The controversy has grown legs
Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed:
Like many academic debates, one currently rocking the music theory world is esoteric. But the controversy — about the legacy of the late Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker — has grown legs because it involves accusations of anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and, now, censorship.
…
Late last year, when conferences still happened in person, [Philip] Ewell delivered a plenary address at the society’s annual conference. Ewell, who is Black, argued that Schenker’s known white supremacist views informed his hierarchical approach to music theory. The talk, in which Ewell referred to Schenker as “an ardent racist and German nationalist,” was part of a much longer, since-published paper on the “white racial frame” in music theory.
Ewell argued that music theory will only diversify through “deframing and reframing” that “structural and institutionalized” framework that Schenker helped build. He also pushed for a more diverse music theory curriculum. The talk was generally well received: Ewell enjoyed a standing ovation.
Soon after the talk, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, housed at North Texas, put out a call for papers responding to Ewell’s plenary. Music theory is a traditionally white, male-dominated field and Ewell’s comments — underneath the applause — apparently ruffled feathers.
Some of the articles were favorable, others were critical or outright hostile.
One by Timothy Jackson, distinguished university research professor of theory at North Texas and a co-editor of Studies, was arguably the most critical of all: in it, Jackson seemed to accuse Ewell of anti-Semitism. Ewell in his talk did not discuss Schenker’s Jewishness. But Schenker’s wife was killed by Nazis and he likely would have ended up in their clutches if he’d lived past 1935.
… Beginning a series of sweeping statements about Black values, culture and families, Jackson said Ewell “is uninterested in bringing Blacks up to ‘standard’ so they can compete. On the contrary, he is claiming that those very standards are in themselves racist.” African Americans “have the right to embrace their own culture as precious — i.e. rap music, hip hop, etc. — and study and teach it in universities,” he added, “so that the products of the ‘defective,’ ‘racist’ White culture — i.e. classical music — be shunted aside.”
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Finding the symposium disturbing, a group of music graduate students at North Texas petitioned their dean to publicly condemn the issue and investigate its editorial process, due to the apparent “horrendous lack of peer review, publication of an anonymous response and clear lack of academic rigor.”
Going forward, the students also asked the dean and the greater university to dissolve the journal and discipline and potentially remove faculty members who used the journal “to promote racism.”
Another one of these, in short.
H/t Sackbut
From Ewing’s slides:
The Society for Music Theory looks like another of those glorified pseudo-esoteric circle-wanks that give higher education a bad name. Zero surprise that it is tightly-whitey. Trying to re-form this sort of thing is about as useful as trying to reform the roman catholic church – why would you even bother?
Maybe this is an identity issue:
“It may seem that I overemphasize whiteness (and, with it, blackness) in this article at the expense of other races, not to mention marginalized groups based on gender, LGBTQIA+, ethnic, religious, disablist, cultural, or other identities.”
– Philip A. Ewell “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame”
https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html
“Seems [madam], nay ’tis, I know not seems”
wasting effort grinding at an already ridiculously granulized idea (ie “music theory”) that in the 21st century is literally “academic” (not to mention arcane & archaic) is a fools waste of time
there is plenty of wonderful writing and discussion about music outside of academia – where it belongs – away from the grant proposal committees, junior researchers, and phd advisors – where it can can thrive and breathe
Sackbut – like proto-trombone or https://ingeniumcanada.org/channel/innovation/electronic-sackbut-first-synthesizer
Re “electronic sackbut”, interesting instrument, thanks for the link.
An academic music friend who first brought my attention to this controversy has said, and I agree, that there is fault on a variety of sides here. My friend is, like many, dealing with the efforts to “decolonialize” music in the academy. (Among the complaints, there tends to be a call to replace the Western classical canon. I don’t see anything wrong with valuing that canon, and would rather see it augmented rather than replaced.)
My experience in academic music as a student was that it was the only place where music could thrive and breathe, free from the encumbrance of having to entice a paying audience. I like the idea of academic music, I like the idea of music theory, and now, several decades removed from my graduate school days, I lament that I did not pursue musicology or music theory as a major. Of course that is tempered with my heightened awareness of the reality of the academic world, with committees and grants and prejudice and cronyism and hierarchies and all that. So I don’t know.
I haven’t read Ewell’s paper yet. John Halle’s response (link copied here for consolidation) I found illuminating:
https://johnhalle.com/on-tonal-stability-and-white-fragility-music-theorys-gift-to-the-right/
Jackson’s response is here, starting on page 32 of this document:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dTOWwlIsuiwsgAa4f1N99AlvG3-ngnmG/view
It is perhaps harsh and strongly-worded, although I do agree with his efforts to defend the Western canon, and to point out that there are Black, Jewish, and female composers that deserve to be in that canon. I can’t see what he wrote that should inspire calls for his ouster, although I’ve read comments that nobody with any actual clout has called for his ouster.
Former US Presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. inspired this petition to lower the tuning of musical pitch from the present standard A=440 cycles per second to C=256 (A=432):
https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/music/petition.html
They blame A=440 on the Treaty of Versailles, so I checked it once, and they might be right, but what can you do.
Ewell is quite right to draw attention to Schenker’s chauvinism & racism, and also to call for more attention to music composed by composers who aren’t white and Western, and music in general that is not white and Western, but he surely goes too far in trying to claim that Schenker’s ‘hierarchical’ analysis is essentially racist. It may well be that Schenker himself saw a relation between hierarchy in Western music and the sort of hierarchy he valued in the world, but even in Schenker’s case that was an association, without analytic value, and is of interest only in so far as it tells us something about Schenker’s character and unattractive beliefs – though Susannah Clarke writes an interesting paper in which she points out how Schenker’s strong views on the ‘proper’ musical hierarchy lead him to overlook or consciously ignore, in the case of Schumann at least, important things that do not fit with his theory. Timothy Jackson’s response is trenchant, and at one point, I think, rather unfair in suggesting, though not claiming, a link between Ewell’s views and the anti-Semitism that is prevalent among some black groups, but having read a few (not all) of the papers, I cannot see any reason for calls to close the journal down and investigate its editorial processes.
Pace ktron, music theory is not in fact a waste of time, and I have learned much from reading good analyses of music. The weakness of Schenker’s approach is that it is fixated on a certain musical tradition (German & Austrian), which at the time he was writing was more or less moribund.
Incidentally, composers like Britten, Scelsi, Cage, Feldman & Jonathan Harvey, and many others, have drawn on non-Western music and ideas about music. Schenker’s analytical approach, though it may spark thought as how to analyse music of other kinds, is not readily applicable to Schoenberg or any major composer after him, or for that matter to French music.
Sorry Tim – I didn’t mean to imply that the study of music theory is a waste of time, more that the academy may not be a relevant place to discuss or develop it. There isn’t very much relevant music coming out of theory schools, really there rarely has been.
Whether consciously studied or not, the ideas that theory describes are in all music, and every musician that can create music knows them, even if they can’t talk or write about them in a “standard” way.
I am still in disbelief at the support Prof. Ewell is receiving and the amount of criticism Prof. Jackson
has to deal with.
The controversy is not really over the amount of Schenkerian studies included. (Some Universities avoid it all together.) The controversy is over Prof. Ewell’s provocative race baiting. He intended this to be a bomb and he has been wildly successful
There is no need to bring up race to argue for other modes of learning, or decrease the amount of Schenkerian studies. Many valid reasons exist to include other genre’s, and cultures as well as improvisation.
The fact of the matter is if instructors are interested in applying prescriptive teaching, and not homogenised manuals, then design a curriculum best served to the golas of the student. Schenkerian analysis is best for graduate level research in my opinion. It offers big rewards for those students who really dig in deep with it.
Professor Ewell is projecting his anger. Some of his comments have been stagering.
For example from his article he states ““What do music and music theory have to do with race?” is a common colorblind refrain, which accomplishes two goals: it allows for music theory’s white-framed theorist to appear to be on the right side of racism, while allowing the very same racialized structures, put in place to benefit white persons, to remain foundational in the field without appearing racist.”
Further in his interview in “I care if you listen” he states about those criticial of his work: “They are all white men.
They represent what Emory University’s African American Studies Professor Carol Anderson calls “white rage,” and I’m uninterested in engaging with it. Show me the white woman, POC man or, most important, the POC woman who takes issue with my race scholarship as it applies to music and I’ll listen.
To me that is stunning. To question anything is to confirm you are a white racist, and furhter if you are a white male no questions are allowed to be asked.
How could this possible be an acceptable approach in the academic field. The whole argument about Schenker is a “red herring”.
When asked: WHAT ARE SOME CLEAR, DECISIVE STEPS THAT CAN BE TAKEN RIGHT NOW TO EFFECT REAL CHANGE AND MAKE THE STUDY, CREATION, AND PERFORMANCE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC A MORE EQUITABLE, DIVERSE, AND GENUINELY WELCOMING SPACE FOR ALL?
His answer: “By rushing to seek solutions, white frameworks wish to circumvent the hard work and accountability that antiracism actually requires. Here are the questions I would ask instead. How can we take antiracist action if we’ve not yet acknowledged our own racist actions? What is antiracism without a firm understanding of racism?”
Ok… so throw out Schenker, but if you ask what we should replace it with…….well that is a mistake. Instead take time to reflect on how you are a racist.
What non-sense. Look not everyone in histroy is a good person. Some pretty messed up people invented some really great things.
Tim Harris (above) mentions Morton Feldman. Feldman’s abuse of his students is well documented as well as accusations of rape. Shall we really turn to him instead?
Tchaikovsky liked to have sex with under-age boys. One of his students forced to have sex with him killed himself.
Does he get a pass.
Same with Jazz. There are some personally less that stellar people who were great artists.
Let’s celebrate their art, and the joy their work detahced from their personality bring to the world.
That someone born in 1868 might have racist ideas should only surprise the truly naive.
The extension that, because such a person said some racist things, his theory about the relation of musical notes to one another must involve an insidious conspiracy of racist musical analysis is so stupid it barely merits commentary. It is beyond “critical theory” territory and well into “looney crank” territory. I excerpted the crank in question’s statement that “Functional tonality is a key element of music theory’s racial structure” above because I thought it was so self-evidently absurd as to be hilarious without further comment.
The fact that the theorist in question worked in what is now an odd little cul-de-sac of music theory only fully applicable to a specific type of music, from a specific tradition, at a specific time, which ended long ago, is the icing on the cake. Next will we be told that the absence of Blacks among renowned 19th century German composers is evidence of racist suppression of all the wondrous contributions of 19th century German Black composers?
One of the wonderful things about music theory is that, for any given music, there is theory about it. Not interested in the sort of music to which Schenkerian analysis is most relevant? Study a different kind of theory, more relevant to the music that does interest you. It’s out there. Even “functional tonality” means something different in different types of music theory.
I was interrupted because my son wanted to share his latest microtonal jazz composition with me. Okay, where was I?
Oh, right. What a load of bollocks. Phil Ewell seems to be contributing things in many ways. This theory of his isn’t one of them. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough, so let us appreciate that he is trying hard.
Getting my BA in music back in the mid ’70s, Schenker was barely mentioned. A sort of quaint footnote. I did get a handout that demonstrated a Schenkerian Analysis of a Bach Invention. On successive staves, the ‘extras’ of the music were stripped away, leaving a I-IV-V-I progressions.
Nobody thought this was a particularly serious exercise. I’ve no idea what a real inside view of Schenker would be like. But the Hip Hop industry might resent its relentless dumbing down of musical content to snippets and quotes cobbed together into ‘new’ accompaniments for belligerent chanting, being seen with a critical eye.
Can’t really follow all this; looked up functional tonality, and the definition made no sense, so I’m still in the woods. But I am following it avidly because I got my doctorate at North Texas, and hey, alma mater, right? I wasn’t in music (obviously, if this makes no sense to me). I was in science. We only had to deal with evolution deniers and climate science deniers. At least them I could understand. They talked nonsense, but I could understand their nonsense.
iknklast, do you know what a tonic is? No, not the stuff you put in your gin, but the note that resolves a musical composition, like the note that all the other notes are dancing around. The tonic is frequently the last note played; sometimes it gives the listener a sense of completion or rest.
Let’s consider the song brought up in another thread, with which many people seem familiar. I don’t know if these brackets will work:
http://folksongcollector.com/images/freetobe.gif
The tonic in this song is F. It’s F all over the place, and it ends on a whole lot of F. So it’s super easy in this song to see that the tonic is F. If you sang the song and ended in, say, a G, it wouldn’t seem quite right.
There are other compositions where the tonic doesn’t get hammered home quite so much. It may not end in the tonic; the tonic may not get played much. But they still have a tonic, even though it’s not made so explicit. This is what they mean by “functional tonality.” It’s the sense that there still is a tonic, even though it’s kind of hiding.
So Ewell seems to think that it’s racist to have one note be the boss, especially when it doesn’t even show up much. So unfair that all the other notes have to be subordinate to an absentee boss note. And did you notice that all the notes are black? Did you? Racist!
“Ewell seems to think that it’s racist to have one note be the boss”
Wow, can’t wait ’til hip-hop discovers twelve-tone! Or would that be cultural appropriation?
Whatever Ewell’s faults are, I don’t think he is complaining about tonality itself. Most music is tonal. He is perhaps complaining about certain analysis techniques regarding chord and note function in a tonal framework.
There is a tendency with some music teachers to imply that the way music is made by the Masters is right and proper, to turn the description of how their music works into a prescription of how music ought to work. Even if not taught that way, some students receive it that way. I can understand rebelling and rejecting these approaches. I can understand that an emphasis on Dead White European Men, and an analytical style that holds their music up as “correct”, might be seen as racist. That doesn’t make the analytical technique racist, it just reduces “correct” to “consistent with the style” or similar.
Slight tangent: I remember in grad school singing this choral work, very modern at the time, with lots of indeterminate tone clusters and very few specific pitches. A composition student presented an analysis showing that three prominent specific pitches during the body of the work, plus the final chord, constituted a V-I cadence. We were all astounded. For me, the analysis made all the difference; the music suddenly made sense, order out of chaos.
Not just in music. I got a lot of that in playwriting. The “well-made play”…which is not what most people are writing anymore, because plays often are not wrapped up so neatly and tidily at the end. They are gloriously messy, sort of like life is, only often more so. They leave you wondering, talking, thinking…and that’s a good thing. But people are still hung up on that “well-made play” thing. And they throw Aristotle at you, as though we must write our plays around ideas derived over 2000 years ago by someone who was not himself a playwright or actor.
I had someone offer to help me with one of my plays this summer, by telling me the correct form for the play I was ‘trying to write’. No, I wrote the play I was trying to write, and it is one of the ones that gets the most positive response from people. I have an MFA in playwriting, and I do understand play form. I simply didn’t write my play, which uses masks, in the format of a Greek play, and classical scholars always think you have to write Greek style if you use masks or choruses. No moving forward, no creating new innovations, no doing what works for you…except I refuse to bow to that.
In fact one of these days I plan to write a play where someone brings in a gun in the first act, lays it on a mantle or something, then at the end of the play picks it up and carries it off without it ever being fired. Why? Because I have been told that if a gun appears in the first act, it must be fired in the second act. I find that a stupid rule. There might be plenty of reasons for a gun to appear and never be fired.
Perhaps if I argue that firing all guns that show on stage is an idea of Western colonial imperialism, inherently racist, and, if I can work it in, transphobic, then people would allow unfired guns.
Sackbut, I haven’t the stomach to listen to the crank’s whole presentation, but I don’t see too many ways to interpret his slide:
as other than completely absurd. Attacking Schenkerian analysis in particular – a method of analysis which its enthusiasts themselves know to be of limited relevance (my dear wife, who eagerly studied Schenkerian theory in graduate school at Tübingen, said it can only be applied from Baroque through Early Romantic).
There is no way in which this analysis tries to tell people currently making music they’re doing it wrong. Even the term “Functional Tonality” doesn’t necessarily mean exactly the same thing today as it did then (you know, the subdominant is a second degree in jazz vs. a fourth degree in classical, owing to the replacement of triad harmony with four-note chords…).
My DW also told me she appreciated Shenkerian analysis most for what it taught her about the music it didn’t apply to, for example she appreciated Chopin more when she understand the rules he broke.
My son said maybe we shouldn’t study Geometry anymore, because Euclid was a racist. And, oh, crap, I should not google anymore, because reality has already lapped me.
http://suburbanlion.com/blog/2019/10/29/geometry-is-racist/
Re #17
That’s one slide. I don’t know from that what his point is. Functional tonality the concept? Functional tonality the subject taught in music schools? What about functional tonality? I would need to find out what he’s getting at. Likely I have significant disagreements, based on John Halle’s article on the topic, but I’m not prepared to declare the presentation absurd based on a deliberately provocative single slide.
In any event, I gather you agree that “functional tonality” is not the same thing as “tonality”, so we’re on the same page there now.
Based on Halle, in particular section 8, I think it’s clear that Ewell is talking about the kinds of harmonic functions seen in Common Practice music, which I would hold as a good candidate for “music deemed to be correct” as I was referring to earlier. A couple of paragraphs from that section in Halle:
So, “functional” analysis like that of Schenker is useful for understanding the music of a certain “school” of music, and that “school” of music has been imposed as the very definition of “good music” through colonization, therefore the methods used for understanding it are racist. Clearly no; clearly also the music itself is not racist. The promotion and imposition and over-valuation of the music or the analysis method might be racist, but the music and the analysis methods are not.
I think Halle’s analogy of the rejection of scientific advances because they came from the “wrong” people is apt.
Sackbut, we are very much on the same page here. One of the things that stuns me, as it seems to stun some other commenters, is how out of date his complaints are. Surely the criticism of Schenkerian analysis can’t outlive the music to which it is relevant by two centuries.
Papito, I like that you gave a simple musical example in #12, so more people could understand. My simplest example is this video of the jazz standard My Romance, where the melody in the horns at 0:18-1:16 is all notes from a C major scale, and the melody ends on the tonic C.
I also like that you said jazz theory uses “four-note chords” in #17 (versus classical triads). I learned jazz “chord-scale” theory without that name (of “four-note chords”), but your name neatly captures the distinction. Here’s My Romance in jazz notation on a 1-page “lead sheet” as a standard way to capture the essential elements of the song.
Sackbut, I like that your reading of Ewell worked harder than I would have, at extending more charity than I would have, and your extra work made your conclusion in #18 very convincing and satisfying for me.
On the concept of how institutions shape music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFWCbGzxofU
It can be pretty geeky, but it addresses many of the points of this discussion
If Schenkerians are not racists, then why do they think that anti-racism proposals are an attack on Schenkerism?
PROOF: Racism in Music Academia
My explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhqFj_fy0w
The Open Letter:
https://heinrichschenker.wordpress.com/open-letter-on-schenkers-racism-and-its-reception-in-the-united-states/
The Journal of Schenkerian Analysis, Volume 12 (or at least the part to which I refer)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dTOWwlIsuiwsgAa4f1N99AlvG3-ngnmG/view
another take:
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-music-theory-really-sowhite
and an interesting related “aside” via the comments to that article:
” . . . the anti-essentialist turn occurred at least fifteen years after second- wave feminists had started critiquing the canonic texts of their respective fields of specialization. This kind of work, which had not appeared yet in musicology, was what I was attempting to bring to the table in Feminine Endings. But when the attacks began (indeed some of them occurred even before the book appeared), many of my female colleagues took refuge in the argument that to identify as a woman, even for the sake of political solidarity, was to fall prey to essentialism. Armed with their copies of Butler, they joined in condemning the book, often more savagely than the men in the profession”
https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/public/docs/trans_15_02_McClary.pdf