This is a response to a mean-spirited and ill-informed hit piece on Phil Ewell’s book On Music Theory that appeared in The New York Times on May 16, 2023. I’m not going to link to it, but you can find it if you haven’t already read it and would like to. I pitched this to a few places but no one bit. Here it is for your reading pleasure (or displeasure).
I am a music theorist by training and while I haven’t taught at Columbia, over the last 20 years I have taught at R1 institutions, state schools, and community colleges. I’ve presented and published my research on musical topics in a variety of venues and I perform regularly as a professional double bassist with local symphony orchestras. When people ask me what music theory is, I tell them that it provides us with a language for talking about our musical experiences. Many people—McWhorter included—mistake a particular kind of instruction in the techniques and materials of a small slice of the global music repertoire as MUSIC THEORY, but this is a myopic view.
I am not a linguist by training, but language is something I have paid close attention to my whole life, to the extent that I took a psycholinguistics course 25 years ago as a graduate student. I do know that McWhorter’s claim that “music theory is infected by racism” not only plays to the collective trauma that we are experiencing from the COVID-19 pandemic, but also has historical resonances. The word “infected” plays into the right’s boogeyman of the “woke mind virus” as well as how immigrants have been villainized as disease carriers, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community were (and continue to be) stigmatized by AIDS. McWhorter’s fear that music degree programs that heed Ewell’s call will result in “relaxed requirements and expectations” is also a dog whistle that sounds suspiciously like the right’s criticisms of affirmative action programs in higher education, a point that Ewell himself makes.
At present, I am an orchestra teacher in the Puyallup, WA school district. McWhorter and those like him hold the opinions that they do in part because of how we teach music in our public schools. These views come from the same philosophical place as the move to ban books and remove discussions of slavery from public school classrooms. Most public schools offer students instruction in band, choir, and orchestra—three ensembles that are conventionally associated with western European (that is, white) concert music. These ensembles are led by a (patriarchal) authority figure—the teacher/conductor—and primarily perform music by white men. While music by composers like Bologne, Price, and Dawson are becoming more widely available, it remains difficult to find music by diverse composers for these young ensembles to play. In fact, calls to diversify the repertoire led to a scandal in which the prominent composer/arranger Larry Clark adopted a Japanese woman’s pen name (Keiko Yamada) to compose and publish music that perpetuated Orientalist stereotypes of Japanese culture. More diverse ensembles–mariachi and steel pan, for example–in the primary schools represents a good first step.
McWhorter’s arguments about technology and the piano are common and easily refuted. He implies that music theory is predominantly about understanding chords. It is easy to play chords on the piano, but chords can also be played on the guitar, or the ukulele, or any number of other stringed instruments, and even by groups of students playing different instruments. And yes: there is one historically prominent theory of music that deals predominantly with harmony (if you’ll excuse the pun). However, it is far from the music theory. Furthermore, the discipline’s pedagogy has largely failed to keep up with the times. The abundance of technology–easily accessible recordings of vast repertoires in particular–that we have at our disposal has rendered the piano practically obsolete as a music theory teaching tool (George Pratt made this argument in his 1990 book Aural Awareness), and I think some might argue that it actually inhibits what we teach our students. Most of the world’s music past and present is not keyboard-centric: our primary approach to music theory pedagogy should not be either.
I am not going to address McWhorter’s points about language requirements or about what has become known as “Schenkergate” because his arguments are flimsy enough to topple on their own.
McWhorter poses the question: “What if, where classical music is concerned, white people, in all of their perfidies otherwise, got something right? And I mean so right that all those trained in the close study of music should be familiar with it?” I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you want to enjoy Beethoven, or Chinese opera, or rap music, no one is stopping you. Music and our theories about it–the language(s) that we use to describe our musical experiences–emerge from specific times, places, and cultures. I tell my students that music theory gives us a set of tools, and as the old adage goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If we want to study Chinese opera or rap music, we simply cannot use the same tools to study it that we use for Beethoven. You might be able to use a hammer to hit a screw into a wall, but pretty soon you’ll wonder why the screw isn’t working as intended. This does not mean that the screw is defective: you simply chose the wrong tool.
And what about Beethoven as “white stuff?” The mythology surrounding Beethoven has been growing and developing since Thayer’s biography in the late 1800s. Many authors before Ewell have critically explored Beethoven’s legacy: Scott Burnham, Matthew Guerrieri, and Esteban Buch, to name but a few. Is anyone going to argue that Beethoven’s best works cannot stand alongside the best works of Teresa Carreño, Ravi Shankar, Rakim, John Coltrane, or A’Bing. It’s perfectly fine to say that Beethoven’s fourth symphony just isn’t that great. More germane to the present argument, in my opinion, is the way that Beethoven’s story is used as a paradigmatic example of what disability scholars refer to as the “overcoming narrative.” We celebrate Beethoven largely because he was able to succeed in spite of losing his hearing, which led him to contemplate suicide. As he writes in his Heiligenstadt Testament: “only Art withheld me. Ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence.” (NB: while I did pass a German proficiency exam, my German is a bit rusty: I searched the web for an English translation of this). Overcoming narratives reinforce the foundational American myth of meritocracy–you can achieve anything if you work hard enough for it–without acknowledging the structural barriers such as racism, sexism, and ableism that society erects to prevent those deemed less worthy of achievement.
To my mind, the bigger question is why does McWhorter (and The New York Times) see fit to go after the discipline of music theory as embodied in Ewell’s work? The number of people who pursue advanced training in music theory is incredibly small. But as Cornel West advises us, “it’s primarily in the music and in the arts where the breakdown of white supremacy begins to take place.”