"Promise Broken: Race, Class, and Music Education on Antebellum Boston’s Beacon Hill North Slope"
Dr. Elizabeth Gould, Associate Professor of Music Education, University of Toronto Faculty of Music
Room 225, Edward Johnson Building, 80 Queen's Park
Free and open to the public
Abstract:
In 1922, nearly 100 years into its ambitious endeavour in the US, the music education profession made an audacious promise: “Music for every child, every child for music.” The promise’s hyperbole, overlooked in every retelling, consigned it to failure and betrayal, as the very students who received music instruction in school generally have not advocated for it as adults—which was inevitable, given the profession’s founding in and ongoing funding of the erasure of race, an erasure it has always suborned, not only in the US, but in Canada, as well. Lowell Mason, the wealthiest musician living in antebellum Boston, is typically given sole credit for introducing vocal music instruction in public schools through a political process that required support from members of Boston’s extraordinarily wealthy “socioeconomic elite,” notably Samuel Eliot, Boston Mayor and President of the Boston School Committee, residing on the South Slope of Beacon Hill. Mason, firmly ensconced in the middle-class, lived on the other side near the top of the North Slope, one block above what was known as “Negro Hill,” an intensely overcrowded, poor working class neighborhood of low tenement buildings set in a dense labyrinth of paths, laneways, and hidden courts. The two-story First African Baptist Church, constructed with brick in 1806, stood out in this irregular streetscape. Known as the African Meeting House, its full basement housed Boston Primary School No. 6 where in 1832 William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society and Boston school teacher freewoman Susan Paul founded a juvenile choir comprised of her primary classroom students. In this presentation, I deploy “queer of color critique” (Ferguson 2004) to analyze effects of race and class in the context of space and time in the founding narrative of music education in North America.