In 2014, at AMS Milwaukee, a well-attended roundtable discussion provocatively titled "The End of the Music History Survey?" raised questions about the function and objectives of undergraduate music history survey courses. Articles subsequently published by roundtable participants in the _Journal of Music History Pedagogy_ further inspired movement toward curricular change in some U.S. music departments. The most highly publicized change was Harvard's replacement of required survey courses with non-survey core courses in 2017. But what about conservatories and schools of music, where undergraduates typically audition with classical repertoire and ostensibly train for professional careers in musical performance, composition, and music education? In such institutions, where "Music" often means Western classical music, it is often assumed that musicologists must teach the history of the established canon. 


Picking up where the 2014 roundtable left off, we question the assumption that a chronological study of canonic composers, works, and style should be positioned as core. What if, instead of retelling-or at best problematizing, complicating, and deconstructing-the established narratives of Western classical music, we started from a different premise entirely? 


Participants in the roundtable will include Melanie Lowe of Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music, Sara Haefeli of the Ithaca College School of Music, Andrew Dell'Antonio of the University of Texas's Butler School of Music, and members of the musicology faculty at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music. We will discuss how we have implemented new courses and new pedagogical approaches in our respective departments; we will reflect on our experiences proposing and justifying these changes to colleagues; and we will share observations about how the new courses have reshaped students' engagement with music both in and outside of the musicology classroom. Ultimately we aim to stimulate a broad conversation about what could be considered "core" musicological study, in particular for undergraduate students in schools of music and music conservatories. If music is meant to be a lifelong pursuit for the students who take our required musicology courses, then what we position as central, as essential, may shape their view of what is possible. 


To offer one example from among the new approaches to be presented: one might organize a course that includes case studies drawn from a wide array of musicological and ethnomusicological topics and methodologies, intended not only to give students tools to engage more deeply in subsequent topics courses and seminars, but also to provide opportunities for students to use critical lenses they glean from published music scholarship to examine their own values and their own theories of musicking; to draw new connections and pose new questions; and to rethink the relationship between scholarship and performance. A shift away from repertoire-as-core and towards engagement with issues, ideas, discourses, and ideologies would empower undergraduate students to engage more actively with the diverse musics they encounter on a daily basis in all facets of their experience and training, ultimately positioning musicological approaches and questions not as a separate, purely academic pursuit, but as essential to all musicking.