Bob Unruh – The old saying is music “can soothe the savage beast,” but who knew those sheets of paper with staves and notes and key signatures and time signatures and more actually have the power to “slap” some people in the face?
It’s the latest battle in “woke” politics in the world today, where now staff members inside the University of Oxford’s department of music reportedly want to remove sheet music from the school’s curriculum.
A report from Fox News explains professors are fretting over its presence because the notation has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past.”
They charge its presence is a “slap in the face” to students of color.
The Telegraph in the United Kingdom said faculty members want now the “white hegemony” in music courses addressed.
Explained the report, “The Telegraph has seen proposals for changes to undergraduate courses, in which some staff question the current curriculum’s ‘complicity in white supremacy,'” a move apparently triggered by the Black Lives Matter agenda.
“Professors said the classical repertoire taught at Oxford, which spans works by Mozart and Beethoven, focuses too much on ‘white European music from the slave period,'” the report said.
Their plans include “rethinking the study of musical notation because it is a ‘colonialist representational system,'” the report said..
The Telegraph found, “Academics have also proposed that musical skills such as learning to play the keyboard or conducting orchestras should no longer be compulsory because the repertoire ‘structurally centers white European music’ which causes ‘students of color great distress.'”
The music department already teaches hip hop and jazz but the Telegraph found the concern is that an “almost all-white faculty” is giving “privilege to white music.”
Suggestions have been made to feature “African and African Diasporic Musics” and “Global Musics.”
The Telegraph reported it has seen documents explain faculty members wrote, “arising from international Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the Faculty Board proposed making changes to enhance the diversity of the undergraduate curriculum.”
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley, of George Washington University, said he doesn’t agree with such challenges to “sheet music.”
“But I would be interested in listening to such a debate,” he said.
He continued, “The problem is that there is little faith anymore about the ability to debate such issues. While many insist that ‘we need to talk about race,’ academics are routinely fired and investigated after engaging in such discussions.”
SF Source WND Mar 2021