Many productive conversations emerged during my time at Residency for the Master’s program that inspired me to reflect on my music education and my positionality in this profession. Experiencing academia through the lens of a composer-educator of color provides perspectives that are difficult to overlook regarding curriculum, the power dynamics and representation. It is worth addressing that being perceived as a non-White scholar itself already causes me to feel discomfort. This term implies “otherness” compared to my white colleagues, which is a common pattern that immigrants went through, according to my conversations with other non-White scholars. 

I chose music education because I love music. As we know, more often than not, classical music training was imposed on us at some point in our American music education. As much as I love singing, teaching, and conducting choral symphonic works and madrigals, I can say that part of me also learned to love it as a survival mechanism. Learning to do classical music myself was my form of code-switching, altering my communications style to adhere to American society, similarly to a time in my life where I wanted to be a white person to fit in.