Cambridge students given content warnings on ‘disturbing’ music

CAMBRIDGE music students are being instructed to “decolonise the ear” and consider the classical canon as “an imperial phenomenon”.

The works of composers such as Mozart and Verdi are being taught in relation to topics including European imperialism and orientalism, as the music faculty pursues work on “curricular decolonisation”.

Undergraduates studying for a paper on “Decolonising the Ear” are taught to consider listening and sound itself in a “post-colonial” way, while a “Music, Power, Empire” course explores how the classical repertoire is a middle-class and imperial phenomenon.

The music faculty has agreed to offer content warnings ahead of teaching potentially “disturbing” musical topics, according to internal documents, after they were requested by students.

According to a course guide for Decolonising the Ear, undergraduates will examine topics including how musical repertoires could be “complicit… in projects of empire and neoliberal systems of power”.

Students also learn how “empire … affected our understanding of what constitutes ‘music’”, and how “genres like opera seem particularly susceptible to racialised representations”.

The imperial leitmotif recurs in a Western Music History course half dedicated to studies of “Music, Power, Empire”, which urges students to consider the classical canon as an “imperial phenomenon”.

A 2021-22 undergraduate handbook explaining the course parameters states that students learn how 19th-century “concepts of middle-class musical value resulted in the creation of a canon of European masterworks”.

The course overview states that this canon was played, enjoyed and patronised by a “musical establishment that was leveraged in the service of patriarchy, class aspiration, and imperial expansion”.

Suggested reading cites Verdi’s Aida as a starting point for the study of these issues, and the Decolonising the Ear course uses Mozart’s output as an example of “musical exoticism”, with course information adding that Stravinsky and John Cage can be studied with regard to “musical appropriation”.

Course content has been cited as an approach to “curricular decolonisation”, according to internal documents, an approach widely adopted as a means to offer diverse and modern courses.

But documents reveal that students raised concerns about the aspects of musical history they were being taught, and requested that content warnings be rolled out across the music faculty. It was agreed that “potentially distressing” or “potentially disturbing” themes would be flagged in future before seminars, classes, and the sitting of papers, and also to caution students about set reading for lectures.

In 2021, Bach scholar Paul HarperScott quit his position at Royal Holloway, University of London, in protest over “dogmatic” attitudes to decolonisation in universities.

Cambridge University and course leaders were approached for comment.