Talking about breaks
There are any number of ways to talk about breaks, so I’ll just list a few ideas here. In Part 2 of Breakbeats in the Classroom, I listed seven possible ways to use breaks, starting with looping the break and ending with extracting the groove and applying it to another beat. A common dismissal of the use of breakbeats—and by extension, of the people who use them—is the claim that by relying on pre-existing material, you’re not making original music and therefore aren’t a musician, or a musician of serious art, etc.
I’m going to focus on how we might use breaks as a way to dig deeper into the idea of originality. To start, we’d want to define originality in a musical context, and this could be done by students before class or in groups during class. Next, we’d want to think about whether or not originality in music is important (and why), who is invested in asking these and similar questions (and why), and who is invested in which answers. It’s always important to name both the stakes and the stakeholders.
After these preliminary steps, we might go through each of the seven iterations listed in Part 2 and ask whether or not the resulting music is “original.” Does the answer depend on knowing how the music is made? What this tells us about the question?
Ideally, other big-picture topics like authenticity, creativity, ownership, appropriation (especially of Black people and Black art) come up as a natural consequence of talking about creativity. If they don’t, then introduce them. Ask what it means to “own” music. Next, go through each of the seven steps and ask about ownership—whose music is it, who is owed credit/compensation, how does this correspond to our ideas of creativity (and why), and so on. There’s a lot of media about the Amen break that get into these sorts of questions that could make for good homework/discussion fodder.
Why talk about breaks?
Let’s turn this question around—why don’t we talk about breaks in a music theory classroom, given the pivotal role they play in multiple musical styles? And before we address this question, we first need to talk about what the purpose of music theory is (and whose) and how it fits into the rest of the curriculum. And before all that, we first need to talk about what the purpose of higher education is.
I’m not going to get into these questions at the moment, but it’s critical that anyone in education wrestle with them. These were never addressed throughout the entirety of my formal education as a student—it was only once I started designing my own courses that I started to reflect on them more critically. This lack of introspection is due in part to who I am and how my identity shapes my life and the expectations I carry with me. It’s also by design—people don’t have to be consciously aware that they’re upholding a system to be doing so, and those whose power and privilege aren’t under threat aren’t likely to change what’s working for them. Anyway, more on that soon, but you can read what I’ve written previously here, here, and here (among other places).
What does it mean to teach hip-hop as a white person?
Matthew Morrison puts the point succinctly, writing, “I know that Black music is super “interesting” (to say the least), but I am very curious about the politics of (non-Black) folks whose work focuses exclusively on Black music without interrogating whiteness or anti-blackness from their own cultural vantage point.” (Prof Morrison writes on Twitter as @DrMaDMo and is consistently one of the best things about the site/app).
These and related questions are critical to address, and I’m actively thinking through them and how they manifest in various ways in my own work. Although I wrote the following in early 2020 in Promoting Equity: Developing an Antiracist Music Theory Classroom, I’m including it below because I think it’s still an good reflection of where I’m at:
As a white man, speaking of whiteness in the effort to de-center it runs the seemingly paradoxical risk of re-centering whiteness. Even in the midst of calling out unearned privilege, I reap its benefits—the presumed authority associated with this aspect of my identity ensures that my voice sounds louder and carries further than the majority of those who do not share it.
And yet, the problem of not speaking up is a form of complicity in the face of ongoing oppression. Calling attention to an injustice forces a decision from those who practice willful ignorance: a decision between confrontation and conscious evasion. Naming is a way to begin, a way to make perceptible something that so often goes unrecognized. As whiteness becomes noticeable, it becomes noteworthy, and we can recognize its ubiquity as unnatural and intentional.
White people are overrepresented as faculty in the college classroom. The belief that race is a non-white problem, something that affects “others,” is itself a white problem with a disproportionate and negative impact on people of color. Whites are responsible both for this ignorance and for redressing it—claimed neutrality only masks our ongoing racism. There is no opt-out.
An antiracist approach must be intersectional—meaning that race, gender, class, sexuality, and other aspects of one’s identity where oppression exists are inextricable from one another. An antiracist approach names these forms of oppression and their manifestations inside and outside the classroom.
When I talk with my students about white supremacy in higher education, I name my whiteness. When I talk with my students about sexism in higher education, I name my gender. I acknowledge that I receive unearned privileges because I am an able cisgendered white heterosexual man and I name some of these privileges. I name the pressures I feel to stay silent and the perils in doing so. If I’m not willing to do this in front of my students, I can’t expect them to be willing to do it during the course of their lives, either.
The need to take an antiracist approach when teaching Black music is I think implicit in Morrison’s thread. I’m not sure how someone could possibly justify teaching hip-hop without foregrounding the social and cultural issues that shaped the music and the people who make it, and it’s essential that any white person teaching hip-hop do so. Michael Berry offers some good places to start in his hip-hop pedagogy as anti-racist pedagogy series.
This discussion really goes back to the fundamental issues that anyone in education needs to wrestle with: what are we actually doing in the classroom, why are we doing it, for whom, and what are the consequences? And these questions aren’t restricted to the work we do in the classroom. We must all ask: what am I actually doing in my life, why, and for whom? What are the consequences of my choices, my actions?