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Reviewed by:
  • Race and Curriculum: Music in Childhood Education by Ruth Iana Gustafson
  • Jacob Hardesty
Ruth Iana Gustafson, Race and Curriculum: Music in Childhood Education. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Ruth Iana Gustafson begins Race and Curriculum with a provocative statement: “This book is an attempt to come to terms with the near 100% attrition rate of African American students from public school music programs across the country.”1 She attempts to answer this vexing—and sad—condition by historically examining music education curricula from the early 1800s to the first quarter of the 20th century, essentially. The purpose, she is quite clear, is not to assign blame, but to understand how concepts of racialism and racism have shaped the music curriculum. Her book, originally her dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, develops over a prelude and nine chapters. In this review, I argue the book is best read as an examination of the attitudes on race and music held by some of the major historical figures in education, not how those ideas played out in schools.

Gustafson draws on Jean-Michel Berthelot’s concept of “entrainment” to help explain how different groups experience music. A purposefully broad concept, entrainment for Gustafson is “the way we react to music, with reference to the interaction of sound, memory, body, motions, and gestures.”2 Gustafson argues that, particularly for African Americans, the body acts as the prime mediator [End Page 92] for music. That is, while music is something to be heard, it must be experienced though physical movement as well—singing, dancing, clapping. This physical interaction with music contrasts with an example she provides of a second grade music student, an African American, who is told to have “good listening ears.” She discusses how the boy’s music teacher instructs him to sit quietly and listen, to keep his physical movement to a minimum. This incident gets at what is really the central tension in this book, the difference in how black students often experience music, and the musical values held up within the public school classroom.

The different concepts of entrainment between those minority students and the standard music curriculum help explain the lack of involvement among African Americans in public school music programs. Gustafson’s choice of theory is purposefully broad, leaving little room for discrepancy between blacks and whites. All black students experience music through movement; whites are more reserved. Some readers may be put off by this lack of nuance, seeing it as an unrealistically homogenous reading of race. If Gustafson were writing with the focus of, say, a case study, that criticism may hold. If she were examining one particular point in time, her theory may be too all-encompassing. Using this broad temporal lens does allow for a certain degree of generalizability between how the two groups experienced music. Her use of entrainment does help explain different approaches among blacks and whites across the century she examines.

Gustafson avoids any strict chronological narrative of music education in favor of concentrating largely on two crucial periods in music education history, the 1830s/1840s and the first quarter of the twentieth century. The first three and a half chapters focus on music education during the common school movement, each from a different perspective. Gustafson focuses the first chapter on the role Horace Mann, Lowell Mason, and others thought music education could play in shaping future citizens from the inside out. Linking music education to common school reform, Gustafson argues that teaching a child proper values though music provided an attractive alternative to corporeal punishment. Race generally entered as a secondary theme here; Gustafson argues one of the perhaps unintended consequences of music education at the time was to “[draw] students to compare themselves to particular images of home, genteel mores, and patriotic sentiments.”3

Race plays a greater role in the second chapter, briefly in Gustafson’s discussion of Mann’s belief in phrenology, and to a greater extent in her discussion on public perceptions and disease. Gustafson argues that many popular children’s songs of the period did not address race directly. Instead, many songs used an almost coded racial language, instructing children about the...

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