Former BUCH Student Awards recipient and Graduate School Workshop participant Brian Barone (PhD Candidate, Ethnomusicology & Historical Musicology) speaks to BUCH Administrative Coordinator, Marsh Chapel Choral Scholar, and mezzo-soprano Ashley Mulcahy about his involvement with the Inclusive Early Music project and the project’s potential impact. The term “early music” generally refers to the study and performance of European music from the medieval period to circa 1750. Through its comprehensive bibliography and teaching resources, the Inclusive Early Music project aims to provide a fuller picture of music making during these time periods, both within and beyond Europe. Years in the making, the Inclusive Early Music project was released in the summer of 2020, as scholars and students in many arts and humanities disciplines are reenvisioning more inclusive versions of their fields and curricula. The interview that follows has been slightly edited and shortened for clarity.
AM: How did you become involved with this project?
BB: I was invited to participate by Professor Erika Supria Honisch, who teaches at SUNY Stony Brook and who, along with Professor Giovanni Zanovello of Indiana University, is one of the two organizers of the project. Honestly, I may have first found out that Professors Honisch and Zanovello were doing this project via Twitter. I got to know Professor Honisch when she came to BU shortly before this project began to speak as part of our Musicology Colloquium Series. The project started as a shared document that a bunch of people became part of. I contributed a lot of the work about Africa and Africans in the globalizing early modern world, particularly through early Portuguese and Spanish colonialism. That’s what the first chapter of my dissertation is on, so I had a lot of literature I could share. This was a couple of years ago now, and I know Professors Honisch and Zanovello have been thinking for a while about how to distribute this resource and make it more useful to people. The website as it exists now and its elegant interface are thanks to their work and vision.
AM: That’s a perfect segue to my next question: How does this project relate to your dissertation?
BB: The first chapter of my dissertation looks at the presence of Africans and African musics in and against early Iberian colonialism, particularly in and around the Atlantic, but also stretching around the globe because the Spanish and Portuguese traded with and colonized lots of places. Africans went and were taken everywhere those early empires existed. In my first chapter, I make a case for the very central role of African musicians, African people, and African music in Europe and elsewhere. Their centrality to what Europeans understood as the modernization of music has been largely unrecognized. I argue that this musical modernization wasn’t an intra-European affair at all, and others have argued this too. This work has informed my contributions to the Inclusive Early Music project. But there’s a lot more to the project.
AM: Whom do you imagine utilizing this resource and how?
BB: I think the central intended audience is probably teachers of music history. In addition to this beautiful, searchable, and sortable bibliography of scholarly work on what’s being framed as an inclusive perspective on “early music,” the website also has a space for lecture notes, classroom assignments, and lesson plans. I don’t think there’s a lot in there yet, but there will be soon. It’s a very useful set of resources for teachers of music history to share how they teach this thing we call “early music” — which assumes a Eurocentric perspective to begin with — differently. One of the exciting aspects of the project is that the more people use and/or contribute to these resources, the more will be generated.
This resource could also be very useful to performers. One challenge that performers face is that academic writing is largely kept behind paywalls by the companies that own academic journals, and academic books are expensive. I do hope that performers who have access to academic libraries will be reading a lot of what’s been collected, both for the ideas it might give them about repertoire, but also, and maybe more importantly, for ideas about how one might present music from these periods and what music from these periods means. What was the world that it was coming out of? What were the relations between peoples across different geographies? What were the regimes of power and domination that underwrote every kind of cultural production? I think when we really study how the world and its relations and economies were structured in “early music history,” we can start to see the traces of the music that we still have and perform from these periods in a new light. I hope that’s something that performers take on. I hope they now will think about ways they can communicate this fuller story of the world that produced the musical sources that we sing and play from to their audiences.
Finally, it’s a great resource for students. If people are writing research papers, it’s an excellent place to start. I really hope students find it and use it. Who knows what research or performance career will be started in some undergraduate class when someone finds this resource? It could be really important.
AM: Do you imagine using Inclusive Early Music resources with your own students at BU?
BB: I’m not teaching this semester, but I certainly will check the website the next time I teach. At BU, the required sequence of music history classes is taught by faculty. The “early music” semester of the music history sequence at BU is usually taught by Professor Victor Coelho, who is a lutenist and scholar of early music. Victor is one of the people who, since the 1990s, has been working in directions that this bibliography and this website are trying to advance. He’s done work on Renaissance Goa and Portuguese and Italians in India. The usual way of telling the story of “early music” in universities and music schools is as one located in Europe. This semester, Victor is doing what he calls “excursions,” where, in each moment the class passes through, he’ll incorporate some of the musics from around the world. It’s an interesting way to teach this kind of course inside a school of music focused on the performance of Western classical music.
His method is to retain some of the traditional sequence, but also show its seams by doing these excursions. He’s doing something interesting within the established framework. He’s been at this a long time, and what the bibliography does is indebted to scholars like him and many others who have been thinking this way. The name of the project, “Inclusive Early Music,” assumes the exclusion of people and histories, and stories, and places, which is absolutely correct. It’s important to note that the project stands on the shoulders of scholars like Victor. But also, these perspectives have existed in places that have been marginalized. What has changed is that there’s a renewed energy recently from people who work inside conservatories and universities, and this has everything to do with both new and long standing work of scholars from marginalized or minoritized backgrounds themselves.
AM: I was struck by how the Inclusive Early Music project that you have all been working on for some years now just appeared on my personal Facebook feed at this timely moment. All summer my Facebook feed and inbox have been flooded with statements from different institutions and ensembles about their commitments to diversity. Then suddenly this resource that has the potential to make a big impact appears. It may have appeared overnight, but it didn’t happen overnight. For me it is an important reminder that really good work takes time.
BB: Totally. Some of the articles I put in there are decades old. I put in a bunch of articles from the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars have been thinking about this and non-scholars too. People at the margins have been thinking about their own marginalization for a long time. It is not news to a lot of people.
AM: You’ve touched on something that has intrigued me in the last few months as I’ve observed wildly enthusiastic online reactions to recent resources and conversations looking at questions of inclusion in early and/or classical music to the effect of, “Wow, thank you so much for your work; I had no idea this repertoire was out there.” Like you said, some scholars and performers have already been doing this work for decades. I’m curious to see what these kinds of reactions will generate.
BB: The interesting sort of intervention that can be made by going back into the periods usually included in the words “early music” is that you’re trying to think about a period before our modern sense of many categories came into being. That is not always the function that early music plays in some scholars’ and some performers’ approach; rather, there’s this way of thinking about early music as what happened so that Beethoven could exist. To me, that’s an utterly uninteresting way of thinking about these periods that get gathered under the name of early music. I think there’s a huge opportunity in thinking about these periods, because they are where the categories that are hegemonic in our world start working. By studying from the perspective of those periods, you can denaturalize these categories and show how and where and why and for what reason and to whose benefit these categories came into being.
AM: And by categories you mean . . .
BB: Much of what we use to make sense of our world: nation-state, Europe, race, for example– big categories of thought, even musical categories. So much of what appears us to be natural and given about the world is not so. For me, one of the really vital things that the study and performance of early music can do is to interrogate how the social and musical phenomena that we now take for granted came to be, because in studying and playing that music, we’re trying to think in music about a world before the existence of some of these categories. It can have this critical edge, which for me is really important. One of the strategies for denaturalizing something is to go back before it happened and march historically towards it. This is the opportunity that early music presents to people who think about music. But, like I said, people do not always approach early music this way. Some people just want to make sense of it as paving the way for later music.
AM: How do you imagine the Inclusive Early Music project and projects like it changing early music departments or required music school curricula?
BB: Many scholars agree that the traditional approach to teaching music history does not make sense. What gets taught as the music history sequence in a large number of conservatories and music departments is a particular story that tells a particular line about a particular music. It’s a genealogy, a justification of a certain way of thinking about a certain, small number of composers, audiences, music, and so forth. There’s interesting momentum around alternatives now. What if music history departments offered their undergraduates thematic courses on issues around the history of music and then tried to draw from a variety of geographies and histories to illuminate those issues? This approach is not unrelated to the chronological march through history. Rather than teaching the traditional sequence of courses, you could require students to take three or four semesters of music history and choose from a selection of offerings that might include something like disability in the history of music, or gender and sexuality in the history of music. And of course, people would learn their history through these other thematic arrangements. I think we’ll see this become more common.
You also have methods like Victor Coelho’s here at BU. You can stay within the broad contours of the music history sequence, but as you march through that story, you show its seams by telling the story in a more global way, making Europe and European music one region among other regions of the globe that were interacting musically and otherwise. People all over the place are thinking about this question very deeply. I think in the next five to ten years we will see different departments trying new requirements and ways of structuring their courses. I’ve been talking about geographical exclusion because that’s been the framework around my contribution to Inclusive Early Music, but of course, the Inclusive Early Music project is thinking about exclusions on the basis of gender, sexuality, disability, social status, and more.
AM: I find this question fascinating as someone who has both performance and academic degrees. On the one hand, today, when someone auditions for a conservatory style program, they’re auditioning for an educational experience that will prepare them for a career in the performance of Western classical music. But on the other hand, you want students to have the full picture of the world that made the kind of music that they’re practicing. Striking the right balance is challenging.
BB: I think you’ve identified a really fascinating tension in music schools. They’re professional schools with liberal arts departments. It’s true that most people who go to music school are trying to prepare for a career in the “classical music” industry. But of course, learning institutions should be places of restless inquiry. The faculty should be challenging the very construction of what is typically called “classical music.” That critique has been going on for decades now. So what does a school that contains these contradictory impulses do? How do you feed into the classical music industry but, on the other hand, question everything?
AM: On its website, the BU Historically Informed Performance Department lists the city of Boston as one of its assets, calling Boston the “Silicon Valley of the early music movement in America.” Do you think BU and/or Boston are uniquely positioned to bring about the kinds of changes in the field that we’ve been talking about?
BB: I think what you’re pointing to is the fact that Boston is a hub of at least, let’s call it the early music industry, and we should not mistake that it’s an industry. One of the things that the musicology and ethnomusicology department at BU used to have — it’s just been defunded because of COVID, which is tremendously disappointing — is the Center for Early Music Studies. One of the Center’s recent projects was an international conference called “Atlantic Crossings: Music from 1492 through the Long 18th Century.” We were interested in questions of the way that European colonialism in the Atlantic world caused European, African, and indigenous Americans to interact. The Center for Early Music Studies was asking socially engaged questions about what we call “early music.” The conference was publicized in Early Music America, and locals interested in early music did come by, although I don’t think any of Boston’s early music performance luminaries came to the conference. The Center was the body at BU that has been trying to intervene in Boston’s early music scene along these lines.
Our department at BU is a department of musicology and ethnomusicology. We try to think very broadly in geography and in time about what we call music. We try not to preordain the categories or regimes of value about what should be talked about. Because its makeup is about 50% musicology and 50% ethnomusicology, there are many electives on non-classical music offered to undergraduates. BU students have this opportunity, but we also still have the traditional music history sequence. The “greatest hits of Western culture” is an approach that continues to be questioned in many disciplines. What are the lines of inclusion and exclusion that have been drawn and what happens when they’re challenged? I hope all of us at BU continue to think about this.