This paper is conceived of as an irruption into the central spaces claimed and inhabited by the orthodoxies of Queensland's music curriculum policies: policies which are embedded in the discourses of western high culture. Such an incursion challenges canonical legitimacy from a social construction perspective, and provides a critique of the assumptions upon which the authority of 'official' music and its discourses rest. Using theoretical tools borrowed principally from the foreign territory of postcolonialism (Said, 1993), and with brief references to feminism (Harding, 1986 and 1991; McClary, 1991), cultural theory (Frith, 1987; Eagleton, 1991; Regan, 1992), gay and lesbian musicology (McClary, 1991; Brett, Wood and Thomas, 1994; Koestenbaum, 1994), it scrutinises musical representations of culture and seeks to problematize them in the context of the Queensland Senior Syllabus in Music (1987).
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