In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock discusses how the curricular scope is of the course is traditional, while her approach to teaching it is critical.
A Traditional Music History Survey Course
21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present is a historical survey of twentieth-century music. One thing that’s interesting is that, over the past few years, other music departments have discontinued survey classes like this one. Instead, they lean toward offering courses in which fewer topics are covered in-depth, or courses organized around themes, rather than time periods. Some of my colleagues at other institutions are explicitly critical of teaching musicology through historical surveys. Historical coverage is no longer prized in the way it used to be, and other values have replaced the “coverage” mentality that a survey encourages. So, it’s a particularly challenging moment to be teaching a survey course like 21M.260 Stravinsky to the Present—I am a modern musicologist teaching within a curriculum that is traditional in scope.
Rethinking the Standard Historical Narrative
"Learning about any given century by studying an array of music from that era is a pretty-old fashioned idea, but the kinds of assignments we’ve developed and the ideas we’re asking students to work with are different from what might have been done in a survey course 20 years ago."
The music program at MIT, in general, tends to be on the traditional side when it comes to curricula. Where we’re more progressive is in our approach to teaching. Learning about any given century by studying an array of music from that era is a pretty-old fashioned idea, but the kinds of assignments we’ve developed and the ideas we’re asking students to work with are different from what might have been done in a survey course 20 years ago. Part of this orientation is simply to ask students to think critically about historical narratives—to not take the way history is told for granted, and to understand where the ideas about history themselves come from. The choice of textbook is key, because you don’t want to just reiterate the same problematic ideas with your students. You want to rethink them together and recreate those critiques.
That’s why I like Joseph Auner’s (2013) textbook, Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. It comprises two volumes, one with scores and the other with the corresponding historical narrative. Historians refer to historiography, or the way that history is written. We understand that the events historians choose to write about and the ways they write about them shape what and how readers think about those events. In other words, history is not a collection of objective facts on a page; rather, it’s interpretive and evocative and shaped by its writers. Auner’s text is very aware of this, and aware, in particular, of some of the older tropes shaping music history. He writes against those narratives in useful and strategic ways.
Because of this approach, students begin to view historical narratives as stories that can be questioned and contextualized. That’s one advantage of using such a recent textbook: in addition to introducing students to the standard narrative, it also explores what we might do to problematize that narrative. So, for example, one strand of the standard narrative has to do with the function of progress in twentieth-century music, like the idea that music was getting better and better, or more and more complicated, and that the more complicated the music was, the better it was becoming. That idea reigned for a long time, but then it blew up entirely, and by now the idea of “progress” no longer makes any sense to tell as a single story of how twentieth-century music was made. There’s a lot of music and a lot of people that are left out if you tell the story that way, and it’s biased. So we can do better now with some historical distance.
Everything You Thought You Knew was Wrong
Even though we now know how the twentieth century “turned out,” that doesn’t mean the narrative is ossified. We’re still writing about and problematizing the story, so the narrative keeps changing. One of the thesis statements of today’s musicology is revisionism—that “everything you thought you knew was wrong”—and this is such a valuable lesson for students to learn in a music history survey course. In the teaching and learning we do, we all (students and professors) are a part of how this history is told, and so in telling that history differently each semester we show how the field is changing.
Reference
Auner, Joseph. Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. ISBN: 9780393929201. (Also available in eBook format, ISBN: 9780393904604.)
———. Anthology for Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. ISBN: 9780393920215.
