Broadening the Canons

Towards Methodological Diversity in History Courses on Western and Brazilian Music

Abstract

I propose a literature review about Music History, its main paradigms and developments – systematic musicology, comparative musicology – from 1880s with Adler, aiming an upgrade of the Western Music History and Brazilian Music History´s classes.  Using such methodology as Carl Dalhhaus, my goals was to look for a musical historiography from its models, and, forward, a Brazilian musical historiography, treating, afterwards, of the Western Music epistemology, intending to draw a picture more inclusive of the discipline. Searching for a less ethnocentric field of study, inspired by ethnomusicology, we could deal with distinct events of History not as fixed ones, although as happenings that succeed through cause and effect, according to Leandro Gaertner. Questioning Western Music paradigms and conservatory culture is not eliminating them, but only an increasing diversification of themes and composers studied, expanding the list of canons, including women and black, peripheral, and oriental authors. In the discipline that I taught as a professor, it was found that the results were that the interest and commitment of the students with the discipline grew with the increase of authors approached and methodologies used, including the Social Sciences. It is concluded that by selecting composers and works representative of different periods, ethnicities, functions – not only the traditional Western aesthetic – in order to compose the canon of the History of Western and Brazilian Music, the students felt more willing to focus on the study and approaches of the discipline, treated not in a linear and evolutionist way, but in a comprehensive and holistic one.