Tonality, Racism, and White Indifference
2024; Duke University; Volume: 68; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00222909-10974716
ISSN1941-7497
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
Resumo"to be a victim of injustice hurts hard. To be a victim of indifference hurts deeper and longer," writes Black American author Danté Stewart (2022). True, the unspeakably horrific injustices that BIPOC have faced in US history are legion, but it's the indifference, the interminable out-of-hand dismissals, that we BIPOC consistently face that are at times harder to bear. As I prepped for my response to the 2022 American Musicology Society–Society for Music Theory session We've Always Been Here: Black Disabled Musicians and the Academy, which featured a keynote by Leroy Moore, I thought of white agency and the simple fact that, among all marginalized and minoritized groups, only we BIPOC cannot exert that agency. Thus women, LGBTQ+, disabled folks, and other marginalized and minoritized white persons have a way to be heard, a platform from which to plead their case to existing power structures within a white space like music theory. Or, as feminist author Sara Ahmed (2004: para. 14) writes, "The power of whiteness is maintained by being seen."As a simple case study, I examined four twenty-first-century edited volumes in music: Queering the Pitch (Brett, Wood, and Thomas 2007), Western Music and Race (Brown 2007), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Howe et al. 2016), and Analytical Approaches to Twentieth-Century Russian Music (Bazayev and Segall 2021). By my back-of-the-envelope calculations I counted eighty-five total editors and contributors, exactly two of whom were BIPOC, for nearly 98 percent white participation.1 On the one hand, these are four compelling volumes of scholarship—especially the pathbreaking Queering the Pitch, whose first edition appeared in 1994—and I have great respect and admiration for the contributors, some of whom I count not just as colleagues, but friends. Yet on the other, can we BIPOC not be queer, race scholars, disabled, or Russianists? By excluding BIPOC from our publications, by showing us indifference, mainstream academic music greatly impoverishes our American music academy for everyone, including white persons themselves. Danté Stewart calls this indifference "white ingratitude," which "is the heart of white power and white supremacy. If you are ungrateful for another person's humanity and freedom, then you will do all types of things to devalue and disrupt it. Many white people are ungrateful for what Black people mean to America, what we have been, what we have done, what we have given them and what we have endured" (Stewart 2022).At the heart of white ingratitude lies racism, the topic of Jason Yust's thought-provoking article presently under discussion. We Americans are finally waking up to the fact that racism is not only individual hate—donning a white hood and cape and lynching a "negro"—but a structure, a system, notwithstanding certain panicked political efforts to deny this simple fact. Racism is redlining, voter suppression, and mass incarceration. Racism is equating good schools with whiteness and bad schools with Blackness. And racism is granting awards only to white excellence even as nonwhite excellence stares whiteness right in the face. But can the musical concept of tonality represent racism?• • • • •So as to not bury the lede, I agree with Yust that tonality is more trouble than it's worth, and that it makes sense to move beyond the term. In discussing the perceptual aspects of tonality, such as musical expectation, attraction, and pitch centricity, Yust writes that "the term tonality binds these perceptual constructs of music theory with its ethnic-historical frame," which ultimately proves to be "a barrier to . . . anti-racism" in the field. In other words, those theorists who wish to engage in anti-racist activities face enormous hurdles in simply having open discussions about race in the field. Tonality, much like Schenkerian theory in the past, is a fortress that has yet to be breached in our country. To be fair to the United States, however, this musical white-supremacist fortress has yet to be breached anywhere where it's in effect, as in most European countries and among many other countries where European colonialism has been rampant.Perhaps most important is how, as Yust points out, the Eurocentric history of tonality delegitimized nonwhite music in our American institutions, and that "it becomes clear that delegitimizing nonwhite music has been the agenda all along, even if those of us carrying out this agenda have in most cases not been fully aware of it," as he puts it. I often point out, however, that if you go far enough into the past—and it's not that far, say ninety years—delegitimizing nonwhite music was quite acceptable within white music theory, and those who so delegitimized were "fully aware of it." That is, in the early mid-twentieth century, American music theorists and composers extolled white European musical "masters" while denigrating nonwhite musical others precisely because of the race of the composers.2 Thus, if tonality, as a system and structure, is representative of whiteness and white supremacy, then it made perfect sense for musicologists and theorists of yesteryear to racially segregate it from other systems of musical organization, lest its white racial purity be sullied by nonwhiteness, which is exactly the logic of colonial white-supremacist racial segregationism going back to the 1600s.My own explorations into tonality happened twice, once in Russian music theory, once in race scholarship. The Russian music theorist Tatiana Bershadskaya once told me, when I interviewed her in 2018, that "all music is tonal" (Ewell 2019a: 153). In a most basic sense she was talking about pitched music, and the European evolution thereof. But to be clear, she was then mapping that line of thought to all music of the world, at least all music that might be worthy of attention in a Soviet colonialist context. In this sense Russia is very much like the United States in that we take our methods of understanding a subject, in this case music, and map it onto other cultures and then determine to what extent they don't measure up to our putative superior cultures. The common thread here is whiteness or, as Yust writes, "It's a story we [both here and in Russia] tell about white music, and universalizing it is a simple act of holding up white music as a standard for all music. Nonwhite music has only to find its place in that history as more or less primitive."Russian тональность is as close to French tonalité as is English tonality. Yet Russians generally prefer a different term for tonality altogether: лад, which I transliterate into English as lād, with the macron diacritic. Though historically lād has been translated into English as "mode," it did in fact represent tonality in nineteenth-century Russian theoretical works. Pyotr Tchaikovsky, for instance, used lād and тональность interchangeably in his music theory textbook from 1871 (Tchaikovsky [1871] 1957). Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov preferred a newer term, строй (structure), for tonality in his textbook from 1885 (Rimsky-Korsakov 1885). In "On the Russian Concept of Lād, 1830–1945" (Ewell 2019b: para. 2.1), I explained that there were four competing terms for tonality in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century: lād, строй, тон (ton-, a shortened form of German Tonart), and тональность. The first three came into Russian as translations of Tonart, while тональность was a translation of German Tonalität, which itself was a translation of French tonalité.Hugo Riemann's ([1882] 1929) distinction between Tonart and Tonalität is telling. He says that Tonart "is the determination of the modal type (major or minor) and the pitch level on which the tonic chord is based," while Tonalität, which he equates with French tonalité, "is that particular meaning that the chords get by their relative attraction to a main tone, the tonic" (2:1854–55; my translation).3 In this reading, lād has more to do with pitch centricity than it does with the "meaning that the chords get" in relation to a tonic.4 Of course, in his definition of Tonalität, without saying it, Riemann is speaking of chord functionality, which he would ultimately explicate in 1893 in what was arguably his most famous work, Vereinfachte Harmonielehre (Riemann 1893).5Perhaps because of this broader meaning, theorists in Russia latched onto lād. No, I'm not suggesting that lād (or Tonart) might substitute for tonality, thereby skirting some of the racial baggage of the latter. Both Tonart and lād come, more or less, with that same baggage. I would, however, point out that in Russian music theory, lād is used quite broadly, and for music outside of the European classical tradition. One example comes from my Azerbaijani colleague Imina Alieva, "Интонационная система азербайджанских ладов в контексте современной теории музыки" ("The Intonational System of Azerbaijani Lāds in the Context of Contemporary Music Theory"; Alieva 2017).Riemann's definitions for tonality postdate Fétis's work on the subject by a few decades, and postdate Alexandre-Étienne Choron's coinage of the term in 1810 by several. So it makes sense that Yust focuses on the French origins of the term in his work. I must admit to never have considered Russia's complex history of tonality in racial terms, but I can't say that doing so now would radically change work I've done in the past thereon.A final link between Yust's article and Russian theory is through Joseph Yasser, a cofounder of the American Musicological Society who arrived in the United States in 1923. Yasser graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1917, where he studied music theory with Nikita Morozov, who himself had studied with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneev. Without question, lād was part of Yasser's tonality as he wrote A Theory of Evolving Tonality (1932). Yust is not incorrect to tie in Yasser's work with the story of tonality's hegemony, since music theorists in Russia very much believe in that same hegemony and its racial underpinnings.6 Or, as Yust writes, "Defining tonality is essentially a game of border disputes, and the best way to understand a definition of tonality is usually to consider what it tries to wall out, what music becomes nontonal according to that standard." Though lād is less racially loaded than tonality, musicians in Russia are every bit as committed to the musical border disputes that separate "high art" from everything else.The only other time I examined tonality per se was for my recent monograph (Ewell 2023). Specifically, I examined Fétis's racial pseudoscience, and Thomas Christensen's and Brian Hyer's analyses thereof (28–31). I commended both Christensen and Hyer for highlighting the racial aspect of tonality, and I drew some of the same conclusions that Yust has here. Like Yust, Hyer examines Fétis's reliance on racial pseudoscience and draws clear parallels between tonality and race. Hyer writes, "Tonalité was in fact the site of a remarkable number of cultural anxieties, worries about the future of music, but also (and perhaps surprisingly) about race" (Hyer [2002] 2008: 748). I hasten to add, however, that to a Black music scholar there is nothing at all "surprising" about the clear links between tonality and race.One point I made in my monograph, something discussed by both Hyer and Christensen as well, is how influential the French aristocrat and racial pseudoscientist Arthur de Gobineau was on Fétis, who owned a copy of de Gobineau's (1853–1855) notorious four-volume Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines and who, according to Christensen, "evidently made much use of it" (Christensen 2019: 204). I also pointed out how de Gobineau's zealous crackpot racist ideas influenced Heinrich Schenker, who mentions Gobineau's work positively in his diaries five times, as well as in "The Mission of the German Genius" (Schenker [1921–23] 2004: 13).7 Schenker clearly drew inspiration from de Gobineau when Schenker (2015, 3:23n13) wrote, "For peace will not come to mankind until inequality, the principle of all creation, becomes an axiom in the intercourse of nations and individuals" (emphasis mine).8 By moving beyond the confines of music theory and our literature, in this case to Arthur de Gobineau—who was also an inspiration to Richard Wagner, unsurprisingly—we can solidify the arguments against the continued use of tonality as an oppressive tool, a racist structure, within music theory.Wouldn't it be so much easier if we could all just get on with music theory and stop thinking about race all the time? Focus on the here and now, and how we can improve for the future? I concede that I often get exhausted when grappling with racial issues in the field. Princeton University classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who is Black, has done work for his field quite like the anti-racist work I've been doing over these past several years in music theory. In a New York Times Magazine feature piece on Padilla Peralta, "He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?" (Poser 2021), his doctoral advisor at Stanford University, Ian Morris, who is white, cited a common classicist retort to Padilla Peralta's anti-racist work: "Yes, we agree with your critique. Now let us go back to doing exactly what we've been doing," which many in music theory have essentially told me in one way or another over the past few years. But instead of asking whether we can just move forward and focus on the future, a better question might be, Once we accept the fact that music theory was firmly founded on a racial segregationism deeply rooted in white supremacy, how could we continue to do what we do without thinking about race? How could we possibly, knowing what we now know, continue to tolerate all the unending racial injustice that is baked into the DNA of what we do as music theorists?• • • • •I wish to thank Richard Cohn and the Journal of Music Theory for the invitation to take part in the present colloquy—all too often, simply being invited, being seen, is half the battle for BIPOC scholars in music theory's white racial frame, which is a direct result of white indifference to nonwhiteness. Such colloquies are the bedrock of what we do, as they model what respectful and collegial dialogue looks like for everyone, which is especially important for junior scholars. Another useful recent example of such a music theory colloquy is Stephen Lett's (2023) "Making a Home of The Society for Music Theory, Inc.," which appeared in Music Theory Spectrum (and which Yust himself cites in "Tonality and Racism").9 Both Yust and Lett challenge the power structures of music theory to deal with their exclusionist past, holding us all to account. I commend them for this anti-racist work, which is, sadly, too rare in our field.Another example of such a colloquy could and should have been my own "Music Theory and the White Racial Frame" (Ewell 2020b). In all three cases we directly confront music theory's whiteness, by name, and highlight injustices based on our analyses. However, in my case, rather than coming together to have a scholarly debate around the issues, Music Theory Online, along with the Society for Music Theory, dismissed my article, called it a "manifesto," and tried to suppress publication.10 I had a video-conference conversation in 2021 with Lett about his own compelling work, among other things, and he commented on how strange this situation was and asked how his own article could garner an official colloquy in a major journal but mine nothing of the sort? The answer to Lett's question, probably posed rhetorically, is simple: because of the anti-Blackness at the core of American music theory, difficult though that might be for the reader to fathom. Not the anti-Blackness of any one actor but rather the structural anti-Blackness in which American music theory is deeply rooted. The anti-Blackness—which is the flipside of white supremacy let's not forget—that creates the hostile environments that we BIPOC must constantly navigate if we are ever to be successful in the field. Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014) puts it better than I can: "The essence of American racism is disrespect" and, in the final analysis, American music theory has been and, to a large and largely unacknowledged extent, continues to be disrespectful of all musical peoples who are deemed not to be white. The sooner we can accept this simple truth and engage with musicians who were not white on equal terms with those who were, the sooner we can all come together to reimagine a racially integrated twenty-first-century American music academy that will be respectful, inclusive, and truly representative of our great country.Finally, I wish to thank Jason Yust, whom I've never met, for his unvarnished account of the clear historical links between tonality and racism. It's easy to understand how tonality acts as what is now known as a "racist structure," and how shoring up whiteness is one of its main goals. Burying our racist past, and the racism of past theorists like Fétis and Schenker, is something that white music theory, and white America writ large, does extremely well. And, as I write in On Music Theory, "if there's anything worse than the erasure of blackness in American history, it's the erasure of antiblackness" (Ewell 2023: 3). I often say that racism and, especially, racist are tripwires best avoided if engaging in anti-racist activities such as Yust's article. Like flies on Scheisse, defenders of the status quo seize on those two words to make facile claims of "reverse racism" and to double down on their beliefs that concepts like tonality couldn't possibly be racist—only individuals can (and, apparently, almost none are). Yust's "Tonality and Racism" lays bare the racism that inheres in one of music theory's most basic concepts. After reading the article, to say that tonality has nothing to do with race sounds, in 2023, quite silly indeed.Having immersed myself deeply in race scholarship over the past several years, and having applied this scholarship back to American music theory, I've come to the unhappy conclusion that Blackness and music theory are still simply incompatible in an oil-and-water kind of way, legitimate attempts to alleviate that incompatibility notwithstanding. But every now and then someone comes along and challenges my conclusion, and I'm reminded that maybe I'm wrong about this, maybe we music theorists can course correct, rid ourselves of our rigid racial hierarchies—hierarchies that we all know are there yet too often lack the courage to confront—and treat all our planet's musics with equal dignity and respect.Jason, thanks for reminding me of this.
Referência(s)