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On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone , by Philip Ewell

2024; University of California Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2024.77.1.228

1547-3848

Michael E. Veal,

Diverse Music Education Insights

There are times in scholarship when a work emerges that exerts such a transformative effect that the field it addresses will never be the same. And while the emergence of such works often seems sudden and surprising, it is typically the result of complex factors that have built up over long periods of time. Such is the case with Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, in which the author, a professor of music theory at CUNY Hunter College in New York City, applies the tools of critical race theory in an effort to decenter the racism, sexism, and elitism that has historically permeated the field of music theory and made it generally inaccessible to practitioners outside of its traditional core of white men.One can take a long or short view of the sociocultural and disciplinary forces out of which Ewell's work has emerged. In the short view, his work is a reaction to the latest resurgent cycle of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia in America, marked by the murders of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and scores of others; the racist blowback to the presidency of Barack Obama; the neutralizing of landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade and the Voting Rights Act; incidents of domestic terrorism perpetrated against synagogues, abortion clinics, and Black churches; and the election of Donald Trump. The forms of activism that have consolidated around these developments provide the sociopolitical context that Ewell leverages to focus his arguments on the academic field of music theory.In the long view, by contrast, Ewell's work can be read as a response to centuries of close connection between white male power and the field of music theory, framed by the big-picture factors of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy. It is by no means coincidental, for example, that 1893, the year in which Heinrich Schenker first borrowed the mathematical term "function" to help articulate his insights about harmonic progressions in European art music, happened to be a mere eight years after European powers carved the African continent into separate colonial spheres, and fifteen years before the German comparative musicologist Carl Stumpf asserted the archiving of sound samples of the world's musics as a central (sonic) agenda of Germany's colonial aspirations.1 As Ewell details, an important connection between the macro and micro was the work of the French writer Arthur de Gobineau, whose 1850s tract on the supposed hierarchy of races exerted a decisive influence on Schenker and other European thinkers of his generation.2 A case can be made, then, that the foundations of modern music theory are embedded in the heart of European colonial expansion, the transatlantic slave trade, and entrenched patriarchy. This connection seems confirmed by the racist attitudes and utterances of several of music theory's founding figures, including François-Joseph Fétis and others, whose ideas Ewell documents at length throughout four of his book's six core chapters.On Music Theory represents the culmination of an agenda that Ewell has pursued for several years, via his blog posts and public lectures. So, what does the book add to his previous achievements? Most immediately, the book-length treatment affords Ewell greater space to flesh out the arguments of his earlier work, which he does through a succession of chapters devoted to, respectively, an opening meditation that lays out a framework for bringing the insights of critical race theory to bear on music theory while detailing his professional and personal experiences; mythologies of whiteness and white supremacy; the legacy of Heinrich Schenker; the issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies that contested his ideas; anti-Blackness as manifested in the field of music theory; a brief history of anti-Semitism in classical music; and finally, recommendations for a series of concrete interventions that would ostensibly make the field of theory (and its pedagogy) less racialized, less gendered, and more accessible to people from a wider range of backgrounds.Unsurprisingly, given the period in which it was written, the tone of Ewell's book falls somewhere between Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist (for its admonishing tone mainly aimed at white readers), Kofi Agawu's 2016 essay "Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa" (for its highlighting of the power-laden relationship between politics and music-analytical thought), and any number of autobiographies (for the honesty and courage of Ewell's autobiographical revelations). Ewell has gone deep in his historical narrative, rigorously applying a range of disciplinary tools—critical race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminist theory, and even more remote sources such as the revisionist Egyptology of Martin Bernal3—to dismantle the hegemonic racial edifice that has insulated music theory from the various social critiques that challenged music history over twenty years ago. Readers who are hostile to his arguments might choose to remain willfully unconvinced, and in fact Ewell has received substantial criticism from some quarters, some of it virulently racist. But his observations will resonate deeply with the experiences of many women or BIPOC people who have studied music theory or even encountered the field in passing. For that matter, they will also resonate with anyone from any background who cares to look at the field's history with unbiased eyes.While Ewell's work has undeniably been the catalyst for a paradigm shift in music studies, the book is not without its shortcomings. If its subtitle—Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone—is a mission statement of sorts, that mission is only partially fulfilled here. One reason is the book's persistent first-person perspective. An inordinately large portion of the book is devoted to chronicling Ewell's personal trials and tribulations. And while this excessive personalization does successfully pull the proverbial "sheet" off the racist beliefs, behaviors, and assumptions of some music theorists, it cloaks the book in a generally defensive, beleaguered aura. More insidiously, it gives short shrift to generations of brilliant Black scholars who have also weighed in on the racial divide in music studies, including Samuel Floyd, Guthrie Ramsey, Horace Maxile, and others. And while many of these scholars are cited in the text, community is not achieved by citation—it is achieved by immersion—and the lack of a sense of community that runs through the book risks ultimately reinscribing the very racialized disciplinary boundaries that Ewell has done so much to dismantle.The book's defensive aura might have been counteracted by a more organic, more affirming embrace of musical "countercultures" that offer a range of sonic, philosophical, and cultural possibilities for a revised music theory. The term "race," of course, indicates not only African Americans. But since it seems that African Americans will continue to be the fulcrum point in America's ongoing and turbulent racial dynamic for the foreseeable future, Ewell's primary emphasis on the Black/white divide as it manifests in music theory makes practical and strategic sense, with the relevance of his ideas to other social groups cited throughout the text being merely a difference in degree, not in kind.Unfortunately, the affirmative stance of Black world making takes a back seat to the defensive stance of white world bashing for most of Ewell's text. The Black feminist theorist Audre Lorde once famously exclaimed, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,"4 but despite the various musical traditions cited in passing, Ewell's primary point of musical orientation remains the Western art music tradition. And while Lorde's formulation ultimately has limited applicability to the true processes of culture, it nonetheless affirms the idea that Black music offers an immediately accessible range of practices that Ewell might have mined more deeply for viable counternarratives of music theory.The traditions of jazz, Black classical composition, and hip-hop (to take three examples cited in the text) are presented in a limited way by Ewell, cherry-picked for examples that might facilitate a revised music theory pedagogy. A more proactive stance might have asserted jazz as an affirmative philosophical orientation, an example of African American agency within music-analytical thinking despite racism. In fact, jazz is largely the creation of Black musicians who are not only voracious consumers of music-theoretical knowledge, but see themselves as having taken Western theory and harmony to places unimagined by its creators. As such, the jazz tradition is a sterling example of nonwhite people engaging Western theory on affirming, rather than defensive, terms.This empowered perspective on BIPOC mastery and innovation is the equally important flip side of the ongoing act of calling attention to white racism and points the way toward the possibility of ultimately transcending racial divisions altogether. Is Heinrich Schenker's racism indelibly encoded into his construction of music theory? Is Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism necessarily linked to his work as a composer? Are the music-theoretical ideas of François-Joseph Fétis inextricable from his beliefs in racial purity and white superiority? One answer is that history is full of examples of human beings who have made valuable contributions to humanity despite holding unpalatable beliefs in their personal lives. And as Ewell himself implies at various points throughout the text, the proverbial baby need not always be tossed out with the bathwater. Another answer is that, whatever racism and sexism might well be encoded into the nuts and bolts of music theory, the dynamic processes of culture will, of necessity, always call forth visionaries who not only contest and neutralize but transmute racist and sexist energies into creative work. This is to say that the most iconic and transformative Black American artists of the post–World War II era—figures such as Alvin Ailey, John Coltrane, Toni Morrison, Nina Simone, Jacob Lawrence, Charlie Parker, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Romare Bearden, and others—were all confident enough in their Blackness to embrace non-Black sources as useful inspirations that were, in fact, part of their birthright as African Americans. In doing so, they neutralized whatever racism or sexism might have been encoded in the work of their non-Black or non-women inspirations.Hip-hop and other forms of electronically produced music, meanwhile, offer a wider and more radical range of possibilities. For example, the producer Hank Shocklee, of the highly influential group Public Enemy, once famously declared, "We don't like musicians. We don't respect musicians. . . . In dealing with rap, you have to be innocent and ignorant of music."5 Despite Shocklee's pronouncement, elements of tonal harmony are intermittently present in the music of Public Enemy and other hip-hop musicians, and, as with jazz, it is this conflicted, ambivalent relationship to Western harmony that has allowed these genres to exert a transformative effect on pitch thinking both within and outside of the Western tradition. By now, at least two generations of musicians and listeners—including composers of contemporary Western art music—have had their understanding and experience of pitch relationships profoundly altered by this music, with the result that tonality is no longer understood as the de facto point of departure for the process of musical composition. In the big picture, this symbiotic relationship between supposed "culture" and supposed "counterculture" has been articulated by a century of Black cultural theorists, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Paul Gilroy.Finally, there are the musical traditions of the wider world, which, from the standpoint of the Western academy, have mainly been engaged via ethnomusicology (a field that, perhaps not coincidentally, has also been subjected to a racial critique as of late). Here, an engagement with the idea of "ethnotheory"—a discourse ultimately derived from postcolonial theory—might have been helpful in the sense that it has allowed scholars and practitioners to explicate culturally specific modes of music-theoretical thinking that exist beyond the Western paradigm.These practices, taken as a whole, are more than mere musical genres, musical traditions, or academic discourses. They are ultimately cultural-philosophical orientations that enable alternate constructions of music-analytical thinking. All of them could be brought to bear on the pedagogy of Western music theory, where they would be profoundly liberating in the coming decades, instilling confidence in women and BIPOC people encountering music theory by providing them with a range of options, instead of locking them into the perpetual death cycle of reacting to the racism of white men. Using these alternate reference points to help extinguish the racist and sexist firewall that has existed around music theory will, in fact, inevitably and ironically empower women and BIPOC scholars to strengthen their relationship to the Western tradition.These observations do not diminish the enormity of what Ewell has accomplished. The old adage regarding African American progress is "one step forward, two steps backward," but with music departments currently scrambling to diversify their programs through hiring and curricular decisions, it seems highly unlikely that the field of music theory will return to its pre-Ewell social configurations. And since this reorientation—as in society at large—is not a zero-sum game, it will ultimately benefit everyone involved with music theory, not only those traditionally excluded from the field. For this reason, Ewell deserves profound acknowledgment for doing the grueling work of unraveling a particularly insidious, intractable, and deeply embedded mode of racialized, gendered, and institutionalized hegemony. One can only imagine the experiences that inspired him to write this book, but like the artists mentioned above, he has transmuted those experiences, and by extension those of many others, into a powerful disciplinary critique that is likely to stand as a watershed moment in the evolution of Western music theory.