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What are our goals when we teach a course like “Music and Politics” to a classroom comprised of performers? How can this historical approach help young performers in their quest to become better musicians? How are students to apply what they learn in such a course in their practical work as performers? Since 2007, a year during which I offered “Music and Politics” courses at two different institutions (the University of X and the University of Y), these questions have been at the forefront of my pedagogical reflections. I was thus naturally drawn to a trio of recent articles published in Music & Politics in which Patricia Hall, Amy Beal, and Dard Neuman elaborate on their approaches to teaching this subject to a student clientele comprised primarily of non-majors. While this article follows in their footsteps by providing some practical suggestions regarding course content and in-class activities for “Music and Politics” courses, it also differs significantly from them in that it concentrates primarily on the challenges associated with offering “Music and Politics” to performance majors. In the process, it voices a critical and somewhat deconstructive argument by querying the current pedagogical paradigm through which interactions between music and politics are generally elucidated. For present purposes I will call this pedagogical norm the “Paradigm of Historical Contextualism” (PHC). The PHC is implicitly structured and defended around the idea that the study of musical works in their historical contexts is an essential stepping stone for achieving authoritative musical understanding and that, equipped with such knowledge, students may become better musicians. Laudable though this goal may be, I argue that the PHC, based as it is upon the pervasive use of interpretive strategies that are conceived almost entirely without recourse to musical practice, constitutes a disciplinary deformation that erects barriers of understanding to performance students within the academy. Not only does the PHC consistently bolster the epistemological supremacy of musical knowledge over musical performance, it also denies performers the ability to derive a coherent discourse rooted in their musical practice. Ultimately, this article questions the methods of the PHC for the practical and professional musical needs of performance students and in so doing aims to stimulate further discussion regarding musicology’s pedagogical agendas within the academy. My argument builds upon a growing literature that has critiqued the ways in which the musicological community has centered its focus on musical works while concomitantly marginalizing or at

Music and Politics, Performance, and the Paradigm of Historical Contextualism