Not Just the Same Old Songs

Who comes to mind when you hear the words “classical music?” Mozart? Beethoven? Bach? What about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor or Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges? “I think most people in our society associate classical music with dead white men and may also believe it’s not relevant to our world today,” said UW Tacoma Part-Time Lecturer Kim Davenport.

Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are considered canonical. By this is meant, they are part of “the canon.” The canon is a sort of unofficial list of the “best” or most well-known pieces of music. No one person is responsible for creating the canon, it’s a product mostly of who has power and influence. Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are fantastic musicians, as are Coleridge-Taylor and Bologne. Why then are the latter not held in such high esteem as the former? That’s a question Davenport is unpacking this summer in her music appreciation class.

Davenport is a classically trained pianist who regularly teaches music courses both here and at the University of Puget Sound. “The usual framework is to teach the main themes of each historical period, with example composers and pieces that are canonic,” she said. “This typically means talking about the work of white men.”

Music gives life movement and injects it with feeling. One of the many wonderful things about music is its ability to transcend boundaries and connect people who are otherwise separated by distance either real or imagined. Davenport is a student of music which is another way of saying she’s a student of the world. She plays pieces by artists from all over the world with equal joy. It’s that feeling that has informed her teaching and led her to tinker with her courses over the past several years.

In 2015 she took part in the week-long Strengthening Educational Excellence with Diversity [SEED] program at UW Tacoma. The course helps faculty members design more inclusive courses and curriculum. “The idea is to include a range of voices in your course materials,” said Davenport.

Jump ahead five years to March 2020. The pandemic forced UW Tacoma and universities around the globe to shift courses online. In our state, a stay-at-home order brought modern life to a standstill. Into this anxious tedium came Davenport and her piano. She started recording performances of herself and posting them on social media for friends and family to enjoy. “The first piece I did was by Bach,” she said. “At the end of that project I put out a question on Facebook to find out who people wanted me to play next.”

Davenport received requests to hear Mozart and Beethoven, but she also got one she wasn’t expecting. “A friend of mine asked if I’d ever heard of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,” said Davenport. Coleridge-Taylor is a Black British composer from the early twentieth century. “I knew about him but had never played any of his music, so I did some research and ended up recording his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, piano pieces which are based on spirituals.”

Davenport’s interest in exploring different voices within classical music intensified following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. “I decided I was going to teach an actively anti-racist version of music appreciation over the summer,” said Davenport. This meant rethinking a few things. “I scrapped the textbook I normally use because it skews heavily towards the canon and instead, I’m identifying examples in each week’s material that put Black composers and/or performers at the center.”

Students in Davenport’s summer class will still hear music by the likes of Mozart but they’re also going to learn about the eighteenth-century Black musician Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Bologne’s father was a wealthy planter and his mother was an enslaved African woman. Bologne’s father took his son to France where he received a quality education. “He [Bologne] ended up becoming an excellent violinist and composer,” said Davenport. “I didn’t know any of that. I took oodles of music history classes in college but was never introduced to this person and I think that speaks to the larger issues of racism and representation.”

Learning about musicians like Bologne is a start but Davenport is also providing her students with context including the societal and historical forces that help shaped the impression that classical music was by and for a white audience. For Davenport, this understanding does more than attempt to correct the record, it is an invitation. “A large percentage of students at UW Tacoma are the first in the family to go to college,” she said. “We also have a large percentage of students who are recent immigrants or, for various reasons, might feel that they don’t belong in a concert hall to hear a symphony orchestra and that’s what’s driving me – this music belongs to everybody.”

Part of Davenport’s class will deal with protest classical music. The genre might not seem like a natural fit for protest anthems but there is an established tradition within the field. “My favorite is by a Czech composer named Janáček,” she said. The piece is from 1905 but its message has resonance today. “It’s about police brutality,’ said Davenport.

The course will cover the period from the 1700s to today. And yes, that means classical music is very much alive and has slowly become more inclusive. “There are many outstanding LGTBQ composers and Black composers and pretty much any voice you can think of is represented in classical music now,” said Davenport. Indeed, towards the end of the quarter students will get a chance to listen to contemporary classical musicians. “There are some excellent and very recent pieces that address head-on current issues in our society," she said.