries through oral transmission and enculturation within community settings. Seldom have these communal dynamics or the learning processes that occur in such environments been studied. The research found that, even though the idiosyncrasies and modus operandi diverge among the initiatives, the ways in which community educators, participants, and leaders learn have little variation. The educational practices and the sustainability efforts of the Community Music initiatives provide a fertile ground for the development of higher level and K-12 music education programs rooted in Puerto Rican music.

This dissertation explores how African and African-descended people in the British colonial Caribbean, enslaved and free, engaged with music that had its origins in Europe through listening, performance, theorizing, and composition between the banning of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and the granting of unrestricted freedom in 1838. By shifting perspective to how black people heard European music, rather than how white people heard colonized and enslaved black people, this project complicates traditional narratives about race and music in the colonial Caribbean, arguing that black musicians used music and listening as a tool to assert their intellectual and aesthetic capabilities, while simultaneously learning, theorizing, and sometimes subverting the music of their colonizers. I position these modes of performance and listening within a context of increased white anxiety about race in the decades before and after emancipation. Drawing on methodologies from black feminist history, this project focuses on the music lives of the enslaved from scant traces in the archive. Through chapters about enslaved fiddlers, military musicians, Christian converts, and free people of color, this dissertation acknowledges that the multiplicity of ways that enslaved and subjugated Africans and their descendants performed and interacted with European music demonstrate that European music in the colonial Caribbean was not strictly racialized as white.

Ska music—a genre that began in independent Jamaica in the late 1950s before reaching global fame in the mid-1990s—is often remembered in American popular culture as an embarrassing, implicitly white moment in popular music. Since ska's decline in mainstream popularity, a new generation of groups dubbed new tone push back against this construction and reposition the ska scene as a space for inclusion, activism, and DIY community. This dissertation uses a mixed qualitative methodology that puts ethnographic interviews in conversation with song analysis and social media texts to understand the scene's relationship to ska history and to social justice advocacy. I investigate activism in the scene via three case studies, which I categorize in three layers: the personal, the local, and the cultural. Drawing from interviews with new tone musicians, I use "dysphoria songs" or songs that depict the lived experience of trans and non-binary musicians—to illustrate how personal narratives can serve as political statements in hetereopatriarchal societies. Next, the South Texas ska-themed concert "Skank for Choice" illustrates activism in local spaces, where the group L@s Skagaler@s tell stories of their home in the Rio Grande Valley to raise funds to benefit vulnerable local populations. Finally, some ska artists use the repeated lyric "Eat the Rich, Feed the Kids" to voice cultural critiques that link capitalism, colonialism, and racism in creating contemporary forms of inequality. Ultimately, I suggest that the new tone ska scene utilizes virtual scenes to recreate ska music as an overtly activist and inclusive space, thus resisting constructions of ska as embarrassing or rock in general as a white cis-male space.

This paper primarily examines calypso as a form of protest to Trinidad and Tobago's post-independence governments, the country's political and societal ills, and global issues of the Black person in the African Diaspora. I analyze the types of protests the calypsos represented such as political (for or against the ruling government), social (women and children's rights, and violence), Black Power Movement, and the use of double entendre as a veiled protest versus plain expression. Using local and international newspaper articles, I investigate what occurred in society prior to the creation of the calypsos and how the socioeconomic backgrounds of the calypsonians influenced and/or contributed to the content of these lyrics; how these calypsonians and their songs informed, educated, and entertained their audiences while highlighting the issues. Secondarily, the national instrument, the steelpan which was born out of the necessity for freedom of expression will be highlighted as a form of protest. I will plot the historical development of the steelpan from the banning of the African drum by slave masters, the creation of tamboo bamboo, and later the introduction of metal products such as brake linings, biscuit tins, and ultimately the oil drum which became the present-day steelpan. I highlight the calypso as a political and social discourse and that the calypso and steelpan are critical elements of the epistemology of Trinidad and Tobago. I approach the examination of these lyrics from the perspective of a cultural insider and look at calypsos from 1972 to 2009. I examine calypsos by calypsonians Chalkdust, Singing Sandra, Black Stalin, and David Rudder all from different socio-economic backgrounds, and highlight the contemporary social relevance of the calypsos that were sung years ago. I provide a nuanced account emphasizing the intellectual prowess, musical innovations, and political contributions these specific calypsonians have made to the cultural art forms of calypso and steelpan, as well as their roles as the nation's most vital political and social activists. Finally, I reflect on how calypsos and calypsonians, through their lyrics of protest, have become a beacon of hope to the people of depressed communities and ultimately the entire country.