Hello, all!

I\’m honoured to have been invited to lead a workshop/discussion for the SMT Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group at our November 4 online meeting, 9:30-11:00 EST. The workshop, titled \”Diversity and Inclusion in the Pedagogy of Contemporary Music Analysis,\” will focus on issues that many of us have been discussing in the past few years. How can we revise our approaches to teaching post-tonal and contemporary music with an eye towards issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion? What does a more equitable syllabus for contemporary music analysis look like? What challenges and issues are raised in the process of reconfiguring the repertoires, techniques, and theories that we teach?

While I certainly don\’t claim to have found any definitive answers to these questions, I\’d like to share my approach towards updating my own teaching as a case study that hopefully will resonate with others\’ experiences as well. An earlier draft of the attached document was shared at the Eastman School of Music\’s Theory Colloquium, presented in collaboration with Zachary Bernstein, Michael Buchler, and Judith Lochhead. This document begins with a short essay on my approach to redesigning an undergraduate \”core\” post-tonal course, and continues with annotated summaries of the repertoire covered in three syllabi: an \”old-guard\” syllabus (based almost entirely on music from the Western post-tonal canon) illustrating my starting point, a alternative \”counter-canon\” syllabus I designed and taught as an elective course, and a newly renovated version of the core course drawing on aspects of both of these syllabi.

My hope is that these documents will raise central issues about curriculum design for contemporary music analysis as well as questions about our broader values as pedagogues. I\’m hoping to keep our in-person meeting focused on open conversation, and thus will keep my own comments very brief, limited to a quick introduction to this document and what I see as the major challenges in revising our teaching approaches. The posted document closes with four questions for further discussion along with my own provisional answers—I\’m including those questions in short form at the end of this post for an online \”pre-discussion\” before our online meeting on November 4. I warmly welcome responses, comments, criticisms, and additional questions… there\’s lots to talk about here and I think the challenges involved are highly relevant to all of us in this interest group.

Looking forward to talking with you online at our meeting!

Bob
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Robert Hasegawa
Associate Professor of Music Theory
Schulich School of Music of McGill University

Questions for discussion

1. What about graduate classes in post-tonal theory and analysis?

2. “But on your post-tonal syllabus you left out _____!” (Fill in the blank: Ravel, Schoenberg, Babbitt, Boulez, Carter…)

3. How diverse are these lists, really? Aren’t these works all within the same modernist strain of Western Art Music?

4. Doesn’t focusing on such a wide range of music mean that you sacrifice analytical depth in favour of breadth?