Dr. Carolann Buff’s article “Envisioning a More Inclusive Choral Literature Curriculum” has been published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Choral Scholar & American Choral Review.

 

Dr. Carolann Buff’s article “Envisioning a More Inclusive Choral Literature Curriculum” has been published in the Fall 2024 issue of The Choral Scholar & American Choral Review. A link to the article can be found here: Choral Journal Fall 2024.

Recently there has been an increasing awareness of a significant lack of diversity and inclusion in the university music curriculum. There are many barriers to transforming curricula to be more inclusive including significant anxiety that there is not room to deviate from a fixed-content canon that is traditionally recognized as essential to a good music education. But it is urgent that music courses are universally reevaluated according to best practices regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. One must ask why and how certain repertories are taught. Who makes the decisions to include or exclude certain musicians or works? What might be assumed about the narrative of Western European art music that is nearly exclusively white, male, and Christian?

This article empowers instructors to take voluntary measures to remedy past discriminations. The task is to reshape the curriculum and incorporate more equitable accounts of underrepresented musics and composers. The courses that are taught at institutions of higher learning must prepare future musicians, researchers, and teachers to meaningfully engage with a diverse body of repertoire. One way of doing this is by altering the repertoire that is discussed in the classroom. Another is to have a frank conversation about why canonic works are established as normative and essential at the expense of excluding others.

In this article, Buff offers suggestions to inspire a broader renovation of the choral literature curriculum. The remainder of this essay highlights techniques, methodologies, and frameworks that may help enable others to create their own inclusive pedagogy or scholarship. Detailed descriptions of her own research and classroom instruction are intended to inspire others to create their own instructional modules and design courses within already existing research or individual expertise. The examples from the article serve to help an instructor find a path towards more inclusive course design.

Specific topics discussed in the essay are cultural appropriation and Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices: Jewish sacred music from the late 17th-century to the end of the 19th-century; and the myth of Palestrina and the Council of Trent.