Teaching in the Tradition?

:
World Music Ensembles at the University of Toronto
World Music Ensemble Paper

Jardena Gertler-Jaffe
September 3, 2017
 The University of Toronto Faculty of Music offers a variety of so-called “World

Music Ensembles” every year, usually six representing different world traditions. These

ensembles are taken as music electives by music majors, who are steeped in Western

Classical or Jazz programs, as an opportunity for students to experience different

cultures of music outside of their expertise. According to the Ethnomusicology website

of the Faculty of Music, “The World Music Ensembles program at the University of

Toronto has for many years enriched the musical lives of our students and has provided

alternative perspectives on learning and making music by offering training in various

world traditions” (Ethnomusicology n.d.). However, I will argue that the program, in its

current iteration, does not achieve these stated goals.

This paper is based on my experience as a student in the “Klezmer Ensemble”,

“Iranian Ensemble”, and “African Drumming and Dance Ensemble”, all of which I took

between 2015 and 2017. By engaging reflexively through my involvements in these

ensembles, I will juxtapose my experience with “best practices” established within

World Music Pedagogy and Ethnomusicology (Campbell 2003; Volk 1998). I will then

propose a number of changes, which could be made given unlimited resources and

interest, that I suggest would strengthen the program and better achieve the stated

goals of the “World Music Ensemble” (WME) program at the University of Toronto.

The University of Toronto offers six WME courses a year. Students are able to

enroll in these courses once during their time in the Faculty of Music, and cannot take
the class again. The majority of students in these courses are undergraduate Music

Performance and Music Education students in order to fulfill a music elective degree

requirement. WME courses are two hours a week for one semester, working out to

twenty-four hours of instruction. However, in all three of the ensembles that I took,

classes were cancelled one or more times due to holidays or illness, leading to the loss

of two or more hours of instruction. The course culminates in a performance, presented

alongside demonstrations by students in other WME classes, that is usually about

fifteen minutes in duration.

Because of the limited time of instruction, instructors tend to present a modified

version of the musical tradition that they are teaching. Iranian Ensemble, which is

taught by master tombak player, Pedram Khavarzamani, has been significantly divorced

from Iranian Classical traditions due to time and resource constraints. For example,

instead of putting together an ensemble, as the course title suggests, each student learns

how to play the tombak, the Persian goblet drum. This instrument, which in the

university’s class context is played by each student in unison, is primarily

accompaniment for melodic instruments or an improvisatory solo instrument in the

Iranian Classical tradition (Azadehfar 2011, xxxiii). Instead of teaching students to

improvise and compose, as is expected from tombak players in the Iranian classical

tradition, students are presented with a modified, one-line Western notation, that has

been used in conjunction with aural transmission methods in Iran starting in the 1960s
(Azadehfar 2011, 282). Instead of challenging students to learn aurally, improvise, and

compose, Khavarzamani saved time by replicating the rehearsal process of other

classrooms in the university, relying completely on written notation. Changing the

performance context in this—admittedly understandable—way means that students are

not receiving training in this world tradition.

Students are not presented with historical or cultural contexts for the traditions

that they are learning. The limited class time is instead devoted to acquainting students

with the new instruments or playing style so that they are prepared for the performance

at the end of the semester. Students are also not familiarized with repertoire outside of

what is to be performed at the end of the class. In order to better serve a diversified

student body and a more global, antiracist sensibility, educators have strived to

incorporate Ethnomusicology and World Music into their pedagogical practice

(McMahon 2003, 257). Music educators have developed tactics for teaching students

world music traditions that overcome possible obstacles, including unfamiliarity with

the musical systems or class sizes that are too big to facilitate the teaching of a music

tradition, that often misrepresent and undermine the musical traditions they are

attempting to teach (Campbell 2003, 28). These tactics include the fracturing or

changing of musical traditions in order to expedite learning and “keep one foot in the

familiar,” as Music Educator Katie Carlisle has written (2012, 7). However, when such
traditions are presented without regards to their socio-cultural context, students are

receiving a misrepresented and incomplete understanding of the musical tradition.

The Klezmer ensemble has generally been far more successful in teaching a

variety of materials and allowing for some cultural engagement. This ensemble also

benefits from the relatedness of Klezmer to Western traditions taught at the university.

Students do not have to learn new instruments to participate in the class, playing

instead their major instrument in a new way. As a result, the instructor, Brian Katz, had

more time to explain performance contexts and more repertoire was covered in the

class. Katz also assigned listening homework, and required students to take

memorizations tests twice during the semester. He required students to study and

practice materials outside of class time each week, which may be expected from other

ensemble classes, but is a tall order for classes that are only worth 0.17 credits, roughly

the equivalent of 3% of the credits that undergraduate students are required to take

each year.

The failure to present these world music traditions in their cultural contexts leads

to the tokenizing and primitivizing of non-Western musical traditions. This is

intensified by a performance context whereby students dress up in costumes which are

supposed to resemble the non-Western culture’s traditional dress in performances.

Students perform a familiarity with a culture while only receiving instruction on a

small, abstracted part of a musical tradition, divorced from their socio-political contexts.
The performance context which presents these unrelated traditions side-to-side and

only twice a year is not a meaningful way to integrate musical diversity into our faculty.

As it stands now, the ensembles can be seen as a type of irresponsible cultural

pedagogy which Brenda J. McMahon has described as “stomp, chomp, and dress up,”

the supplementation of non-Western traditions as a token effort, that does not

meaningfully change the rest of the curriculum (2003, 265). While it is important and

good that the University of Toronto provides some training other musics besides

Classical and Jazz, the current approach seems like mostly a symbolic gesture that

ultimately minimizes the complexity and depth of other non-Western musical

traditions, encouraging students to think of them as worthy of only passing

acknowledgement.

In order to overcome this unfair treatment of non-Western musics, I suggest that,

given the limited resources available at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music,

some changes should be made to improve the “World Music Ensemble” program. The

doubling of credit allotment for these classes (from 0.17 Full Course Equivalents [FCEs]

to 0.33 FCEs) which begins in the coming school year (2017-2018) is quite an

improvement and should continue to happen. Giving these classes more credit weight

is one way to enhance their legitimacy. Students who only have to take one World

Music Ensemble instead of two to achieve the same amount of credits will find

themselves, theoretically, with more time to practice and explore these musical
traditions. However, merely bumping up the credit worthiness without adding more

time for instruction or other forms of musical exploration does not mean that students

are going to be more immersed in so-called “world music” traditions. Instead, they will

be spending less class time on these traditions in total, since they now only have to take

one of these classes to satisfy the credit requirements that used to take two. As an

alternative, if another class hour was added to these classes every week, and such a

change was reflected in the credit allotment, this would be a significant improvement.

This extra hour could be devoted to either listening to the musical tradition, reading an

article or listening to a lecture meant to deepen the students’ understanding of cultural

and historical contexts surrounding the musical tradition. The majority of WME

instructors currently teaching at the University of Toronto have been life-long

participants in the musical cultures they are instructing, so a lack of knowledge is not a

barrier to the presentation of cultural-informed pedagogy. This adjustment would

allow students to more easily meet the department’s goal to “[enrich] the musical lives

of our students and [provide] alternative perspectives on learning and making music”

(Ethnomusicology n.d.).
Bibliography

Azadehfar, Mohammad Reza. 2011. Rhythmic Structure in Iranian Music, 2nd ed. Tehran,
Iran: Tehran Arts University Press.

Campbell, Patricia S. 2003. “Ethnomusicology and Music Education: Crossroads for

Knowing Music, Education and Culture.” Research Studies in Music Education 21
(1): 16 – 30.

Carlisle, Katie. 2013. “Steps Toward Gaining Knowledge of World Music Pedagogy.”
General Music Today 26 (3): 7–12. doi:10.1177/1048371312462215.

Ethnomusicology at University of Toronto. N.d. “World Music Ensembles.” Accessed

August 30, 2017. individual.utoronto.ca/kippen/Ethnomusicology/wme.html

McMahon, Brenda J. 2003. “Putting the Elephant into the Refrigerator: Student
Engagement, Critical Pedagogy and Antiracist Education.” McGill Journal of
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