Colonization and the Institutionalization of Hierarchies of the Human through Music Education: Studies in the Education of Feeling

In the following study I explore the role of musical practices in the making of different sensibilities. Beginning with the founding of colonial musical institutions in the late nineteenth century in Canada and ending with a consideration of the ideals and subjectivities embodied in a 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, I take up the education of feeling as it is rehearsed into being through various musical practices and juxtapose notions of identity with actual material and social relations. Anchored as it is in particular physical locations, my project draws on spatial analysis, discourse analysis and historical contextualization. The study is a genealogy of music education in Canada with music education referring to the institutional settings in which professional musicians and music educators are taught; public school music programs; and public celebrations of national identity in which music is employed with the goal of enjoining participants in particular historical/political narratives and emotional responses. My concern is to track the production of Imperial subjects and the normalization of hierarchies of the human, for example, rationalities of race, gender and class, as they become embodied and normalized in colonial institutional structures and discourses of national identity. I am particularly concerned with the ways that the displacement of Indigenous peoples, along with narratives of white entitlement, are rationalized and rehearsed into being in musical contexts. I also take up the question of how the discipline of musical training might lead to increased identification of classically- and university-trained musicians with the ruling order, and passivity in “political terms of obedience”—a subjectivity Foucault refers to as “docile bodies.” I identify this mode of being as “terminal naivety” in order to draw attention to personal and societal effects, and costs, that result from positioning ourselves and our artistic endeavours as politically disinterested.Ph