About Decentering the Canon

Decentering the Canon was a collaborative project undertaken by Wellesley College students enrolled in Music 122: Harmonic Concepts in Tonal Music in the fall semester of 2020. The central goal of the project was to produce a pedagogical resource for tonal theory featuring music outside the standard canon. In recent years, the field of music theory has seen an enthusiastic push for more inclusive and anti-colonial teaching practices. One prominent strand in our collective antiracist and feminist efforts is the impulse to diversify the musical repertory that features in undergraduate curricula. This anthology aims to address a gap in the pedagogical resources on tonal harmony by collecting examples from lesser-know classical composers and from popular music, and presenting them in a widely accessible format.