The White Noise of Music Education: Unsounding the Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty in the Australian Curriculum

Abstract

In this chapter, I seek to “unsound” the white noise of music education curriculum in Australia by positioning it within a historical and contemporary colonial matrix to consider the ways in which the “possessive logic” of “patriarchal white sovereignty” (after Moreton-Robinson, Borderl e-journal 3:1–9, 2004; Griffith Law Rev 20(3):641–658, 2011) is deployed musically in the realm of Australian music education and curriculum. I consider the ways that Indigenous Australian musical epistemologies and ontologies are at once constituted within, projected into, possessed by, and thereby racially heard in Australian music education, specifically through the white-settler-colonial imaginaries of anthropology and ethnomusicology, and further explore current decolonial moves by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander thinkers and educators to unsettle the possessive logic of current Australian music education curriculum.