According to the Society for Music Theory's 2018 report, 84.2% of its membership is white, 90.4% of all full-time employees in music theory are white, and 93.9% of professors in music theory are white. Apart from that, composers chosen to represent music and music theorists on top of the discipline are white. In the 1990s, the Committee on Diversity was launched aiming to increase the ethnic diversity of the society's membership. The number of black and Hispanic members grew from 2% in 1996 to 2.9% in 2018.
Ewell criticises music theories being theories of white persons and representing either the best or the only framework for music theory with the those from German-speaking countries of the 18th, 19th or 20th century on top. He also criticises the notion that institutions and structures of music theory need not be examined.
An example he mentions is Heinrich Schenker's influence on American music theory, an "exemplar of a music theorist" but also an ardent racist and German nationalist. The author speculates that his "racist views infected his music theoretical arguments". For Schenker, blacks were incapable of producing good music.
Schenker himself obviously believed that his political fulminations and his musical ideas belonged together, that both were armaments, as it were, in a cultural struggle that would eventually lead to a regeneration both of music and of the society at large in the German-speaking world. (Schachter cited in Ewell, 2020).
Schenker's theory of music is not a theory of music but of genius which implies a biological category with the genius being "an innately superior being" ... and never black.
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- Ewell, P. A. (2020). Music Theory and the White Racial Frame. A Journal of
the Society for Music Theory,
link
- photographs of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, NYC 1959 © by Don Hunstein via. All rights reserved.
insanely beautiful shots!!!
ReplyDeleteThey truly are.
DeleteThank you ever so much for dropping by, Wim!