#90

I find there’s less holes in arguments, when you hear the whole argument.

If you’re going to engage so much with a topic, surely also engage fully with the content everyone is actually discussing before dismissing it :blush:

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#91

I actually don’t think much about the content of college music theory curricula. It ranks well behind poverty, environmental destruction, and police and governmental abuses on my list of social problems. But I do think that Neely’s indictment of “music theory” as “white supremacist” is absurd and misleading.

Social class and related market forces are far more significant than white supremacy in driving music theory college curricula. Students in the US can study nearly any type of music, if they choose the appropriate school. This has been the case for well over a half century.

University curricula are responsive to market demand, albeit in a relatively inelastic way. The hegemony of Euro classical is explained by the preferences of the elite classes. As college became more accessible to the middle classes, the curricula gradually expanded beyond the elites’ preferences, and continue to do so.

The lingering racial effects are real, and understandably upsetting to people who value the overlooked musicians. But the racial consequences are mostly epiphenomenal to lingering class effects—regardless of Schenker’s comments about the French army’s employment of African soldiers.

Re Schenker and Ewell’s take on him, a far more cogent and balanced appraisal of Schenker’s ideology and its relationship to his theorizing can be found here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41054326

#92

I accept your point. But when a man spends ten minutes setting up a straw man, I’m not inclined to stick around for 35 more minutes to watch him knock it down. I did read the Ewell article very closely.

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#93

Class, markets, education, race, etc are all part of white supremacy. It’s not (only) about overt racism or what we used to call white supremacy meaning skinheads etc, but about systemic whiteness as a driving factor in how our entire society is structured. One of the major factors driving economic disparity and class divisions is exactly this – a descendent ideology of colonialism steeped in white supremacy.

College curriculum (and higher ed in general) has a huge problem of white supremacy and colonialism, and also a huge opportunity for shifting how the structures of society function. This includes things like music and art as much as anything else.

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#94

So what about historically less racially diverse societies that happen to have class issues? Are they also white supremacist in their nature? Or are you making the same thing as in video calling one particular society “The society”?

#95

I could probably be more specific … but also consider the global impact of 600+ years of European colonialism on the rest of the world. So no, white supremacy isn’t the cause of every problem on earth. However, it is a global issue and driving force in a lot of global economic disparity.

I’m not intending to give a whole history of colonialism and its impact here, lots of places to read up on it. But let’s not dismiss it as something “American” or localized in impact either.

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#96

I’m not suggesting to dismiss it, I’m saying that class issues are universal while racial less so while still being widely spread. And both are intertwined, though I’m not sure that fixing racial issues automagically going to fix class issues, or not fixing racial issues prevents from improving class issues.

On a side note it’s really curious if it’s possible for a person to be racist while also leaving a useful body of work? Or does that work become racist and therefore bad?

#97

Class and race are cross-cutting categories, though. Any analysis of US history and culture that fails to address that is impoverished. This is my objection to Ewell and most (not all) CRT in general. With regard to music theory, the class effects were already profoundly embedded before race was even a factor.

#98

In terms of the USA, when was “before”? Race has been a driving factor since the first settlements…

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#99

It doesn’t become bad, but it becomes imperative to interpret/reinterpret the work in this context and understand it thusly. Which might mean not using it in the same ways.

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#100

Math though is one of the (perhaps few) cases where the work and the creator can be separated cleanly- math being abstract to a degree that art is not. The uses of math (e.g. technology, as part of a narrative of cultural superiority) and the biographies of its creators or discovers are of course not so separable.

#101

Two points in response: First, the conception of racial categories as a basis for class stratification was not set in stone from the beginning. It took some time to develop in the North American colonies, and evolved over time after it did emerge.

Second, and more importantly for this discussion, it took the North Americans two centuries to begin to develop their own elite music. Prior to say the mid-19th century --at the earliest–the North American elite accepted the Euro aristocrats’ music as the standard. Thus North American conceptions of racial difference were not even relevant to the canon.

#102

I hear what you’re saying … I guess I see this plain historical fact as an aspect of white supremacist structural dominance. The fact that, even after all that time and exposure to other things, the European aristocratic standards were the ones adopted is telling. That has so much to do with both racial and class (and their inseparability/intertwining) thinking, aspirations, and influence. It is not an unbiased fact of history, it’s a cultural move that tells of a specific social history.

Similar could be said about European class (and race, although quite differently then in the USA) structures and its impact on “canon” and education, and thus acceptability (and career availability, and etc). It’s not a benign historical fact, it’s a result of so many interrelated ideologies and circumstances.

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#103

in terms of the African diaspora, it was, in fact, set in iron schackles, right from the beginning due to the Atlantic slave trade.

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#104

This is a common misconception. The colonists in Maryland, for example, first used religion as the justification for slavery–not race. It wasn’t until the late 17th century that they replaced religion with race. And the laws regarding mixed offspring continued to evolve for more than a century.

#105

It might be an interesting thought exercise to consider other societies where class is entirely decoupled from race, but in most examples of extreme class disparity race is also involved. (Note that race/class disparities don’t need to be white supremacist – see eg caste disparities in India.)

You seem to be claiming that it is a “misconception” that slavery was based in race… surely that is not what you intend to say?

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#106

Of course it was profoundly based on race for most of North American history. But not at the very beginning:

http://aomol.msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/000001/000001/html/am1--41.html

It took some time for the racial justification to develop. And legally, eligibility for slavery remained based on maternal status–not race–even after race became the rationale for the institution. This is why there was always a population of free people of color.

None of the above is to deny the salience of race. But race-based slavery as an institution did not spring full-blown out of nowhere. It emerged and developed over time.

#107

So to loop that back on topic: The distinction between slave and free person is perhaps the most profound class division known. White supremacy as an ideology emerged in North America at first as the ideological justification for slavery, and then later to keep the common whites politically aligned with the elites.

That political equation persists today. Orange’s only real policy interests seem to be tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and deregulation to let capital run amok. But he appeals to the common white vote with white supremacist dog whistles, as it ever was for centuries now.

Critical race theorists who ignore class–even music theorists such as Ewell–are the flip side of that coin. Like Orange’s common white base, they are distracted by racial ideology, and completely miss the class conflict at the root of the phenomenon.

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#109

:point_up_2: there’s actually a key typo in the web-version where it states:
“that all the Inhabitants of this Province being Christians
(Slaves excepted Shall have and enjoy all such rights liberties”
the “Slaves excepted” is to be enclosed by a closing parentheses(which sets “Slaves” as separate from any religious consideration), you can tell by the grammatical/punctuation-structure of the remaining paragraph that there is something missing there(another complete set of parentheses occurs after that, and the “Shall…” which follows is capitalized to show it’s another separate idea).
therefore, this source can’t be credited as holding any integrity. if you’re basing your entire argument that it’s a misconception on that alone, that would be an incorrect assumption.

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#111

ok, it irked me to see it, but i hear ya, will avoid. :sweat_smile:

i feel as though emenel explained that best earlier, in that there were certain imposed biases, early on, which would define the trajectory of all societal institutions from then on.