The New Yorker on Sept. 14 featured an article, “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music,” as part of their contribution to the CancelCulture mania. Besides learning that classical music has a “extreme dependence on a problematic past” of racism, and that the pandemic has, fortuitously, pre-empted the “so-called Beethoven Year — a gratuitously excessive celebration,” the author Alex Ross treats the reader to a fine example of moral, intellectual and aesthetic bankruptcy.
Instead of Martin Luther King’s passion, love and devotion for the U.S. Constitution, and his lifelong drive and mission to make a “more perfect union,” Ross shows us how King only loved opera because America was more racist than Europe. So, “[b]lack leaders as Du Bois and King found sustenance in European music. White as the canon was, it appeared to stand outside of America’s racial horror.” There is nothing universal or uplifting in the founding of the republic or in classical music or in Dr. King’s mission. Rather, King was fooled, falling for the lesser of two evils. (Du Bois, it is suggested, had the problem of pursuing an education in Germany during the 1890s.)
Ross has his own particular bent, celebrating Wagner as a prime example of a disgusting animal-like mankind, bedeviled by moments of beauty: “Because all art is the product of our grandiose, predatory species, it reveals the worst in our natures as well as the best.” It used to be called a Manichean heresy. Ross’s conclusion: “Like every beautiful thing we have created, music can become a weapon of division and destruction. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in a characteristically pitiless mood, wrote, ‘Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.’”
However, Ross is reporting on, at core, the recent controversy over Heinrich Schenker and racist music education. Ross claims:"At bottom, the entire music-education system rests upon the Schenkerian assumption that the Western tonality, with its major-minor harmony and its equal-tempered scale, is the master language.” Leave aside for now that the music-education system would experience a major upshift were it to bend in the direction of Schenker, and leave aside that Ross — the music critic for the New Yorker for the last 24 years — thinks either Schenker’s work or Western tonality is based upon an “equal-tempered” scale (rather than a well-tempered one). Ross turns to Philip Ewell’s “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” to explicate the evils of Schenker and the “master language.”
Ewell credits the Harvard-trained sociologist, Joe Feagin, for the concept of the “white racial frame.” There the fundamental reality of Western civilization is racial — and that reality is invisible to racists. Ewell begins his study on Schenker with “Music theory is white.” (Ewell has adopted as his central goal of increasing the amount of black practitioners of music theory, a goal which requires de-mythologizing classical music, trashing Schenker and Beethoven.) Since Schenker’s theory has different levels of structure in a composition (foreground, middle ground, etc.), some deeper level than others, Ewell maintains that is racist — and it coheres with Schenker’s racist view that German (i.e., Beethoven’s) music is deeper and better. When Schenker speaks of the notes in a scale having different characters and not being equal, or of “the scale-degrees” having “decisive control over the middle-ground and fore-ground,” that is his racism spewing out in his music theory.
It is the “white racial frame” that keeps music theorists from seeing the racism. However, at its root, Ewell’s argument is not about race; it is that there is no better or worse, no forward or backward — except for increasing the number of black music theorists. To this end, Beethoven must be pulled down. Ewell’s blog posting, “Beethoven Was an Above Average Composer — Let’s Leave It at That,” explains that he has been “propped up by the white-male frame, both consciously and subconsciously, with descriptors such as genius, master, and masterwork.” (It turns out that even calling Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a “masterwork” reflects racism, as “masterwork” is based on the “master/slave” relationship!) “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is no more a masterwork than Esperanza Spalding’s ’12 Little Spells.’ To state that Beethoven was any more than, say, above average as a composer is to state that you know all music written on planet Earth 200 years ago when Beethoven was active, which no one does.” Such know-nothingism! Where does such rage come from?
Ewell’s self-revelation may address this. He brags about his ability to smell out racism, citing as one of the world’s greatest racists John Ewell… his father. He graduated with a chemistry degree from Morehouse College in 1948, a classmate of King, and got his doctorate in mathematics, specializing in number theory. He wrote on Fermat and on Riemann’s zeta-function. His son indicts him as a black racist for adopting the “white racial frame,” citing his father’s love of Mozart, Verdi and Gauss.
The judge who sentenced Lavoisier to the guillotine said, “The revolution does not need scientists.” To which Ewell will add, “nor classical musicians.”
For some “un-woke” humanity and science, register for Schiller Institute NYC Chorus Sept. 20 Sunday Class on Sept. 20: “Kepler’s Harmony of the World: A Celestial Chorus.” The class, from 4:30-6:00 (Eastern Time) is free. https://www.sinycchorus.com/class_5_2020_keplers_harmony?utm_campaign=class_5_megan_beets_on_kepler&utm_medium=email&utm_source=schillerinstitutenycchorus
