The Known and Unknown

Can music education transform society?

Welcome new subscribers! This piece is a conversation about ideas from the past weekend—on pedagogy, society, and of course, music. I hope you enjoy.

Standing tall at the lectern in a large room of wood and glass, scholar-musician Dr. Nduduzo Makhathini rested his left hand on its edge and spoke about the relationships music teachers have with knowledge in the form of their curricula.

Music is notoriously difficult to talk about—in other words, it is challenging to conceptualize and put into language. Our attempts over the course of history to define music, to capture it into a formal system of harmony or musical theory, bear the scars of those difficulties. This shows up in the way music is taught in universities, and by extension the k-12 music class. 

The music that has been formalized into a curriculum often does not and cannot relate to the local communities that surround the institutions that teach the music curriculum. Over time, this creates a huge disparity between the types of …