Abstract:In the last two decades, Spain’s general music education curriculum has moved beyond the exaltation of so-called Western art music to also include some instances of non-Western musical traditions. This process of diversification is often articulated as entirely positive. The present paper interrogates such discourses, following a post-structural, socio-historical approach. It looks into the circumstances surrounding the emergence of Spain’s multicultural music education as a field of study, paying special attention to the inherent limitations and (contradictory) effects it produced. It (...) argues that, despite its progressive-sounding rhetoric, Spain’s multicultural music education still draws on age-old colonial discourses that pin the Self and the Other against each other. Following this line of inquiry, the paper then unpacks the emergence of the notions of music and schooling, as well as Spain’s recent move toward deregulating music and the arts as school subjects. Interspersed, the paper includes brief critical discourse analyses of policy documents and scholarly texts to exemplify its main points. (shrink)

In recent years, the study of musical cultures has gained popularity as a curricular intervention for increasing cultural diversity in school music curricula. Informed by Michel Foucault’s analytics of power-as-effects, this paper examines some of the underlying epistemic premises of the notion of musical culture as it operates in music curricula. Additionally, it considers how this construct’s discursive effects align with or contradict its presumed contribution to cultural inclusivity. I use the International Baccalaureate high school music curriculum as my exemplar (...) because of the key role that the notion of musical culture plays in this increasingly popular curriculum. First, I contextualize the notion of musical culture socio-historically, pointing to this construct’s Euro-Americentrism. Second, I argue that musical culture leans toward musical formalism. Third, I examine musical culture’s presumed distinctiveness, indicating discursive connections to a nineteenth-century, Euro-American conceptualization of cultures as fixed and discrete. Fourth, I examine musical culture’s presumed comparability, suggesting that the construct indirectly embraces Euro-American high art music as its frame of reference for analyzing all cultures. Based on this analysis, I suggest approaching the study of musical cultures relationally to render visible the dynamics of power and privilege that shape them. Finally, I consider the potential of abandoning the notion of musical culture altogether in favor of approaches that eschew establishing cultural boundaries. (shrink)