GAVIN S. K. LEE
Global music history counters the coloniality of Western music history and works towards the decolonization of music higher education. This site presents five big decolonial narratives in global music history that total 6000 words, constituting a synthesized, decolonial account of the full historical and geographic spans of global music history since antiquity. Decolonization in this context is the targeted dismantling and partial retreat of cultural coloniality as embodied in Western music history, as well as, crucially, the accompanying “return” of Indigenous and other BIPOC musics to various ethnic groups. Decolonization of music curricula is critical because, as Dylan Robinson argues, “[w]ithin all academic disciplines, the core curriculum serves as the epistemological foundation—the ground that we provide through the courses, the texts, and the performances we teach . . . [I]n order for decolonization not to merely be a metaphor, curriculum might need to be one of the things ‘given back.’”[1] While Western universities are colonial institutions that require multi-pronged approaches to decolonization[2], global music history is one concrete approach that can address the problems of offering exclusively Western music history in music higher education. This is the case even as global music history, like all ethical approaches, rightfully undergoes close scrutiny in order to identify its limitations (such as the potential disconnect with social justice for marginalized peoples[3]), because, as Robinson argues, the ceding of epistemic grounds is a concrete decolonial action.
The five decolonial narratives (DN) are:
DN1: Multiple antiquities existed before 500 CE.
DN3: European settler colonizers suppressed Indigenous and African musics (1500ff.).
DN4: Western music spread globally due to European colonization (1500ff.).
DN5: There are music histories elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia-Pacific regions.
Biography: Gavin S. K. Lee (PhD Duke; Associate Professor, Soochow University; Elizabeth Wood Fellow, University of Adelaide, 2024-5) researches and teaches issues of race, gender, and sexuality, focusing especially on Sinophone and minority US music makers. An editor of IMS Musicological Brainfood who has given keynotes and guest lectures across US, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, he is the author of the forthcoming Estrangement from Ethnicity: Music and Sinophone Alienation, and the editor of multiple collections: Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory (Oxford); Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music (Routledge); “Global Musical Modernisms” (Twentieth-Century Music); and, “Global Music History Course Design” (Journal of Music History Pedagogy).
[1] This is from Dylan Robinson’s own segment in the introduction titled “Beyond Western Musicalities,” co-authored with Maya Cunningham, Chris Stover, Leslie Tilley, and Anna Yu Wang for Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy Vol. 8 (2020): https://engagingstudentsmusic.org/index.php/engagingstudents/issue/view/245.
[2] La paperson, A Third University is Possible (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/a-third-university-is-possible.
[3] Tamara Levitz, “Why I Don’t Teach Global Music History,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 13, no. 1 (2023): 118–37.