Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts with Its Software(pitchfork.com) |
Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts with Its Software(pitchfork.com) |
Screw that! If you don't like „Western“ software, written by „Westerners“, go write your own! They made the effort to design and code that software, to scratch their own itch. There's nothing stopping you! Your imaginary antagonists even created the tools for you to do so. Are you going to start complaining that Open Source doesn't understand your culture because the ReadMe isn't in your native language?
I'm all for celebrating other tuning and composition systems, but stop griping that things aren't done your way. Do it yourself!
To me, that's the wrong itch to scratch. Instead of creating composition tools that celebrate their own culture, and push music in new directions, they're trying to hit back against a perceived injustice.
A basic internet search would have resolved their issues. But why let the facts get in the way of the story, right?
For example, at almost any university in the US, European music theory will be taught in the mainline music curriculum classes, whereas musical systems of indigenous Americans will be taught in specialized classes or sidelined to an “ethnomusicology” curriculum, if it is taught at all. It’s hard to separate this from the history of how America was colonized.
This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the world, helped both by “traditional” colonization as well as the economic colonization via the dominance of European and American products and cultural artifacts, including music and music software.
So, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the overwhelming conformity of music software to European musical patterns is a direct result of the age of European colonization that continues to have an impact both on music education as well as the software industry.