Name
Bibliodiversity in Higher Music Education: Exploring the Possibilities of Multilingual Readings
Date & Time
Wednesday, July 29, 2026, 11:50 AM - 12:20 PM
Description
Concepts of inclusion, globality, and decolonization have gained prominence in music studies, across fields such as music education, music history, and music theory. While work on these topics has largely focused on repertoire and subject matter, less attention has been paid to the foundations of research—sources, bibliographies, and citations. Diversity, global awareness, and equity ought, however, also to be important considerations for researchers and teachers when interacting with musical literature. This paper introduces bibliodiversity, a concept adapted from the world of publishing that, in an academic context, can refer to the diversification of readings. In addition to being a desideratum of research today, bibliodiversity has pedagogical implications, as instructors seek to include a variety of voices, scholarly approaches, and perspectives.The paper explores the pedagogical potential of bibliodiversity in music education and demonstrates strategies for its implementation in course design and instruction. In particular, it focuses on the incorporation of non-English-language scholarship in music history courses within Anglophone higher education, where reading lists are often monolingual. Examples of specific publications demonstrate ways in which teachers and students can engage with this material: how to locate multilingual resources, and how to navigate the benefits and challenges of translation and summarizing technologies. These case studies also show how diversifying a course’s reading list can both make new topics accessible and generate new insights on frequently taught subjects. While the examples are drawn from music history, the principles of bibliodiversity are applicable to any reading list, including those used in teacher training and music education research. In higher education, bibliodiversity not only broadens the range of topics taught and researched but also encourages students to undertake their own multilingual research, increases their familiarity with global systems of knowledge, and develops their facility with translation technologies. It additionally helps to ameliorate the marginalization of non-English-language scholarship. This paper aligns with the theme “Unity in Music Education: Building Bridges for All” by suggesting that bibliographic practices in research, pedagogy, and curricular design can build bridges between different scholarly and musical traditions, fostering global literacy among musicians, scholars, teachers, and students.
Location Name
511B
Full Address
Palais des Congres - Montréal Convention Centre
1001, Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle
Montreal QC H2Z 1H2
Canada
Session Type
Paper Presentation
Presenting Author(s)
Ralph Whyte