In the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the social unrest surrounding ongoing racial inequities across society, Professor of Music at the University of Michigan and author of Black Music Matters: Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies, Ed Sarath has gathered a national consortium of academics to critically examine and reevaluate the racist foundations of music studies in higher education.

The Alliance for the Transformation of Musical Academe's (ATMA) Task Force on Musical Racism brings together leaders, educators, and students in music from more than 30 universities, including Music & Entertainment Industries Studies student, Alana Margolis, the College of Arts & Media's Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs, Dr. Mark Rabideau, and Activist-in-Residence, Katie Leonard.

Leonard, serving in the unique role of ATMA Special Advisor and Activist, will promote public awareness of the work of the ATMA Task Force on Musical Racism with the media, broader Black Lives Matter circles (on and beyond college/university campuses), and through workshops and presentations to organizations and communities.

The Task Force charge is to provide a penetrating analysis of the multi-dimensional nature of systemic musical racism that plagues our nation’s music schools and to advance a new vision (roadmap and exemplars) for systemic change based in the foundational repositioning of Black American Music in music studies and culture.

Margolis, who joins music student colleagues from Indiana University, Oberlin Conservatory, New England Conservatory and Harvard, said, "I am elated and honored to be part of this task force. The representation of black music needs to be a heavy part of education since a lot of genres are white washed from the original black creators."

Sarath and Rabideau are working closely together to present the Task Force's findings through Routledge Publishing's Emerging Fields in Music series - a forward looking publication about the future of music - for which Rabideau serves as the senior editor.

Rabideau, said about the Task Force's work, "This is a timely, critical and exciting moment in the history of music in higher education. We have the opportunity to reshape curricular and pedagogical practices; recruitment and hiring practices; tenure and promotion criteria, and beyond.

Here at CU Denver, because our programs are innovative and contemporary, it is easy to forget that for the vast majority of music schools across the country, the curriculum has gone virtually unchanged for the past 70 years. Professor Sarath's vision for the future is nothing short of epistemic shift in what music and what musicians count, in music in higher education."