Keynote I
Musings, Fusings, and Mistaken Identities: The Checkered History of the Ethnomusicology - Education Weave
Professor Patricia Shehan Campbell
Donald E. Petersen Professor of Music
Head, Ethnomusicology
University of Washington
Chair, Smithsonian Folkways Board
The unique and shared visions of dynamic activist-musicians in ethnomusicology and education has resulted in changes to curricular content and instructional process in schools, in community venues, and on university campuses. Teachers in a wide variety of venues, including university professors, who seek a multicultural-intercultural-global array of songs, instrumental pieces, dance, and listening selections are locating them in the catalogues of publishing companies with national and international distribution and on the Internet, where they are finding the results of fieldwork by ethnomusicologists to apply to their curricular practices and programs. Tertiary-level students in colleges, conservatories, and universities are increasingly enrolling in ethnomusicology and world music performance courses in their degree programs, while their professors of music (often not trained ethnomusicologists) are finding ways to diversify the content of their programs through various resources that include invitations to local community musicians and culture-bearers. Practicing teachers are participating as in-service teachers in an array of short- (and longer-) term in-service courses to fill the gaps of knowledge created by their earlier university degree programs in music education, and they are learning from collaborative teams of ethnomusicologists and educators (and following on the works of ethnomusicologists that comprise the course reading and listening lists) in honing their understandings and skills in world music pedagogy. The significant overlap of ethnomusicology and education historically and in continuing the diversity movement in education at all levels and venues, however, conceals the fact that the fields are uniquely focused on goals particular to their specializations of “pure” and “applied” scholarship. Ethnomusicology continues its earnest interest in interdisciplinary questions of music and cultural anthropology, folklore, performance studies, politics, religion and ritual, gender studies, race or ethnic studies, while music educators remain focused on scholarship pursuant to understanding the multiple dimensions of music teaching and learning. Attention to the two coinciding yet separate fields will offer a sense of half century’s “checkered history” of ethnomusicologists and educators who follow separate yet also intersecting pathways in music.
