The Oberlin Review: Conservatory Creates African American Music Minor

 

The work of historically marginalized composers will gain more attention in the curriculum for the new African American music minor. In clockwise order from top left: Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George; Jessie Montgomery; Roque Cordero; J. H. Kwabena Nketia; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; and Florence Price.  Credit: Abe Frato

The Oberlin Review

Walter Thomas-Patterson, Conservatory Editor

February 25, 2022

The Conservatory has established an African American Music minor that will be available to students beginning in the 2022–23 academic year. The minor will be interdisciplinary in nature; courses will be offered within the Conservatory’s Jazz and Ethnomusicology departments and the College’s Africana Studies, Dance, and Theater departments, among numerous other cross-sectional courses available to students.

The introduction of the minor actualizes a broader curricular expansion toward historically marginalized musical fields, following the Conservatory’s Racial Equity and Diversity Action Plan released in September 2020. The Conservatory is restructuring the music theory curriculum to de-emphasize Western art-music as the sole theoretical canon and instead provide students with a greater array of forms to explore.

Along with this pedagogical shift, the Conservatory is hiring new faculty for positions in Jazz History, as well as in African American and African Diasporic Music, to help teach newly available courses in this minor.

Africana Studies Department Chair Charles Peterson, Conservatory Associate Dean Chris Jenkins, and a not-yet named professor in African American Music will collaborate as co-chairs of the minor. They will be responsible for approving students’ academic proposals.

Jenkins says that although new positions will be hired for the minor, the program will also draw on pre-existing academic infrastructure.

“The curricular elements of the minor have been around for a long time; we just needed to formalize them to articulate a single area of study,” Jenkins wrote in an email to the Review. “There is already a lot of interest at Oberlin in studying Black cultural topics, so expanding Conservatory offerings in this area seems like an obvious opportunity.”

The minor requires 20 credit hours for completion: 12 are obtained through required introductory courses, and eight are approved from a variety of courses, contingent on a student’s particular interests in fields ranging from theatrical performance to gospel singing.