Teaching Music History at Hong Kong Baptist University: Confessions of a Skeptic

Why do I fail to share anxieties about whether we should be doing something other than teaching Western music history in this day, age, and place? Unapologetic and probably infuriating to some, my view is that we continue to teach the history of the Western canon not only because of its historiographic structure and immense literature, but because that’s what so many people are studying, playing, interpreting, striving to understand, and making part of their cultural, or even multi-cultural, post-modern lives and careers. That is the dynamic path we follow in response to global musical life.