Matias Recharte | Music education at (de)colonial crossroads
Matias is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. He has shared a brief discussion of the context for his research.
Music education at (de)colonial crossroads
Resources, impulses and discussions linked to the conference "Decolonising the Musical University"
Matias is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. He has shared a brief discussion of the context for his research.
Music education at (de)colonial crossroads
Hi Matias,
Thank you for sharing this piece – it resonates so closely with the discussions at this morning’s panel discussions surrounding how to challenge systems built around proving competence in musical practice, and raises some very difficult questions on educating without suffocating. (That may be too strong a word given recent events. Or maybe not).
I was really struck by the term “empirico”. The opposite to empiricism is of course rationalism – and rationalism/reason is *the* quality that white colonisers (and many before and after) have used to justify ideologies of white supremacism, and the violence associated with these (which of course is not termed violence, since violent behaviour is classed as primitive/other/driven by emotion). It strikes me that the term “empirico” thus functions similarly to the way that discourse around “natural” musical talent has been used particularly in discussing African/African-Heritage and Roma (and historically also Jewish) people – it’s an elaborate construct that allows a celebration of this music (through an exoticised lens) while maintaining a clear distinction to the more “rational” traditions of western art music.
These kind of distinctions are so deeply embedded in how we think and therefore how we act. It’s disturbing though I suppose not surprising to hear of another example of this ideology reproducing itself. Good luck for the rest of your research, looking forward to the results in due course!