If Colors Could Be Heard: Narratives About Racial Identity in Music Education

A deeply personal and scholarly exploration of how race and ethnicity shape the ways we learn, teach, and experience music.

If Colors Could Be Heard: Narratives About Racial Identity in Music Education is a groundbreaking collection of firsthand accounts by music educators, artists, activists, and students from the Global Majority. These deeply personal narratives explore how race and ethnicity shape experiences in music learning, making, and teaching.

From stories of childhood discovery to reflections on navigating racial identity in the classroom, these voices paint a complex and vivid portrait of music education in the United States. Going beyond a collection of research studies, this book embraces self-reflective storytelling as a legitimate and essential method of inquiry, offering a scholarly mosaic of lived experience.

By centering voices often marginalized in academia, If Colors Could Be Heard challenges dominant narratives and reimagines music education through a lens of equity, identity, and belonging. A must-read for students, educators, and researchers committed to fostering an inclusive and just musical future.

Christopher Cayari is an associate professor of music at Purdue University West Lafayette-Indianapolis, Indiana.

Jason D. Thompson is an inaugural faculty member at the nation’s first Black Honors College at California State University, Sacramento.

Rekha S. Rajan is an award-winning classically trained singer who has performed in musicals, operas, and operettas across the United States, and her bestselling children’s literature books encourage young readers to explore the world around them through the arts.