Listening for Whiteness: Hearing Racial Politics in Undergraduate School Music

Three Saturdays each year I attend the voice auditions of high school seniors seeking admission to the School of Music at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this essay, I use my observations about these auditions to explore how current conceptions of university-level school music, what the MayDay Group’s fourth action ideal calls “institutionally mediated expressions of musical culture,” systematically advantage some applicants while disadvantaging others (MayDay Group 1997, pp. x–y, this volume). Stringent and restrictive notions of what constitutes musical competence, together with narrow definitions of legitimate musical knowledge, shut out potential teachers from already underrepresented culture groups and are tying the hands of teacher educators at a time when greater diversity, both perspectival and corporeal, is needed in the music teaching pool.