Opinion | Is Musicology Racist?
Relating to the piano, for instance, Ewell thinks it “enforces a dedication to whiteness and maleness,” and thus enjoying it shouldn’t be anticipated of those that educate music concept. However aside from the relatively central query of what makes piano enjoying male or white, the reality is {that a} keyboard is much better suited to demonstrating music concept than most devices for the straightforward motive that one can play chords on it. Ewell appears additionally to be referring to the truth that there are on-line instruments for instructing concept lately, however can they substitute a instructor who is ready to execute primary items spontaneously with a view to show these ideas?
Ewell additionally believes musicology ought to entail no international language necessities, as a result of Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German are “white” languages. Questions abound. Do we actually need music specialists unable to learn or perceive the lyrics in Wagner, Puccini or any works in these specified languages? It’s my sense that Ewell may not thoughts this. He implies that there are non- “white” languages that college students could possibly be pointed to: “It ought to go with out saying that there are music-theoretical works value learning written in international languages aside from these 5, and that they are often consultant of different longstanding wealthy music concept traditions, each inside and out of doors of the European continent.” It’s a fascinating proposal, and one to which I’m not in any respect averse. However it’s tough to evaluate exactly as a result of Ewell doesn’t inform us any of the languages he’s referring to. If we’re to be maximally un-white in regards to the matter, I hope he’s referring to music concept work in Swahili, Hausa, Amharic or Twi, nevertheless it’d be good to have some specifics.
Music concept has historically been taught with a significant deal with the work of the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whom Ewell particularly attacked in his 2019 article. Within the ebook, Ewell expands his argument that learning Schenker needs to be optionally available as a result of he was — like many Germanophones of his time and place, straddling the flip of the twentieth century — a German nationalist with overtly racist views. Timothy Jackson, an editorial adviser of a small journal dedicated to Schenker’s work, commissioned a particular challenge of responses to Ewell’s article, most of which had been essential. The problem was broadly condemned as racist in musicology circles, and Jackson was barred from the journal amid requires his firing as a professor on the college that helps it.
There are certainly reasoned debates one may have about Ewell’s varied suggestions, however it’s disturbing that they so usually entail a calming of requirements with out presenting new challenges aside from people who decentering whiteness may entail. Getting a musicology grasp’s or Ph.D. diploma in Ewell’s world could be lots simpler: no have to play piano (or apparently, any instrument), no have to study international languages, no have to take standardized assessments or undergo nameless peer critiques (two extra targets of Ewell’s) and so forth. Ewell solutions thus: “If somebody says that enacting any of my suggestions represents a ‘decreasing of requirements,’ push again towards that language. Normally a decreasing of requirements is code for turning into much less white and fewer male.” He doesn’t clarify why his concepts do not contain a decreasing of requirements; he merely dismisses such requirements as racist “code.”
The belief, then, is that the “whiteness” or “maleness” of any given proposition should routinely be a mere energy play relatively than a reasoned aesthetic or logical conclusion. And that elicits a query we’re not alleged to ask: What if, the place classical music is anxious, white folks, in all of their perfidies in any other case, obtained one thing proper? And I imply so proper that each one these skilled within the shut examine of music needs to be conversant in it? Black folks obtained it proper with syncopation as default, with blue notes and, particularly in Africa, with advanced rhythm. All of those components deeply season our fashionable musical expertise. However Beethoven’s Seventh is simply, in Ewell’s telling, white stuff? In a weblog publish, Ewell dismissed the composer as merely “above common” and fetishized by the white institution.
