Whose Excellence?

In music-making courses, I find it helpful to begin by taking these facile notions of “excellence” off the table entirely—which is often a big leap for Harvard students. You can’t set about making anything new if you are convinced of your own greatness; it’s paralyzing. You must accept tension, vulnerability, failure, and dead ends at every stage. Also, the “excellence” paradigm tends to focus on solitary achievement, but most of music takes place with, for, and among others. Music education must hold space for these fundamentally relational skills—the musical capacities to support, reinforce, and hold each other together. For students used to an ultrahigh standard of individual accomplishment, I find it most effective to let them experience the gift of each other: to help them discover how collaborative music-making builds real ties among people.

It’s no secret that Asian and Asian American players have flooded this arena, as if following a promise of acceptance in the otherwise hostile or indifferent cultures of the West. There is a body of research on classical musicians of Asian ethnicities— see, for example, Mari Yoshihara’s Musicians from a Different Shore (2007) and Grace Wang’s Soundtracks of Asian America (2015)—which reveals that irrespective of how they play, they tend to be described by (almost always white and male) critics and judges as if they were robots: technically accomplished, but viewed as inherently less expressive than white players, and even treated as if interchangeable.

For some white gatekeepers, it turns out, even excellence isn’t enough if you don’t look the part. As the composer- performer Pamela Z once said, “When people can see you, they hear something else.”

The conservatory model was replicated in “jazz performance” college programs, which have proliferated in the West in recent decades. These programs have become the primary method of transmission of what is called jazz today, by presenting a bowdlerized, institutionally sanctioned version of 20th-century Black music. The (mostly white and male) teachers and students in these programs strive to master a narrow range of artificially codified Black musical practices, largely centered around the discographies of a small handful of (overwhelmingly male) music-makers prominent in the 1950s and early 1960s. Most of these artists, if still living, have long since moved away from the music of that era. These programs’ curricula include few or no Black women composer-performers, virtually nobody associated with the Black Power movement or the various avant-gardes, and hardly any music from the last half-century that wasn’t written by a white man. Conservatories should be understood as sites of erasure as much as they are repositories of knowledge.