Teaching World Music: Going beyond Naivete and Cultural Appropriation

When I was in elementary school the idea of teaching music of different cultures consisted of watching slides and videos, making 'coffee can' drums, singing songs in the original language to piano accompaniment, and whacking on toy percussion instruments. I slept through the slides and videos, cut my fingers opening the bottom of the coffee can, hated singing weird unintelligible words, but loved playing the percussion instruments.

MUSIC IS NOT A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Music is interwoven with every other aspect of a culture: language, food, dress, climate, resources, the list goes on. The combined rhythms of an African drum group are heard as one complete rhythm to their dance group. For the average American teenager it sounds like corn popping.  A Viennese waltz would make no sense to an Australian Aborigine. Many times the language heavily influences the music: pitch inflection, glottal/fricative/bilabial sounds, rhythm of the spoken phrase. Rhythms can also be derived from the metabolism of the people (not all cultures play in 2/4 time), the dance may have come first, dictating accents and pulse. But many times their roots are shrouded in history.
Instruments were made from local sources, sometimes imitating natural sounds. And finally tonality, the equal tempered scale is a product of European culture. It may be the dominant form in Pop and Western culture today but it is only 1 of many scales in the history of music.

What not to teach 

Either through ignorance, sloppiness, or intention, there has been a wealth of cultural appropriation in our education system and society in general. Note for example the 'coffee can drum' mentioned above. After finishing the project we were taught the 'authentic' Indian rhythm:

Stores in the Southwest sell images of Kokopelli not only playing a flute, but riding bicycles, and other activities advertisingsome product.

And the typical 1950's western that put big name Anglo stars in Native American rolls ( i. e .Rock Hudson as 'Taza, Son of Cochise').  
 

In another post, I'll describe some of my attempts at teaching World Music through percussion.