Music Composition and Epistemic Injustice

This article considers the implications of the consideration of epistemic justice within modes of composition pedagogy within Higher Education, and takes the form of part-manifesto and part-reflection on my experiences of teaching composition in this setting. I ask how composition education can become, as described by the North Macedonian dramatist and creative educator Goran Stefanovski, ‘the politics of the impossible.’ (2015) I question how composition education could function without a canon of examples or assumed master-apprentice hierarchies and frame this as a question of epistemic justice: one that considers the composers themselves as individuals prior to the technical exercises that they may undertake. I describe why I believe that epistemic justice is a concept that is worthy of consideration in creative education in composition alongside the ways that current models of composition pedagogy might unintentionally cause students to experience epistemic injustice within their education experiences. Rather than a prescriptive model, I propose challenges that I hope can and will influence my educational approach now and in the future, and so conclude with some suggestions about what a model of hermeneutic epistemic justice might look like as a pedagogic model for music composition.