🌀 The Canon Was Always a Choice

Picture a university music history course. Week one: Bach. Week three: Beethoven. Week seven: Brahms. Somewhere around week fourteen, if you're lucky, a footnote about "world music."

For generations, this was the curriculum. Not because it was the only music worth studying. Because someone decided it was. And that decision, made in European academies centuries ago, still shapes what we call "serious music" today.

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Every society has a canon, an unofficial list of works considered worth preserving, teaching, and celebrating.

The word comes from the Greek for "rule" or "measuring stick." The problem is that the measuring stick was designed in one specific place, by one specific group, at one specific moment in history. When that stick gets treated as a universal truth, everything it can't measure disappears.

In music, this produced a curriculum built almost entirely around Western European composers, mostly men, mostly from a handful of countries, writing in a handful of forms.

The rest of the world's musical traditions got filed under "ethnomusicology," a separate, lesser discipline, as if the music of West Africa or the Andes or Southeast Asia were field specimens rather than living art. The separation was never about complexity or craft. It was about power.

Musicology, the academic study of music, spent most of the twentieth century doing detailed close readings of scores. How did Schubert structure that modulation? What makes the fugue in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier so formally elegant? These are real questions worth asking.

But for decades, the discipline treated this as the whole job, as if music were a text to be decoded rather than a social practice embedded in living communities.

The shift now underway reframes the discipline's basic question. Instead of "what does this music mean?" scholars are asking "who gets to have music that matters?" And the answers are uncomfortable.

Consider what happened to Congolese rumba. Through the 1950s and 60s, this music crossed the Atlantic in both directions, shaped by Cuban son, feeding back into African cities, eventually becoming one of the most widely danced styles on earth. The musicians who built it, figures like Franco Luambo Makiadi, were running touring bands, releasing dozens of records a year, filling stadiums. European music academies largely ignored them.

Today, when UNESCO added Congolese rumba to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2021, it was partly because the music had nearly been absorbed into "world music" categories that strip context and authorship from the original communities. The heritage designation was an act of restitution as much as celebration.

That idea of restitution has a name in newer musicological circles: the repatriation of sound. It borrows logic from debates about physical artifacts, the arguments over whether the Elgin Marbles belong in the British Museum or in Athens, and applies it to something harder to hold: recordings, transcriptions, field notes, and the musical knowledge extracted from communities by colonial-era researchers who filed it away in European archives.

The Smithsonian's Folkways collection holds recordings of Native American ceremonies made by ethnographers in the early twentieth century. Some of those recordings were never meant to leave the communities they documented. Some were made without meaningful consent. The question of who controls them, who can hear them, who profits from them is now an active ethical dispute.

In Brazil, musicologists working with Quilombola communities (descendants of escaped enslaved people) have started publishing work that explicitly refuses to describe this music using Western harmonic theory. The refusal is deliberate. Imposing European analytical frameworks onto music built outside European traditions distorts what it is and who made it. It recycles the original violence in academic language.

None of this is only historical. Streaming algorithms currently weigh classical and Western pop in ways that make folk traditions from the Global South harder to find and monetize. The infrastructure of the music industry was built on the same assumptions as the musicological canon. Changing the curriculum is the easier part.

There is a version of this argument that goes wrong. Some scholars, responding to legitimate concerns about Eurocentrism, end up creating a different kind of essentialism, one that treats non-Western musical traditions as pure, authentic, and endangered, needing protection from analysis itself.

That framing can be just as patronizing as the colonial gaze it tries to replace. Griots in West Africa have always engaged with outside influences. Andean musicians blend pre-Columbian instruments with Spanish guitar forms and think nothing of it. Treating these traditions as fragile artifacts rather than living practices with their own agency does them no favors.

The goal is not to wall off certain music from criticism. The goal is to stop the criticism being done exclusively through one culture's tools, on one culture's terms.

The canon was never a list of the best music ever made. It was a list of the music certain people decided to keep. Recognizing that is not the end of musicology. It might finally be the beginning.

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