Expanding the Music Curriculum: Why Film Music Promotes Diversity and Inclusion
Limiting the music studied in our courses to works written between 1750 and 1950 offers students a working knowledge of the Western canon's most significant pieces. Yet a closer inspection reveals deeper concerns that deserve our attention—issues ranging from ethnic, social, and gender representation to the reinforcement of misunderstandings about music's function in society. The upcoming CMS Institute on Film-Music Pedagogy directly addresses these challenges.
As Henry Louis Gates Jr. argued, "to reform core curriculums, to account for the comparable eloquence of the African, the Asian, and the Middle Eastern traditions, is to begin to prepare our students for their roles as citizens of a world culture, educated through a truly human notion of 'the humanities,' rather than…as guardians at the last frontier outpost of white male Western culture, the keepers of the master's pieces." Adopting this perspective does not mean tailoring courses to match specific cultural groups; instead, it means embracing variety and inclusion, thereby expanding and deepening what community means. Students come into the classroom with diverse backgrounds and should be active voices in a continuing conversation—each offering a unique vantage point while remaining receptive to the views of others.
Music schools ought to cultivate students' sensitivity toward the ethnic diversity present both within American society and across the globe. To foster respect for accomplishments of other cultures, institutions need to weave multicultural musical examples into the standard repertory. Film music offers exceptional breadth when it comes to the ethnic backgrounds of its composers. Figures such as Toru Takemitsu (Japan), Gustavo Santaolalla (Argentina), Lisa Gerrard (Australia), Ennio Morricone (Italy), Dimitri Tiomkin (Ukraine), John Williams (United States), and Trevor Jones (South Africa) are iconic film composers who represent every continent except Antarctica. More importantly, film music supplies an especially large palette of ethnic styles. To be sure, objections can be raised about Hollywood's often ethnocentric, stereotyping portrayal of non-Western traditions—for example, confining Asian characters almost exclusively to pentatonic scales. But comparing Hollywood's treatments with the music of foreign films can help students identify and reflect on such stereotypes, building a well-rounded perspective grounded in understanding and respect, free from cultural bias and free from the temptation to measure one musical culture against another or to claim superiority for one's own.
Gender equity emerges as another persistent problem in curricula anchored in Western classical music. In that repertoire, women composers are heavily outnumbered by their male counterparts. To avoid sending unintended messages and to reflect the growing diversity of the student body—including diversity of gender and sexual orientation—courses of study should mirror the pluralism found in society at large. Including film music in the curriculum encourages pluralism by making evident that society consists of many distinct groups, and helps students develop positive attitudes not merely toward a variety of musics but, by extension, toward all genders and gender identities.
Where an emphasis on "high art" music can alienate particular classes and age groups, film music attracts a more consistent audience that cuts across social strata and generations. Film music seems to narrow the gap between young and old and between "high" and "low" musical cultures. It encompasses an almost limitless range of styles—from the lush Neo-romanticism of Alfred Newman and Franz Waxman to the sparse Minimalism of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, from the haunting presence of Gregorian Chant in The Da Vinci Code to the evocative New Age sounds in Lord of the Rings,
and from Western classical works like Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor heard in The Godfather to the rap of Eminem in 8 Mile.
Certainly one goal of a music institution is transmitting the practices of earlier eras. Yet relying exclusively on traditional material often seems disconnected from the musical worlds students actually inhabit. The more students learn and understand Western classical music, the more they appreciate it—that much is true. But John Dewey recognized as early as 1897 that traditional education focused too much on delivering knowledge and too little on drawing from students' own experiences. Today, the curricula of many music schools disregard the real musical environments in which both students and teachers live. As a consequence, the constant weight of the Western canon fails to awaken the potential of young musicians and instead creates rigid walls between the music examined in class and the music encountered outside it. Students frequently struggle to reconcile what they hear every day on their iPods, in movie theaters, and elsewhere with what they study in their courses. While preserving long-standing traditions remains important, we risk having music majors—and, even more so, music minors and non-majors—find little relevance in their chosen course of study.