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.

Music history textbooks of the near future should also display greater sensitivity to the musical traditions. Reading our assigned textbook, I was stunned by how little space author Craig Wright gives to music outside the traditions of western classical music. His writing sometimes betrays a stunningly blinkered perspective in which classical music reigns supreme. He is casually dismissive of pop music and its ability to be emotionally affecting. After asking the reader to listen to both Puccini’s ario O, mio babbino caro and Taylor Swift’s Shake it off, he asks us which performance “is due to beat, electronic enhancements, orchestra sound, visual effects, vocal training, and lyrics? … Which, if either, would you be able to shake off?” These are the words of an older white professor trying to convince an audience of young, impressionable university undergraduates to see through the “tricks” of pop production and agree with him that “if you think classical music is for wimps, think again!”

The way Dr Wright treats the music of the common practice period is emblematic of the way our reverence for the “great masters” obscures our ability to rationally place them in context. In his zeal to sing the praises of Bizet’s opera Carmen, Dr Wright states that it is a work that “transcends race and class”, a sentiment that could not be further divorced from opera’s actual class function. His enthusiasm for Mozart in particular leads him to make a series of dubious statements, such as when he hails him as “the most universal composer in the history of Western music.” Forgetting for a moment that this is an incredibly subjective title for a textbook to bestow, is it true? I would argue that many composers since have pulled on just as many influences, if not more. Take for example Miles Davis, who not only pioneered at least four genres of jazz but also incorporated rock, funk, European classical, European folk, electronic, and psychedelic music. Towards the end of his biography of Mozart, Dr Wright writes that “no single event in the history of music is more regrettable than the premature loss of Mozart.” Given that it’s almost casually acknowledged that white settlers have committed genocide on every continent save for Antarctica, could it not be presumed that the musical traditions lost since the dawn of imperialism constitute a greater tragedy than the death of a solitary Austrian?

The worst offending page of the textbook might actually be the table of contents. Nothing “neutralizes the common sense intuition of the most privileged members of society as objective knowledge” more than devoting 27 of out of 31 chapter of a book titled Listening to Music exclusively to European classical music. Not a single chapter is devoted to a musical tradition that doesn’t have its roots in Europe or the United States. Rap music, the single most popular genre of our time, is given all of two paragraphs at the very end of the last chapter, sandwiched between heavy metal and grunge under the “rock” label. It’s a stunning note of ignorance on which to end. Had this book been titled Listening to Western Classical Music, it could at least have presented itself more honestly.