A university that attempts to chip away at the white racial frame should do so from a place of humility and recognition. Academia, through its relentless focus on the works of the “great masters of music”, has long been the leading force in sacralising the harmonic styles of 18th century European musicians. To undermine the role academia has played in the specific context of Canadian settler-colonialism, I think that university music programs should orient themselves towards indigenous ways of knowing and teaching. Decolonizing education is a goal that has already been integrated into the public-school curriculum but has been slower to come to university music programs. Indigenous teaching methods involve activities such as knowledge webs, jigsaw activities, and large-group discussions of a physical prompt. They give more space to co-learning, as opposed to the directive model of teaching wherein the teacher possesses ultimate knowledge of what is “good”. Music departments should be getting students to engage with these methods from day one and using them to explore the role that institutions such as the church, the concert hall, the conservatory, and especially the university have played in prizing the musical perspectives of a privileged few.

No music school should be so arrogant as to presume that they can simply draw from institutional knowledge to confront this challenge. Indigenous elders, knowledge keepers, and cultural advisors must be invited to share their knowledge about indigenous music and give perspective on the kind of teaching that is being done in the music school.

A university music school of the near future should also do what it can to challenge what are commonly understood to be the “fundamentals” of music. Indeed, “fundamentals” is a term whose time should pass. It lifts an exalted set of musical rules from the extremely contingent web of historical factors that produced them. Students should be asked to weigh the relative merits of different tuning, notation, and rhythmic systems. A concept from one musical idiom should be studied in comparison to relevant principles from other idioms, so that neither seems immutable or eternal. Students should think about how playing music might serve different ends and fill different spaces than the standard concert-hall environment. Where possible, a music school of the near future could even get students to learn how to play the music of an unfamiliar musical tradition.