A Manuel of Music: It’s History, Biography and Literature- A Complete History of Music, Illustrated with Chronological Charts, including Biographies and Portraits of Eminent Composers with Characteristic Specimens from their Works, Carefully Analyzed and Explained. A Dictionary of Technical and Proper Names with Definitions and Simplified Pronunciations.

Chicago 1888

Whoa….. that was the longest textbook title ever…..

This is NOT our textbook! But we would not be good researchers/scholars/mini-ethnomusicologists, if we did not dissect and critically analyze topics, texts, and contents from theses kinds of books!

Things we HAVE to be thinking about

• Our positionalities or situated knowledges (Add link to Dona Harraway article)- this basically means we have to take into account our personal biases, connections, privilege’s, and access to material we are examining…. in other words …. check yourself
• Context and specifically historical context… some of the articles and items we read and are exposed to can be problematic… yes because we situate them in their time, they might not have been considered problematic… HOWEVER… we cannot ignore the problematicaness… Now does this make everything completely EVIL? Should we CANCEL? not exactly …. humans, history, material is more complex than that. We have to be able to identify where these ideologies come from? MORE OFTEN than not, they come from Western notions of Settler Colonialism, that which is very much bad… What do we do ? We label as coming from these ideologies that have systematically undermined and violently hurt various communities and peoples of color. Should they continue ? Absolutely not… Do we put on a pedestal and only teach this in schools? Absolutely not? (I AM GOING TO SOUND LIKE A BROKEN RECORD HERE…. BUT IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE ALWAYS ACKNOWLEDGE THIS … REPEAT, REPREAT, REPREAT ….)

• What is missing? Foreal…. who, what, where , when , why IS MISSING?
• Levels of frequency and importance? What is mentioned all the time?
• Language ? What kind of lexicon ? vernacular? Diction? Words? are being used to describe and talk about?
• Are other ideologies and p.o.v’s being talked about ? Indigenous ? Black ?
• Let’s say we are rewriting ? from your positionality? What would you include?