The 23rd Teaching Music History Conference (THMC) took place June 20-22, 2025 in New York City. This year, participants gathered online and in the AMS offices on the New York University campus in Manhattan’s East Village. A total of 86 people registered for the conference, with 34 attending online.
One major theme across several presentations was the role of the Western art music canon in our teaching. Several presenters shared an emphasis on moving beyond an “inclusion model,” in which instructors incorporate historically under-represented literatures, genres, composers, and/or cultures into existing, often Euro-centric, narratives. Instead, presenters proposed broader perspectival shifts aimed at teaching the nature of canon formation and its philosophical rationales in a self-conscious and self-critical way. The literature that we use to teach music history, in this sense, might be presented to students not as comprehensive (i.e. a closed selection of great works) but as illustrative of particular historical moments, social forces, or the dynamics of human musicking and creativity. In the eyes of several speakers, this reframing substitutes open curiosity as a learning rationale, rather than a sense of dutifully responsive expansion in which diversity and inclusion serve the role of a checklist, or worse, the equivalent of eating one’s vegetables. Furthermore, using an inclusion model to make well-intentioned changes often creates intellectual and ethical pitfalls of tokenism and cultural essentialism. Many speakers also touched on how the more curious outlook is more realistically engaged with the complexities of “global history,” a category that resists closure and completion while implying a comprehensive approach.
Such approaches to canonicity also facilitate teaching history and historiography in ways that are not only philosophically broader, but also more directly immediate to our students’ lives as culturally enmeshed, creative individuals. Several presentations emphasized the importance of “culturally responsive” and “culturally sustaining” pedagogy; students engaged with their own local musical culture and history proximate to the site of learning. In addition to foregrounding immediate responsiveness to real musical communities, much of the other, richly creative coursework on display was aimed at developing a sense of historical empathy. Students learned to view historical musical creativity as the practices of living, relatable human beings. Some of the more notable ways this manifested included writing fictionalized historical travelogues, and using AI to simulate interviews with (dead) composers. Both of these techniques pointedly foreground the affordances and limits of the technology, fostering creativity but also skepticism.
AI, more generally, was a prominent theme. The conference program included a dedicated session on using AI in the classroom, and many presentations throughout the weekend addressed generative AI both as a useful tool and as a boogeyman. Presenters were not especially concerned with detecting academic dishonesty using AI; the technology is here to stay, so the emphasis was on how to train students to use it responsibly and productively. Two main themes emerged from the ensuing discussions. First, it’s clear that academia needs more standardized AI training, similar to the style and formatting guides long-considered essential. Second, when incorporating AI into the classroom instructors can frame it as “a collaborator, not a servant.” It can help students locate the unknown unknowns, such as what platform to use for a technical aspect of a project. As presenters in the “Disability Disclosure in the Music History Classroom” panel pointed out, AI-supported tools remove barriers for students with disabilities.
With so many known benefits for students, particularly in creating a more accessible classroom, banning AI altogether for a course could be irresponsible. With that in mind, many presenters addressed its role in the writing process, where the line between conscious collaboration and academic dishonesty remains fuzzy. Ethical use of AI will vary widely across classes and assignments, so instructors need to be very explicit on what does and does not count as fair use within their course. For instance, one presenter asked students to use ChatGPT to help refine their thesis statements and then submit their chat threads along with their proposals. The consensus among conference participants was, now that generative AI is widely available, it’s our responsibility to shift how we assign and evaluate scholarly and creative work.
Some of the hands-on activities included an engaging (and very fun!) escape room exercise, in which participants worked with primary sources related to the “Music of the Future” controversy. This exercise demonstrated how students can put together these sources to tell a story (in keeping with the conference’s larger theme of constructing narratives) while searching different rooms in the conference space for artifacts, matching different keys to different locks, and solving puzzle boxes. Another activity was the “Teaching Asian American History in 22 Songs” breakout sessions, presented by Many Musics of America in partnership with the Music of Asian America Research Center. In this session, groups made effective use of the collaboration platform Padlet to apply a critical historical listening framework to select songs on a curated playlist. Other valuable resources include:
A web-based database “organized as an interconnected web of composers, creating links between them based on stylistic parameters.” Type in the name of a composer that you love, and you’ll get suggestions for other composers that you’ve likely never heard of that you may also love.
A sound-mapping app used to create gps-triggered audio tours or other types of soundscapes. Free and paid versions available.
An adaptive web-based tool from the Center on Inclusive Software for learning. Students can upload or sync course readings and use Clusive to make them more accessible, both in terms of format and content. Educators can also use the platform to assign readings and response assignments and track student progress.
Educators often use the phrase “meeting students where they are,” and presenters at this conference demonstrated the many ways this phrase applies to our students, who differ widely in personal tastes, practiced modes of listening, and access to technology or resources. However, when “meeting students where they are,” the unintended result might be to “elevate” them to the content of the course and have them demonstrate competency in problematically limited and limiting ways. This may be particularly true for histories of Western European art music. The above-mentioned discussions, however, aim towards classrooms that are both culturally responsive and culturally affirming. Furthermore, presenters described dozens of creative assignments and diverse modes of engagement to affirm students’ strengths and validate different modes of thinking. The themes raised in this conference show, overall, that these complex issues will continue to offer us opportunities to grow as educators and learn from our students.
