Listening Across Borders

Musicology in the Global Classroom

James A. Davis, Christopher Lynch, James A. Davis, Christopher Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429648717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Listening Across Borders: Musicology in the Global Classroom provides readers with the tools and techniques for integrating a global approach to music history—within the framework of the roots, challenges, and benefits of internationalization—into the modern music curriculum. Contributors from around the world offer strategies for empowering students to critique the economic, ideological, and political structures that propagate global challenges. Applicable in a variety of classroom settings, the internationalized teaching methods collected here suggest fruitful ways forward in a global age, in three parts:

• Creating Global Citizens
• Teaching with Case Studies of Intercultural Encounters
• Challenges and Opportunities

In reevaluating the role of higher education in a cosmopolitan world, modern educators have come to question the limits of geographically defined canons, traditional curricular content, and other longstanding teaching approaches. Listening Across Borders places the music history classroom at the center of the conversation about internationalization in higher education, embracing pedagogies that develop the skillsets to become global citizens in a world where international cooperation is increasingly essential.

Part I

Creating Global Citizens

DOI: 10.4324/9780429027215-2

1 Western Music History as a Teaching Topic in Taiwan

Pedagogy as Transculturation

Jen-yen Chen

DOI: 10.4324/9780429027215-3

In setting forth the teaching of music in a global context as a topic worthy of discussion, one necessarily proceeds from a keen concern with the particular dynamics of transcultural exchange, involving stark tensions among competing value systems and worldviews. The subject of interest consists of more than the world’s diverse individual traditions of musical pedagogy: the unsettling of previously well-defined boundaries of scope, material, and approach demarcating these traditions evokes a “cultural polylingualism” as a kind of outlook or attitude, which itself merits detailed consideration. The central traits of this inclination toward the metaphorical speaking of more than one culture¹ include active skepticism toward the possibility of fully stable identities, an embrace of heterogeneity and even disunity (in a positive, productive sense), and a breadth of consciousness that recognizes and legitimizes the perception by others of one’s own normality as alien. At the same time acknowledgment of the impossibility of achieving complete fluency in multiple “tongues,” even while the striving toward such an ideal remains a necessary task, represents an essential facet of the internationalized temperament. Polylingualism thus consists less in linguistic proficiency (important as this is) than in a stance toward cultures that eschews the presumption that one can become just like others and recognizes “the indissoluble individuality of the other person”² as a crucial principle of sympathetic human interchange.

The present chapter aims to illustrate the foregoing points by drawing upon the teaching of Western musics in Taiwan as a case study. This choice of focus, inspired in the first place by my own experiences as a faculty member at National Taiwan University, where I have taught since 2006, will serve to exemplify the fluidity and liminality that marks the internationalized state of being. There are at least three areas in which one may discern these characteristics: the relations between Taiwan’s aboriginal and Han Chinese populations; the island’s history of colonization by various foreign powers; and the current, seemingly intractable problem of national status. Although nowadays Taiwan seems to present the face of an indubitably Han Chinese society to the casual outsider, in fact it had been inhabited by aboriginal peoples of Austronesian origin for several millennia by the time emigration of settlers, principally from the southern areas of the nearby Chinese province of Fujian, began during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).³ Subsequent conflicts over land set in motion an inexorable process of growing dominance by these settlers, with a resulting marginalization of the aboriginals; the tragic legacy of social prejudice and exclusion, recognition of which has occurred among the wider public only in recent decades, now forms a central theme in ongoing debates concerning multiethnic relations and complicates a tendency to assign Taiwanese identity to descendants of the Fujianese migrants. In fact the construction of the very notion of a Taiwanese identity is intimately connected with historical circumstances that have forced a subaltern status upon these descendants, chief among them the colonization of the island by the Netherlands (1624–62), Spain (1626–42), Japan (1895–1945), and, as some have controversially argued, China (1945–?).⁴ The strategic essentialist response of a fierce articulation of separate identity especially characterizes the period following the end of the Second World War, during which the Nationalist regime of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who was defeated by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War of 1945–49 and fled to Taiwan, exerted brutal authoritarian control over the island and suppressed all practice of local cultures amidst an obsessive effort to represent itself as the sole legitimate ruler of a unified Chinese nation and culture. Today, the competing yet shared Nationalist and Communist ideologies of a “one China” that includes Taiwan engenders the profound ambivalence of a self-sufficient Taiwanese society (with respect to government, currency, infrastructure, medical and educational systems, etc.) that enjoys no official recognition of its sovereignty, though its present population of approximately twenty-four million would make it tenth in size among European countries, or larger than roughly four-fifths of the continent’s nations.

Though deeply unsettling to many contemporary residents of Taiwan, the uncertainties of identity resulting from the historical circumstances sketched above furnish significant opportunities for active and open engagement with diverse possibilities of transcultural interactions and negotiations. In making this claim I proceed from the assumption that a firmly centered sense of self may well tend to discourage interest in such opportunities. Furthermore the positive value of decentering in promoting a cosmopolitan spirit of caring about others⁵ applies broadly to all societies, and not only to those undergoing a restless, transformative interrogation of their place in the world. This argument does not mean to romanticize collective cultural anxiety, which more often than not leads to a retreat into essentialisms and provides fresh fuel to nationalist or tribalist impulses. Rather it proposes an initial basic condition for internationalization, which may or may not then actually follow. More than observing and studying other cultures is involved in becoming global; only an active displacement of one’s habitual and comfortable standpoints away from a dominant position, in order to provide space for what seem like alien understandings and experiences, can produce the global in a strong, intensely dialogic and polylingual sense. Thus, for example, an intellectual phenomenon such as “global history” truly merits its name only if it transcends monovocality in its research methodology; that is, if it does not restrict its interest to how one and only one part of the world sees the rest of the world. This remains the case even for projects that aim at a critique of the one part’s modes of seeing, as this part would still remain the relentless center of attention.

A crucial task in promoting internationalized teaching, then, is to avoid a globalism built upon a notion of “the West and the rest,” a discursive phenomenon afflicting, for instance, the concept of world music, according to which all musics except that of the Euro-American classical tradition belong to an indiscriminate category termed “world.”⁶ Of course “the rest” need not only signify “non-Western” and can assume the form of other undifferentiated masses produced through alternative choices of egocentric cultural focus. In practice the dualistic imagination sometimes generates configurations more complex than a binary opposition between a single center and multiple peripheries, which require individual analyses of their ideological structures. Thus, for example, within certain musicological circles in East Asia, the wholly laudable effort to counter the colonial legacy of European art music’s dominance has led to problematic calls for a distinctive Asian understanding of musicological knowledge, the trouble here having to do with the generalizing of the qualifier “Asian” to indicate a monolithic outlook set against an equally monolithic “Western” counterpart. Aside from the presumption to speak on behalf of an enormous and diverse continent that encompasses the traditions not only of the East Asia region but also of Turkey, Iran, India, and Russia (to name but a few countries), the exclusive preoccupation with native perspectives is plainly non-dialogic.

The goal of internationalization presents the unceasing challenge of adopting a relational stance, that is, of contextualizing oneself within the multivocal environment of global society. Such a relationalism applies equally to the study of one’s own culture and to that of the cultures of others; the concerns motivating the internationalizing effort do not implicate research by a European musicologist on European music, for example, to a lesser degree than they do research by the same scholar on Asian or African music. The learning of languages of other continents, if only in the metaphorical sense of cultural polylingualism, is imperative in both cases, as is also a wariness toward any inclination to assume that such learning self-evidently takes place when more distant cultural others form the subject of investigation, since mediation of knowledge about these others through a single language (or set of kindred languages) hardly counts as an uncommon occurrence. Furthermore, in situations in which transcending univocality presents formidable difficulties of practical realization, polylingualism emerges more subtly yet no less valuably in a candid and imaginatively generous admission of one-sidedness (a condition never wholly eluded anyway). The critical act of examining one’s subjective vantage point as if observing it from the outside includes among its notable models Bruno Nettl’s 1989 article, “Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture,”⁷ which envisions an alien encounter, involving an ethnomusicologist from Mars, that exposes the quirks, biases, and anomalous practices of a “normal” culture of planet Earth. In turning the identities of the familiar and the extraterrestrial on their heads by assigning these respectively to the Martian and the Earthling, rather than vice versa, Nettl offers a vivid example of reflexive self-displacement taken as far as imagination permits, in the absence of pragmatic options for dialogue (with civilizations of Mars).

Of course, one need not cross planetary borders in order to obtain divergent perspectives on the culture of European art music, and the remainder of this chapter will discuss such perspectives, which exist in real, rather than merely imagined, form, provided by living informants. A necessary set of final prefatory remarks concern my own personal experiences of liminal identity and their possible impact upon the arguments presented here. Born in Taiwan but raised and wholly educated in the United States, to which I immigrated at the age of two with my mother and elder brother (my father having preceded us there), I am a bilingual speaker of English and what in my native land is commonly referred to as “Taiwanese,” a language more precisely termed Southern Min, which originates from Fujian. Growing up as a member of an ethnic minority I sometimes felt myself in an uneasy relationship with an American cultural mainstream that seemed to like marking individuals such as myself as different, even as I developed the keen passion for Western classical music that would lead to my eventual choice of profession. Many years later, when I seized upon the opportunity to carry out a return migration, as it were, by applying for a faculty opening at National Taiwan University, the interest in pursuing a move that would upturn my accustomed world by necessitating adaptation to a linguistically and institutionally foreign context had much to do with my uncomfortable sense of Americanness and with the exploratory bent fostered by that discomfort. Romanticized ideas of returning home may well have contributed to fueling an overconfidence about the ease of achieving the adaptation. But the Taiwanese aspects of my personal background would only serve as a limited aid, above all because the official language of Taiwan, whose use dominates most public domains including that of education, is not Southern Min but Mandarin. This circumstance, which reflects the continuing impact of Chiang’s oppressive policies toward local cultures, meant that in my new (yet simultaneously old) home I would also be marked as culturally different as a result of speaking the predominant tongue with a foreigner’s accent.

The aforementioned notion of return migration, and also the related one of double diasporic experience,⁸ can help to elucidate the type of personal situation I have been describing. Twice resettled into a new environment, I sometimes experience a magnified sense of outsider status, a feeling paradoxically deepened by the fact of living in my original land of birth. More specifically, my ethnic appearance gives rise to the expectation of native Mandarin fluency, which, when not fulfilled, may lead to a partial breakdown of human connectedness (and this breakdown can persist even after the details of my background become known). On the other hand, my evident ability in English, a language that enjoys high social capital in Taiwan (another colonial legacy), along with the prestige of the aca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: Why Internationalization?
• PART I: Creating Global Citizens
• PART II: Teaching with Case Studies of Intercultural Encounters
• PART III: Challenges and Opportunities
• Index