CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – While high school music students may be able to identify Pyotr Tchaikovsky as the composer of the ballet “Swan Lake,” and George Frederic Handel as the genius behind “Messiah,” few, if any, students may be aware of how the composers’ masterworks were influenced by their homosexuality and homophobia in the societies in which they lived.
“An important part of the content of what we teach – music history – has been greatly influenced by the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender composers and performers,” yet conventional music education generally excludes discussion of LGBT issues, said Louis Bergonzi, chair of music education in the School of Music at the University of Illinois.
While other disciplines such as education and musicology examine the influences of the LGBT community in their fields, conventional music instruction does not – but should, Bergonzi said, in order to provide a comprehensive music education and foster an inclusive environment for LGBT students in schools.
Next week, Bergonzi is co-chairing a symposium at the U. of I. believed to be the first conference to feature research on the intersection of LGBT issues and music pedagogy. The symposium, “Establishing Identity: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies and Music Education,” will be held May 23-26 on the U. of I.’s Urbana campus.
Twenty-one scholars in the fields of musicology, LGBT studies and education from the U.S., Canada and Brazil will present their work, which will appear in a future issue of the School of Music’s Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, published by the U. of I. Press.
Bergonzi, a professor of conducting and of instrumental music education as well as conductor of the Illinois Philharmonia, is co-chairing the symposium with Bruce Carter, a professor of music education in the School of Music at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Bergonzi first broached the topic of sexual identity and music instruction in an article titled “Sexual Orientation and Music Education: Continuing a Tradition,” which appeared in the December 2009 issue of Music Educators Journal. In the article, Bergonzi raised questions about heterocentrism in conventional music education and examined the ways in which it biases curricular content and marginalizes the lives and work of LGBT music teachers and students.
“There’s an assumption that the arts and music are gay-friendly, but if that’s the case, why was the first practical article about sexual orientation and music education published only five months ago?” Bergonzi said. “It’s time to have the conversation. There are LGBT teachers and students, and they and their families need to be considered like any other students and colleagues.”
Keynote speakers at the symposium:
• Elizabeth Gould, a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, whose research interests include gender and sexuality. She has held leadership roles in professional organizations such as Gender Research in Music Education-International and the International Society for Philosophy of Music Education.
• Nadine Hubbs, a researcher of popular and classical music, gender and queer studies, and modern American culture. Hubbs is the author of “The Queer Composition of America’s Sound” (University of California Press, 2004), which won the Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society, the Irving Lowens Award of the Society for American Music and John Boswell Prize of the American Historical Association’s Committee on Lesbian and Gay History. Hubbs is a professor of women’s studies and of music as well as founding co-director of the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative at the University of Michigan.
• Nelson Rodriguez, a researcher on queer studies, queer theory and education and a co-author of “Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education” (Springer Publishing, in press) and “Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in Education” (Peter Lang Publishing, 2007). Rodriguez is a professor of women’s and gender studies at The College of New Jersey and a research fellow at the Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy, Faculty of Education, at McGill University.
The symposium’s complete schedule of events as well as abstracts of proposed and accepted papers are available on the Web.
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