Beyond Mainstream: An Interdisciplinary Study of Music and the Written Word

Cage’s “ocean” may be an accurate metaphor for our time as our knowledge of the world and its histories expands exponentially. Fiber optics technologies have begun to revolutionize the way information is processed and disseminated. In the future, the entire world may be linked by a massive global telecommunications network that will allow us to transfer information at incredible speeds into every home. These technologies have the potential to break down the world’s geo-political boundaries. Marshall McLuhan’s vision of a “global village” may soon become a reality; or, more pessimistically, we might envisage a situation where everyone has access to a diminishing fragment of the whole. Institutions of higher learning and their epistemological paradigms are not exempt from these profound cultural changes. “Undergraduate education,” write the authors of Strong Foundations: Twelve Principles For Effective General Education Programs, already “strikes students as a bewildering introduction into diversity, different bodies of knowledge, modes of inquiry, ways of knowing, voices, historical periods and cultures” (Association of American Colleges 12). In finding their way through that plethora of material, viewed and interpreted from a wide Beyond Mainstream: An Interdisciplinary Study of Music and the Written Word