From time immemorial, music has served as a collective experience that brings a sense of social solidarity through the acts of singing, playing, and dancing together. Even across the miles and around the planet, connections are made to music and musicians through mediated resources, including field and studio recordings of people in their local “surrounds”. In a pedagogical sense, listening to (and viewing) music of diverse cultures readily gives way to interactive engagement through various participatory, performance, and creative-expressive experiences (Campbell, 2004; Campbell, 2018; Campbell and Lum, 2019). Whether listened to or made, music is a powerful pathway for forging human relationships, and social bonding happens in classrooms through such engagement--even as intercultural understandings evolve in knowing people from far-away places through the music they express. Music overcomes physical distance, and because we cannot physically travel with students to remote villages or urban and rural communities beyond our reach, educational experiences that launch from mediated musical resources has the potential to develop musicianship, shape social solidarity, and grow a “respectful resonance” with people anywhere in the world.

This presentation is manifestation of World Music Pedagogy (WMP), an approach to the study and experience of culturally unfamiliar music that sits at the nexus of ethnomusicology and education (Campbell, 2018), and which is substantiated by research in music cognition. Its bedrock of operations emanates from theoretical principles that have been honed by ethnomusicologists, including issues of orality, the negotiation of emic-etic perspectives, interdisciplinarity, and ngoma as a multi-sensory mixture of song, dance, instrumental music, and “pageantry”, and the integration of cultural heritage (Nettl, 2015; Rice, 2017), all of which are deeply relevant to teaching-learning diverse musical cultures. My intent is to articulate WMP’s theoretical framework, and to advance illustrations of its dimensions as they apply to curriculum and instruction in school and university settings where the formation of understanding, respect, and empathy through music are valued aims of the educational process. I draw from the wealth of resources maintained by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, with exemplary “music pathways” from the archive of 70,000 tracks organized and curated by a staff of working ethnomusicologists (Carlin, 2008), and the Association for Cultural Equity and its Global Jukebox, an ever-expanding website of music of local-global cultures collected and curated by folklorist-musicologist Alan Lomax (Szwed, 2011), and from which WMP-focused instructional modules have been designed and delivered.

In the spirit of developing students’ cultural sensitivity, intercultural understanding, and empathetic bonds with people both close and far, I hope to describe and discuss WMP as demonstration of the joining togethers of efforts by educators with the theories and fieldwork recordings of ethnomusicologists. The combination of World Music Pedagogy, a “listening-first” instructional method, with exemplary archives of traditional music from throughout the African continent, the Americas, Asia, the Pacific region, has resulted in the provision of interactive engagements in music and cultural meanings (along with channels for students to socially bond with and stand in solidarity with musicians across the globe). I hope to affirm the aims of cultural diversity in music education by reinforcing the power of collaborative efforts to “change the world”, and to suggest that the combined expertise and energy of music scholars and educators can impact the development of learners of various settings and circumstances globally, locally, culturally—and holistically.

References

Campbell, P. S. 2004. Teaching Music Globally.  New York: Oxford University Press.  

Campbell, P. S., 2018.  Music, Education and Diversity.  New York: Teachers College Press.

Campbell, P. S. and C. H. Lum, 2019. World Music Pedagogy: School-Community Intersections.  New York: Routledge.

Carlin, R., 2008. Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways. NY: Harper Collins.

Global Jukebox <https://theglobaljukebox.org/#>

Lomax, A., 2002.  The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: The New Press.

Nettl, B., 2015.  The Study of Ethnomusicology.  Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press.

Rice, T., 2017.  Modeling Ethnomusicology.  New York: Oxford University Press.  

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings < https://folkways.si.edu>

Szwed, J., 2011.  Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking (Penguin Books).