Special Event – Vernacular and ‘Ethnic’ Music in Higher Level Education: Colonial and Post-Colonial Perspectives

Vernacular music (a troublesome concept at best) has become embedded in the curricula of many higher level music departments across the globe. This has very often been achieved under the gaze of elite and privileged culture and in particular western academic ‘musicologies’ whose pre-made and potentially colonising paradigms have arguably shaped the consideration of these musical ‘others’. Ethnomusicologists among others have observed and critiqued this phenomenon in the past fifty years; however there have been few opportunities to observe these phenomena from the perspective of those academics who are shaping the spaces for folk, ethnic, popular and ‘other’ musics in higher education. The aim of this conference is to bring together practitioners and pedagogues within their own cultures.