Julia Eklund Koza

Listening for Whiteness: Hearing Racial Politics in Undergraduate School Music

This article describes how admissions auditions at schools of music may demonstrate and participate in what critical race theorist, Gloria Ladson-Billings, calls the full social funding of race. Julia Eklund Koza argues that the construction of musical difference, which is an effect of power and is accomplished by the materialization of styles of music, plays a role in the systemic inclusion or exclusion of people whose bodies have already been raced through a similar process of sorting and ordering. Focusing on the equity implications of an access conundrum that is making many public colleges and universities more exclusionary, Koza advocates listening for Whiteness in admissions processes, not to affirm it, but to recognize its institutional presence, understand its technologies, and defund it.

A Response to Elizabeth Gould, "The Nomadic Turn: Epistemology, Experience, and Women College Band Directors"

Climate and its impact on women in instrumental music education is a tremendously important subject, and I thank Liz Gould for her thoughtful analysis. Rather than offering a critique of her work, I will respond as one might answer in a call and response. Gould has sung a call that articulates a definition of feminism and invites us to explore climate in the professions, specifically in instrumental music education; I will answer in affirmation, confirmation, and extension. The nomadic metaphor, which is central to her paper, has been appropriated by a number of postmodern theoreticians, including, among others, Baudrillard, Grisoni, Deleuze and Guattari, and of course, Braidotti.1 I have decided not to talk about this metaphor, however, principally because the complexities of any analysis of Western constructions of nomadism—constructions that are rife with exoticism, fascination, revulsion, and fear—are multiplied at this moment, as my country wages war against Iraq, a land of nomadic and seminomadic peoples, after having recently engaged in military action in Afghanistan, which is similarly home to nomads. An incisive discussion of post-