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The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his book " Stride Toward Freedom," wrote, "On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. . . . The Metropolitan Opera was on the radio with a performance of one of my favorite operas-Donizetti's 'Lucia di Lammermoor.' So with the beauty of the countryside, the inspiration of Donizetti's inimitable music, and the splendor of the skies, the usual monotony that accompanies a relatively long drive-especially when one is alone-was dispelled in pleasant diversions."

What does it mean, if anything, that King was listening to bel-canto opera as he made his historic journey to preach his first sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church? One response would be to find something curious, or even contradictory, in the image of King enjoying Donizetti behind the wheel of his car. He was poised to become a titan in the civil-rights movement; classical music is a world in which Black people have seldom been allowed to play a leading role. Much the same question could be asked about W. E. B. Du Bois, who admired the music of Richard Wagner to such an extent that he attended the Bayreuth Festival, in 1936. Even though Wagner was notoriously racist, Du Bois said, "The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it, and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he would know life."

Several scholars have conjectured that King was sending a cultural signal when he inserted Donizetti into "Stride Toward Freedom." Jonathan Rieder says that the story demonstrates "King's desire to cast himself as a man of sensibility and distinction." Godfrey Hodgson writes that such references were intended to "reassure northern intellectuals that he was on the same wavelength as they were." Du Bois's cosmopolitan tastes have elicited similar commentary. It is questionable, though, to assume that these two formidable personalities were simply trying to assimilate themselves to a perceived white aesthetic. Rather, they were taking possession of the European inheritance and pulling it into their own sphere. More elementally, they loved the music, and had no need to justify their taste.

It is equally questionable to assume that King's and Du Bois's fondness for classical music lends it some kind of universal, anti-racist virtue. In that sense, my attraction to these anecdotes of fandom is suspect. I am a white American who grew up with the classics, and I am troubled by the presumption that they are stamped with whiteness-and are even aligned with white supremacy, as some scholars have lately argued. I cannot counter that suggestion simply by gesturing toward important Black figures who cherished this same tradition, or by reeling off the names of Black singers and composers. The exceptions remain exceptions. This world is blindingly white, both in its history and its present.

Since nationwide protests over police violence erupted, in May and June, American culture has been engaged in an examination, however nominal, of its relationship with racism. Such an examination is sorely needed in classical music, because of its extreme dependence on a problematic past. The undertaking is complex; the field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also honoring the individual experiences of Black composers, musicians, and listeners. Black people have long been marginalized, but they have never been outsiders.

This spring, the journal Music Theory Online published " Music Theory and the White Racial Frame," an article by Philip Ewell, who teaches at Hunter College. It begins with the sentence "Music theory is white," and goes on to argue that the whiteness of the discipline is manifest not only in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy, one that insidiously affects how music is analyzed and taught. The main target of Ewell's critique is the early-twentieth-century Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), who parsed musical structures in terms of foreground, middle-ground, and background levels, teasing out the tonal formulas that underpin large-scale movements. Schenker held racist views, particularly with regard to Black people, and according to Ewell those views seeped into the seemingly abstract principles of his theoretical work.

Schenker was Jewish, but his adherence to doctrines of Germanic superiority blinkered him to such an extent that, in 1933, he praised Hitler, adding, "If only a man were born to music, who would finally exterminate the musical Marxists." Schenker's advocates have long been aware of his disturbing views but have insisted that his bigoted rhetoric has nothing to do with his theoretical writing. Ewell argued that Schenker's system is, in fact, founded on national and racial hierarchies. Reverence for the kind of supreme talent who can assemble monumental musical structures shades into biological definitions of genius, and the biology of genius spills over into the biology of race. Ewell concluded, "There can be no question that for Schenker, the concept of 'genius' was associated with whiteness to some degree."

Shortly after Ewell's article was published, a skirmish broke out in the music-theory community, incited not by the article itself but by a twenty-minute condensed version of the material that Ewell had presented at a conference seven months earlier. The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which is based at the University of North Texas, chose to devote ninety pages to responses to that brief talk. Some were supportive, others dismissive; one accused Ewell, who is African-American, of exhibiting "Black anti-Semitism," even though Ewell had not mentioned Schenker's Jewishness. On social media, Ewell's colleagues came to his defense and questioned the journal's methodology. The historian Kira Thurman wrote, "Did the Journal of Schenkerian Studies really publish a response to Professor Ewell's scholarship that was 'anonymous'? Yes." National Review and Fox News somehow stumbled on the episode and cast it as so-called cancel culture run amok; it was claimed that Ewell was trying to ban Beethoven, although nothing of the sort had been suggested.

At first glance, the Schenker debate looks to be of limited relevance to the wider classical-music world, not to mention the general population. Although his theories have been taught in American universities for generations, they are by no means universally accepted. German-speaking musicologists, for example, have never taken him as seriously. Even in the U.S., conservatory students can often undergo a thorough training without encountering his work. Yet the case of Schenker illustrates an implicit prejudice that is endemic in the teaching, playing, and interpretation of classical music. His method is far from unique in elevating the European tradition while concealing its cultural bias behind eternal, abstract principles. What Ewell calls "the white racial frame"-he takes the term from the sociologist Joe Feagin-has the special power of being invisible. Thurman, in her paper " Performing Lieder, Hearing Race," makes a similar point: "Classical music, like whiteness itself, is frequently racially unmarked and presented as universal-until people of color start performing it."

The hysterical complaints that Ewell was proposing to "cancel" the classical canon stemmed mainly from a blog post in which he called Beethoven an "above-average composer" who has been "propped up by the white-male frame, both consciously and subconsciously, with descriptors such as genius, master, and masterwork." This is a provocation, though it is hardly the first to have been lobbed at the great man: Debussy wrote that Beethoven's sonatas were badly written for the piano, and Ned Rorem memorably dinged the Ninth Symphony as "the first piece of junk in the grand style." Ewell provokes with a higher purpose: he is goading a classical culture that awards the vast majority of performances to a tight circle of superstars, shutting out female and nonwhite composers who, until the mid-twentieth century, had little chance of making a career. In some ways, that Valhalla mentality is as entrenched as ever.

The whiteness of classical music is, above all, an American problem. The racial and ethnic makeup of the canon is hardly surprising, given European demographics before the twentieth century. But, when that tradition was transplanted to the multicultural United States, it blended into the racial hierarchy that had governed the country from its founding. The white majority tended to adopt European music as a badge of its supremacy. The classical-music institutions that emerged in the mid- and late nineteenth century-the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and the like-became temples to European gods, as Lawrence Levine argued in his 1988 book, " Highbrow/Lowbrow." Little effort was made to cultivate American composers; it seemed more important to manufacture a fantasy of Beethovenian grandeur.

Immigrant populations supplied much of the workforce for those ensembles: Germans gravitated toward the orchestras, Italians toward the opera. Such activity exemplifies the process of assimilation and ascent that Nell Irvin Painter describes in her 2010 book, " The History of White People ": the expansion of the category of "whiteness" to encompass new groups. A large wave of German immigrants arrived in the period of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, which sent thousands of leftists and liberals into exile. The Germania Musical Society, which was founded in 1848 and toured America widely, offered itself as a model of democracy in action-"one for all and all for one." Members of the group exercised a decisive influence on the development of the New York Philharmonic and other ensembles.

The wealthy white Americans who underwrote the country's élite orchestras tended to see their institutions as vehicles of uplift that allowed the lower classes to better themselves through exposure to the sublime airs of the masters. The contradictions of such paternalism are evident in the case of Henry Lee Higginson, who founded the Boston Symphony, in 1881. In his youth, Higginson opposed slavery, and after the Civil War he briefly ran a plantation in Georgia, aiming to provide employment and education to formerly enslaved African-Americans. When the project proved more difficult than he anticipated, he tended to blame his Black workers. In his later years, he adopted strident anti-immigrant rhetoric. By the time of his death, in 1919, he had become a leading member of the Immigration Restriction League.

Although a few well-dressed African-Americans would not have been unwelcome in the Boston Symphony audience, a Black musician had no hope of joining the orchestra. As Aaron Flagg recently recounted in Symphony magazine, the professionalization of the musician class in the late nineteenth century led directly to the segregation of musicians' unions-a system that lingered into the nineteen-seventies. Black musicians had to establish their own unions and form their own ensembles. Not until the forties and fifties did Black players begin joining upper-echelon orchestras: Jack Bradley in Denver, Henry Lewis in Los Angeles, Donald White in Cleveland, and, in 1957, the double-bassist Ortiz Walton in Boston.

Black composers had entered the edges of the limelight somewhat earlier. In 1893, the young singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh befriended Antonín Dvořák, who had come to New York to serve as the director of the progressive-minded National Conservatory. Stirred by Burleigh's singing of spirituals, Dvořák declared that Black melodies should be the foundation of future American music. A couple of generations later, the work of a few African-American composers-William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price-began to appear on orchestral programs. Black opera singers gradually made headway in the same period, culminating in Marian Anderson's breakthrough appearance at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1955. The Met has yet to present an opera by a Black composer, though a production of Terence Blanchard's "Fire Shut Up in My Bones" is planned for a future season.

In the long view, the marginalization of Black composers and musicians was not only a moral wrong but also a self-inflicted wound. Classical institutions succeeded in denying themselves a huge reservoir of native-born talent. Dvořák's acknowledgment that African-Americans were in possession of a singular body of musical material-one that broke open European conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm-went largely unheeded. Instead, much of that talent found a place in jazz and other popular genres. Will Marion Cook, Fletcher Henderson, Billy Strayhorn, and Nina Simone, among many others, had initially devoted themselves to classical-music studies. That jazz came to be called "America's classical music" was an indirect commentary on the whiteness of the concert world, although it had the unfortunate effect of consigning Black classical composers to a double nonexistence.

Of course, racism was endemic in the pop sphere as well, as a host of scholarly studies have made clear. In an essay titled " Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse," Matthew Morrison marshals a formidable array of research and theory to argue that the American pop-music industry is inextricably rooted in the racist routines of nineteenth-century blackface culture. Some historians and critics have tried to find redeeming features in a practice that pervasively ridiculed African-American voices and bodies; Eric Lott, in his classic 1993 book, " Love and Theft," argues that working-class blackface performers demonstrated a "profound white investment in black culture" even as they carried out appalling acts of exploitation. For Morrison, these "counterfeit and imagined performances of blackness" are better understood as affirmations of white identity, with racial mockery integral to the act. (Mockery of "élite" European art was part of the formula as well.) Black performers eventually took up careers on the minstrelsy circuit, but only at the cost of playing along with white fantasies.

That dismal history may help to explain why such Black 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. Du Bois's veneration of German culture-cultivated during his student years in Berlin, in the eighteen-nineties-partly blinded him to the depravity of German racism, which led not only to the Holocaust but also to the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in what is now Namibia. Slavery was a European undertaking before it was an American one, and it left its marks on the repertory. A few years ago, the scholar David Hunter made the disturbing discovery that George Frideric Handel was an investor in the Royal African Company, which transported more than two hundred thousand enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas.

The racism embedded in classical and popular music alike is the necessary background to understanding the hard-won achievement of Florence Price, who is the subject of a new biography, " The Heart of a Woman," by the late musicologist Rae Linda Brown. Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, to middle-class parents, and won admittance to the New England Conservatory, which had a history of accepting Black students. She initially made a living by teaching and by composing parlor songs and other short popular pieces. But in her forties, having escaped an abusive marriage, she broadened her ambitions and turned to symphonic composition. She won some high-profile performances but found herself isolated. Her bonds with Black communities weakened; the white world treated her as an interesting oddity. The resistance that she faced as a female composer made her progress all the more arduous.

Nevertheless, she stuck to her path, and her Third Symphony, which premièred in 1940, is increasingly recognized as a landmark in American music. Variously majestic, sinuous, brooding, and playful, it gestures toward African-American spirituals and dance styles yet seems to enclose them in quotation marks, as if to acknowledge their ambiguous status in a white marketplace. Brown analyzes Price's work in terms of "double consciousness"-Du Bois's concept of the "warring ideals" inherent in Black and American identities-and then enlarges that tension to include Black traditions and European forms. Brown writes, "A transformation of these forms takes place when the dominant elements in a composition transcend European influence." The tradition will not survive without such moments of disruption and transcendence.

Classical-music institutions have just begun to work through the racist past. Scores of opera houses, orchestras, chamber-music societies, and early-music ensembles have declared solidarity with Black Lives Matter, in sometimes awkward prose. Because of COVID-19, most performance schedules that had been announced for the 2020-21 season have been jettisoned, and the drastically reduced programs that have emerged in their place contain a noticeable uptick in Black names. When the virus hit, we were in the midst of the so-called Beethoven Year-a gratuitously excessive celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of a composer who hardly needs any extra publicity. It remains to be seen whether this modest shift toward Black composers will endure beyond the chaotic year 2020.

In the same vein, mainstream organizations are giving more attention to a Black classical repertory: the elegantly virtuosic eighteenth-century scores of Joseph Bologne; the folkloric symphonies of Price, Still, and Dawson; the African-inflected operas of Harry Lawrence Freeman and Shirley Graham Du Bois. Yet such activity goes only so far in challenging an obsessive worship of the past. These works remain largely within the boundaries of the Western European tradition: if Schenker could have overcome his biases, he would have had an easy time analyzing Price's music according to his method. Furthermore, this programming leaves intact the assumption that musical greatness resides in a bygone golden age. White Europeans remain in the majority, with Beethoven retaining pride of place in the lightly renovated, diversified pantheon.

Classical music can overcome the shadows of its past only if it commits itself more strongly to the present. Black composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have staged a much more radical confrontation with the white European inheritance. A pivotal figure is Julius Eastman, who died in near-total obscurity, in 1990, but has found cult fame in recent years. Eastman's improvisatory structures, his subversive political themes, and his openness about his homosexuality give him a revolutionary aspect, yet he also had a nostalgic flair for the grand Romantic manner; his 1979 piece "Gay Guerrilla," for two pianos, makes overpowering use of the Lutheran hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

With a vibrant roster of younger talents moving to the fore-Tyshawn Sorey, Jessie Montgomery, Nathalie Joachim, Courtney Bryan, Tomeka Reid, and Matana Roberts, among others-the perennial solitude of the Black composer seems less marked than before. Still, Black faces remain rare in the rank and file of orchestras, in administrative offices, and, most conspicuously, in audiences. Price once described how strange it was to see an all-white crowd vigorously applauding her Black-influenced music. That experience remains all too common.

A deeper reckoning would require wholesale changes in how orchestras canvass talent, conservatories recruit students, institutions hire executives, and marketers approach audiences. A Black singer like Morris Robinson should not have to live in a world where-as he recently reported at an online panel discussion-he has never worked with a Black conductor, stage director, or chief executive at an American opera house. At the same time, institutions must recognize that the Black-white divide is not the only line of tension in the social fabric. Asian musicians have often complained that blanket descriptions of classical music as an all-white field efface their existence. They are well represented in the ranks of orchestras, but they have little voice in the upper echelons, and routinely encounter the racism of disdain.

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. Vast tracts of the world's music, from West African talking drums to Indonesian gamelan, fall outside that system, and African-American traditions have played in its interstices. This is a reality that the music department at Harvard, once stiflingly conservative, has recognized. The jazz-based artist Vijay Iyer now leads a cross-disciplinary graduate program that cultivates the rich terrain between composition and improvisation. The Harvard musicologist Anne Shreffler has said of the new undergraduate music curriculum, "We relied on students showing up on our doorstep having had piano lessons since the age of six." Given the systemic inequality into which many people of color are born, this "class-based implicit requirement," as Shreffler calls it, becomes a covert form of racial exclusion.

The sacralized canon will evolve as the musical world evolves around it. Because of the peculiarly invasive nature of sound, old scores always seem to be happening to us anew. A painting gazes at us unchanging from its frame; a book speaks to us in its fixed language. But when modern people play a Beethoven quartet it, too, becomes modern, even if certain of its listeners wish to go backward in time. The act of performance has enormous transformative potential-an aspect that musicologists, so accustomed to analyzing notation on a page, have yet to address in full. Naomi André, in her 2018 book, " Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement," evokes the dimensions of meaning that opened up when Leontyne Price sang the title role of "Aida" in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Of the passage " O patria . . . quanto mi costi! "-"Oh, my country . . . how much you have cost me!"-André writes, "The drama onstage and the reality offstage crash together. . . . This voice comes out of a body that lived through the end of Jim Crow and segregation." The music of a white European had become part of Black experience-become, to a degree, Black itself.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, the musicologist and semiotician, has described two dominant ways in which we construct musical meaning: the "poietic," which reads a score in light of its creator's intentions, methods, and cultural context; and the "esthesic," which takes into account the perceptions of an audience. We live in a determinedly poietic age: we give great stress to what artists do and say, particularly when they stray from contemporary moral norms. That project of demystification is often useful, given the rampant idealization and idolatry of prior eras. But listeners need not be captive to the surface meaning of the scores, or to the biographies of their creators, or to the histories that accompany them. We can yoke the music to our own ends, as W. E. B. Du Bois did when he improbably reinvented Wagner as a model for a mythic Black art.

The poietic and the esthesic should have equal weight when we pick up the pieces of the past. On the one hand, we can be aware that Handel invested in the business of slavery; on the other, we can see a measure of justice when Morris Robinson sings his music in concert. We can be conscious of the racism of Mozart's portrayal of Monostatos in "The Magic Flute," or of the misogyny of "Così Fan Tutte," yet contemporary stagings can put Mozart's stereotypes in a radical new light. There is no need to reach a final verdict-to judge each artist innocent or guilty. Living with history means living with history's complexities, contradictions, and failings.

The ultimate mistake is to look to music-or to any art form-as a zone of moral improvement, a refuge of sweetness and light. Attempts to cleanse the canon of disreputable figures end up replicating the great-man theory in a negative register, with arch-villains taking the place of geniuses. Because all art is the product of our grandiose, predatory species, it reveals the worst in our natures as well as the best. 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." ♦

Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests

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Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music

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The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his book " Stride Toward Freedom," wrote, "On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama.

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The Artist Sings: Peter Morin in Conversation

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Tahltan Nation performer and visual artist Peter Morin discusses his creation of the 2013 work, 'Cultural Graffiti in London'. This work was sponsored by the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World Project, led by Helen Gilbert and funded by the European Research Council. Video Directors: Sergio Huarcaya and Dani Phillipson. For analysis of this performance see an article by Helen Gilbert and Dani Phillipson at https://www.academia.edu/22317420/Cultural_Graffiti_in_London_Singing_Life_into_Exhibitions_and_Embodying_the_Digital_Document

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Nearly a hundred string musicians convened in North Portland Friday to issue a musical call for justice for a violinist who died before his time.

Elijah McClain, a Black man from Aurora, Colorado, is remembered by his loved ones as quirky and kind - an introverted animal lover who played his violin for stray cats at an animal shelter. He was walking home from a convenience store last year when a 911 caller reported someone "looking sketchy." Aurora police put him in a neck hold and medics reportedly injected him with what they called a "therapeutic" dose of a sedative. He had a heart attack on the way to a hospital and died days later.

He was 23.

As protests against racism and police brutality have unfolded in communities large and small across the U.S., McClain's name has been added to a sad litany, alongside George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and other Black people killed by police. And like Floyd, Taylor and Arbery, McClain has become an icon to many participants in a movement for justice that is still unfolding today.

"Elijah McClain was a 23-year-old human - 23 years old," Kinsey Smyth of the Portland Civil Rights Collective spoke with a mournful voice Friday, as she stood amongst the cellists, violists, bassists and violinists gathered at Peninsula Park.

"I am 23 years old, to put it into perspective," she said. "And to hear that a human at 23 years old lost their life, before really their life even got to start, I feel that deep within myself. We're here not only celebrating and honoring the life of that individual but so many countless lives that have been lost at the hands of those who are supposed to protect us."

In Aurora last month, some violinists were pepper-sprayed by police in riot gear. They'd been swept up in a Black Lives Matter protest across a park from a vigil for McClain. Karla Mi Lugo, who instigated that vigil, described it as a cathartic ritual of grief.

But in Portland, close to a thousand people, nearly all wearing COVID-19 masks and many carrying Black Lives Matter signs, were audience to a peaceful show, interrupted only by the staccato pops of fireworks and the fiery words of people demanding a better world.

As the sun slowly set, a swollen moon climbed above children holding violins, seniors seated with cellos, amateurs playing alongside Oregon Symphony performers, beginners alongside Bravo Youth Orchestra teachers.

Nydelis Ortiz, 30, said it had been a decade since she had played her violin. She tuned her strings and began to practice when she learned about the vigil for McClain. "Music is one of those things that transcends languages, and it's a way to reach people."

A similar sentiment prompted Lugo, stage name Faith Faucet, to organize the Aurora violin vigil - and later to work with Jadhi Levvi on the Portland event. Lugo told OPB that they've been moved by expressions of art that the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired. Portraits of George Floyd and other victims of police killings have appeared on murals across the country. Performing artists have developed acts. And there's been music.

Lugo had seen a similar outpouring of creativity from the millennials they grew up alongside in Puerto Rico, as artists protested corruption and colonial history with theater, puppetry, reggaeton and rap. In 2019, artists led two weeks of protests over corruption and the Puerto Rican government's failed response to Hurricane Maria, culminating in the resignation of the U.S. territory's governor.

"Having the Puerto Rican spirit in my heart and witnessing how they uprose and they really took to culture and creativity has just been on my heart."

And then Lugo watched a video of McClain's arrest and listened to the fear and confusion of his final words:

I can't breathe. I have my ID right here. My name is Elijah McClain. That's my house. I was just going home. I'm an introvert. I'm just different. That's all. I'm so sorry. I have no gun. I don't do that stuff. I don't do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don't even kill flies! I don't eat meat! But I don't judge people, I don't judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me. All I was trying to do was become better. I will do it. I will do anything. Sacrifice my identity, I'll do it. You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful and I love you. Try to forgive me. I'm a mood Gemini. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Ow, that really hurt. You are all very strong. Teamwork makes the dream work. Oh, I'm sorry I wasn't trying to do that. I just can't breathe correctly."

"It just kinda, like, broke me completely, and I just knew that I had to do something," Lugo said. McClain's words had resonance.

Resonance: The feeling of a shared emotion or belief. The sound of instruments vibrating together in frequency. The echo of hundreds of voices chanting at twilight in a Portland park in memory of a man whose life ended too soon.

"Elijah McClain."

"Elijah McClain."

"Elijah McClain."

As voices chanted, lead violinist Chibia Ulinwa lifted her bow. A hundred cellists, violists, bassists, violinists pointed their elbows toward the darkening sky, lifted their own bows and filled the air with music.

Later that night, poet Tazha Williams stepped to the microphone.

"Set it free, your Black body, beautiful Black body," Williams recited breathily to the backing of dozens of musicians.

"It's time to organize in the streets," she said, chanting "consciousness, consciousness," as pizzicato plucking transitioned to frantic bowing: "Consciousness. Black consciousness."

"Yes, there is a reason that the caged bird sings," Williams spoke in the cooling night, "the promise of tomorrow that the warm sun brings."

Across the city in downtown Portland, other protesters were beginning to gather for their nightly standoff against law enforcement. Long after midnight, police would eventually declare a riot. The night would fade. The sun would rise on the Fourth of July, America's 244th Independence Day.

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arts | local | music | news | culture | protests

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A vigil for a Black violinist who died too young

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Your browser does not support the audio element. Nearly a hundred string musicians convened in North Portland Friday to issue a musical call for justice for a violinist who died before his time. Elijah McClain, a Black man from Aurora, Colorado, is remembered by his loved ones as quirky and kind - an introverted animal lover who played his violin for stray cats at an animal shelter.

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Kawania Wooten's voice tightens when she describes the struggle she's having at the school her son attends. When his class created a timeline of civilization, Wooten saw the Greeks, the Romans and the Incas. But nothing was said about Africa, even though the class has several African American students.

Wooten, who is black, spoke to the school's director, a white woman - who insisted that the omission wasn't racially biased.

"Her first comment was, 'you know, we've just been following the curriculum. We're not talking about whether people are white or black,'" recalls Wooten, who lives in Bowie, Md. "I said that the children have eyes and they can see. And I'd like them to see that our culture was a strong, viable culture."

That kind of story brings a groan from Mark Benn, a psychologist and adjunct professor at Colorado State University. He hears similar tales whenever he delivers lectures about race relations.

Such incidents are examples of racial "colorblindness" - the idea that ignoring or overlooking racial and ethnic differences promotes racial harmony.

Trainers and facilitators say colorblindness does just the opposite: folks who enjoy racial privilege are closing their eyes to the experiences of others.

"It benefits me not to pay attention," says Benn, who is white. "I never have to question whether or not my race is being held in question when I apply for a job. It benefits me not to question that (because) it makes it look like I got here on my own."

Paying attention to the cultural experience of students is becoming increasingly important, given the differences between the demographics of American students and their teachers.

According to reports from the National Center for Education Statistics, roughly 80 percent of American teachers are white, while children of color make up more than 40 percent of the student body.

As the nation's demographics shift, the sight of a white teacher leaning over the desk of a brown or black student is likely become more and more common. In order to be effective, teachers will have to learn about the cultural experiences of their students, while using these experiences as a foundation for teaching. The approach is called culturally relevant pedagogy.

But that is hard to do if a teacher doesn't see differences as valuable. That means the blinders have to come off, says Randy Ross, a senior equity specialist at the New England Equity Assistance Center, a program of Brown University's Education Alliance. Ross facilitates workshops on racism and culturally responsive teaching. And in her experience, white people have the hardest time opening their eyes.

"I have never heard a teacher of color say 'I don't see color," Ross says. "There may be issues of cultural competence [among teachers of color], but colorblindness is not one of them. The core of 'I don't see color,' is 'I don't see my own color, I don't see difference because my race and culture is the center of the universe.'"

Such tunnel vision is the reason a teacher can omit Africa from a timeline of world civilizations, Ross says. Still, she cautions, the flaws of the colorblind approach run deeper than curriculum.

Failure to see and acknowledge racial differences makes it difficult to recognize the unconscious biases everyone has. Those biases can taint a teacher's expectations of a student's ability and negatively influence a student's performance. Study after study has shown that low teacher expectations are harmful to students from socially stigmatized groups.

In her article "Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for the Nineties and Beyond", Ana Maria Villegas pointed out that ignorance of cultural differences could lead teachers to "underestimate the true academic potential" of minority students.

"Teachers' judgments on students' potential have profound and long-lasting effects on students' lives," Villegas wrote. "For minority children in particular, such judgments or misjudgments may prove costly...

"The evidence is overwhelming. When compared to their 'high-ability' peers, 'low-ability' students are called on less often in class, given less time to respond, praised less frequently...and prompted less often in the case of incorrect responses."

Ross says a teacher who professes to be "colorblind" is not going to understand how unconscious biases can influence expectations, actions, and even the way a teacher addresses students of color.

After talking to her son's teacher, Kawania Wooten wondered whether her son was being harmed in just that way.

She'd asked for advice on helping the youngster complete a difficult project. Instead, the teacher immediately offered to give him easier work. Just as quickly, Wooten refused. Then she explained the racial subtext of the exchange: the white teacher doubted the intelligence of an African American child.

"I heard that expectations of my son were low," Wooten says.

Such misunderstandings could be avoided, she believes, if the teacher learned some things about African American culture.

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Kawania Wooten's voice tightens when she describes the struggle she's having at the school her son attends. When his class created a timeline of civilization, Wooten saw the Greeks, the Romans and the Incas. But nothing was said about Africa, even though the class has several African American students.

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Mamie Smith's song wasn't just an artistic breakthrough. It proved Black women and girls bought records, paving the way for today's fan armies.

Mamie Smith recorded "Crazy Blues" - African-American women's breakthrough into the mainstream recording industry - with the Jazz Hounds in the summer of 1920. Credit... Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

"Music was my refuge."

This is how Maya Angelou opens her third memoir, "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas," from 1976. When she was piecing together a life in 1940s San Francisco as a single teen mother, it was the need for vinyl - the blues of John Lee Hooker, the "bubbling silver sounds of Charlie Parker" - that drew her to the Melrose Record Shop on Fillmore. Her passion for records drove her to snatch two hours between jobs so she could rove its aisles. It was "where I could wallow," Angelou writes, "rutting in music."

Angelou would go on to join the store's staff, basking in a world of wall-to-wall sounds - Schoenberg, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie - ordering stock and playing records on request. Maya the music wonk. Maya the D.J. Maya the record collector. This is a side of Black women's cultural lives rarely considered and yet deeply woven into our modern pop universe.

This week marks the 100th anniversary of Mamie Smith recording "Crazy Blues," African-American women's breakthrough into the mainstream recording industry - a feat that is stunning and impactful, yet so often misunderstood or forgotten that most people would be hard pressed to name the artist whose smash altered the course of pop. And though they're rarely acknowledged in histories of music, the Black women and girls who responded to Smith's sound en masse helped upend the anti-Blackness of America's nascent record business in the early 20th century.

In the summer of 1920, Smith, the Cincinnati-born New York vaudevillian, walked into a studio with Perry Bradford, a shrewd songwriter-musician and blues business hustler. They were on a mission to counteract the industry's previous decade, when white blues artists like Marion Harris and the Ukrainian immigrant Sophie Tucker were breaking out with their own recorded renditions of Black music while African-American entertainers - legends like Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith - were confined to burning up the stages all along the "Chitlin Circuit," the Theatre Owners Booking Association's array of venues designated for Black performers.

For Smith and Bradford, one of the biggest questions was whether they could prove to record executives that, without a shadow of a doubt, Black music fans mattered.

Such a claim had, so far, fallen on deaf ears. At the time, it was acceptable for a Black musician to record renditions of and opera and theater fare, and even phonographic curiosities like the 1890 blackface-adjacent "Laughing Song" by George W. Johnson, one of his two recordings believed to be some of the earliest by an African-American. But that Southern vernacular lowdown sound? Those straight-out-the-juke-joint blue notes and bends? Early white labels saw no reason to record them unless they could be repackaged with white artists for the phonograph-owning bourgeoise of the Progressive Era.

Bradford and Smith's strategy was simple yet novel: allow an African-American woman blues vocalist to appeal to Black listeners, proving they had a taste for popular sounds while spotlighting the artistry and the seriousness of the singer and her accompanying band. In short, they would showcase Black pop music excellence as achievable and commodifiable and win over manufacturers who, as the Chicago Defender noted on July 31, 1920, "may not believe that the Race will buy records sung by its own singers."

Recorded on August 10, 1920, for Okeh Records and released in November, Smith's gripping and rambunctious "Crazy Blues" hit all of those benchmarks and more. In its nearly three and a half minutes, Smith sings in a robust vibrato atop horns and woodwinds, lamenting a love affair that brings her a boatload of pain. This is heartbreak that demands a multitude of emotions, so it's no surprise that she would lean into her pronounced theater-world chops. On one end of "Crazy Blues," our heroine is all tied up in knots about the man she loves doing her wrong; by its close, her despair has morphed into a militant rage.

"Gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop," she sings, invoking an inflammatory term that was unfortunately not uncommon - even among Black folks - at the time, "Get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop." Somehow we've gone from "Crazy in Love" to "____ tha Police" over the course of one song.

Bradford had assembled an all-Black band, the Jazz Hounds, who played live, improvised music that was its own unpredictable, breakneck adventure - a refreshing contrast to the buttoned-up versions of the blues interpreted by white artists across the 1910s. And Smith was game about playing along with them. "It's remarkable," said the critic David Wondrich, whose gutsy book "Stomp and Swerve" documents a history of America's "hot" music. "She's a part of the band. She's bending notes with them. She's not flinching whenever the trombone drops a bomb."

The reaction to the song, particularly among Black audiences, was groundbreaking. The explosiveness of its parting lyrics, its references to drugs and vigilantism caught the public's attention and broke boundaries: Something taboo was being uttered on a record for the first time in a popular song by a Black woman entertainer. Bradford's gamble on "a Black woman nobody's ever heard of," as the popular music historian Elijah Wald put it in a phone interview, was "a huge conceptual leap."

It's also possible that Black listeners were dazzled by a phenomenally well-executed record that captured an even bigger, existential ache than its lyrics describe. It was an expression of the grandeur and complexity of Black life, finally available for their phonograph. Sales figures for "Crazy Blues" show an estimated 75,000 copies purchased upon its release, andin 1921 Billboard credited the song as pulling in "a million dollars' worth," a giant sum at the time that stood for "lots and lots" in this era, Wald said.

Black recording artists subsequently made significant inroads riding the coattails of Smith's success. Blues women dominated the first half of the decade, with Waters, Rainey and Bessie Smith at the forefront of the craze. Waters's popularity would almost single-handedly keep the African-American-owned Black Swan Records afloat in the early 1920s. Rainey, called "the Mother of the Blues," signed with Paramount Records in 1923 and would go on to crank out more than 100 songs covering topics like lesbian pride and the perils of patriarchy. And that other Smith, the "Empress" Bessie, would hold court at Columbia Records as the most formidable and original voice of the blues.

These were the pioneers who upended the soundtrack of American life. Record labels now believed in the (monetary) value of Black mass cultural art, and they provided Black artists with access - though still heavily mediated by white executives - to recording their own music. Pop music was transformed by a people whose musical innovations were - and remain today - the manifestation of a brutal, centuries long, blood-soaked struggle to be regarded as human in the West.

Smith had an impressive run as a mega-wattage celebrity who capitalized on the success of "Crazy Blues" into the mid-1920s with lavish wardrobes and sold-out shows. This is "one of the first cases in history," Wald said, "where a record makes a difference in somebody's career." She was drawing white as well as Black audiences in droves. But blues veterans (like that other Smith) were nipping at her heels and would soon eclipse her in fame.

This is where the story of "Crazy Blues" often reaches its climax in the history books - with Smith's risk-taking innovation. But the popularity itself is often left unexamined. The other side of the "Crazy Blues" story is how African-American women and girls found their way to that record and the ones that followed and loved them fiercely.

Thanks to the blockbuster success of "Crazy Blues," Smith had an impressive run into the mid-1920s with lavish wardrobes and sold-out shows. Credit... Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

Many of these listeners were absorbing the straightforward opinions, demands and perspectives stored up in the music. Angela Y. Davis pointed this out in "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism," her landmark study on blues women, cataloging the variety of topics covered in their songs: explosive eroticism, queer desire, the horrors of domestic violence, segregation, poverty and racial terrorism. The music articulated much about post-captivity Black life in all its vicissitudes and pleasures.

If we were to widen the lens to look at the lasting legacy of "Crazy Blues," we might find out more about those Black masses - especially the Black women and girls - who turned their record buying into a full-blown revolution. These were the people who possessed tastes and ideas about culture, who constructed elaborate leisure rituals around their records and who used these records to articulate their wants and needs, their hopes and dreams.

Only a handful of scholars have bothered to extensively explore the history of African-American record fans, buyers and collectors, and yet we know that Black listeners got a hold of this music through a variety of ways. As the historian Joshua Clark Davis points out, there were few Black-owned brick-and-mortar shops in those early blues years. His own research found a shop owned and operated by the Louis Armstrong associate Erskine Tate selling "Crazy Blues" in November 1920. The scholar Stephen Robertson's work identifies James H. Tetley's Harlem Music Shop as "the largest colored music store in the city" in 1921. And Lynn Abbott and Douglas Seroff's indispensable study "The Original Blues" alludes to other Black shops that played pivotal roles in marketing early blues records in places like Dallas, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

Black people were also selling and buying records through other means as the Smith phenomenon rolled on, getting around a largely white-controlled retail culture. "It could be a news stand. It could be a furniture shop. It could be a variety store," Davis said in an interview.

The culture of the Black record shops evolved through the post-World War II era, and Davis said that it played a big part in fostering community. The stores were "Black public spaces" with a don't-cost-a-thing barrier for entry, where kids "could come in and hang out." They were safe, convivial places Black folks could call their own, and they were organized around exploring, thinking about, discussing and purchasing - laying claim to - music.

This is the compelling forgotten history sparked by "Crazy Blues" that's worth lingering on: the sites and cultural rituals created by Black record lovers, particularly women. And while most books won't tell you their stories, the memories shared by everyday African-American women who are living archives of cultural knowledge do.

Take, for instance, my 94-year-old mother, Juanita, whose teen years in Jim Crow Texarkana, Tex., included regular excursions with her girlfriends to the local Beasley's record store in the early 1940s. They requested music they'd heard on the radio, which held their imagination again and again in the shop's listening booths.

The local Detroit legend and public historian Marsha Music said her father, Joe Von Battle, opened his own store in 1945. According to Music, Joe's Record Shop stood out because of his decision to "feature old blues," the sound of Black migrants' "last years in the transition period" from "the South to the North." Her father would blast music from a big speaker out front, so patrons and passers-by could soak up the sonic energy of whatever was spinning inside.

Having grown up in her family's store in the early 1960s, Music developed a rich repository of wisdom about record culture and the ways shops like her father's, similar to bookstores, held the potential to cultivate curiosity and nurture intellectual perspectives. By the time she was 8 or 9 years old, she was fully "immersed" in this world, reading Bobby "Blue" Bland and Ahmad Jamal album covers. "In those days, album covers were the window on the world," she said.

This is certainly how I experienced my own record shop culture while growing up in the Bay Area in the 1970s and '80s when Tower Records ruled the day. The pilgrimages my friends and I made to the Mountain View and the Columbus Avenue stores were steeped in hard-core fandom and a pursuit of knowledge about Prince, Bowie and the Police (I had a thing for the band's drummer) and, laterin my Gen-X 20s, riot grrrl and neo-soul. These were ludic dwelling places where my crew and I identified our shared affinities, our likes and dislikes.

The 2020 Hulu reboot of "High Fidelity" starring Zoë Kravitz, Da'Vine Joy Randolph and David H. Holmes gets as close to this kind of feeling that I've ever seen. It plays with the original's white masculinist ideas about pop music culture - the semi-self-conscious "rock snobbery" sentiments of Nick Hornby's novel and its slightly more expansive film from 2000 starring John Cusack and Jack Black as fanatical record shop clerks.

Da'Vine Joy Randolph reinvents Jack Black's character in the Hulu reboot of "High Fidelity." Credit... Hulu

Fandom matters in "High Fidelity" 2.0, just as it did in the original. But the fans are now Black women, each distinct from one another, yet sharing a deep investment in music as both a salve and a compass for their complicated self-making journeys.

These "women are allowed to study with each other, to study culture and to have opinions and ideas and convictions about their beliefs about cultures," said Randolph, the classically trained vocalist who boldly reinvented Jack Black's character, in a phone interview. Their "conversations about artistry - when that artist did this at that one part, and that bridge is killer - she's learning," she added. "This is her education. This is her grad school."

Sadly, but not surprisingly, Hulu canceled "High Fidelity" last week. Randolph's electrifying character remains a testimony to the eclecticism and passion of Black women music fans. They are the listeners who've consistently shown love for Black women artists - the musicians who have provided crucial DNA for pop music but who've rarely had control over how their records are produced and promoted because of unrelenting racism and sexism. For this reason, fandom feels especially critical and meaningful.

Online fan communities may be infamous when it comes to the lengths they'll go to rep hard for their goddesses - the fiercely protective BeyHive (for Beyoncé), Navy (for Rihanna) and Barbz (for Nicki Minaj). The Black women and girls who are front and center in thesefan armies may seem to little resemble Maya or Marsha or my mother, each grooving to their favorite jams in their own beloved shops. But there are connections between these two generations, who, as the artist Carrie Mae Weems once put it, have "endless discussions" with the music. This is the tradition of looking after art they've deemed precious in the face of an industry that has profited off Black music without deeply caring for the people who made it.

Social media and streaming have given fans in 2020 a lot of power. But they can't ultimately repair a broken system. The early record industry's root-and-branch white supremacy and sexism have resulted in lasting structural inequalities in the label boardroom (where Sylvia Rhone of Epic Records is one of the few Black women executives), in the studio (where men outnumber women as engineers and producers) and in arts criticism (where white voices speak more often about Black music than African-American women do).

These problems are indicative of a larger crisis that neither an ardent fan base nor a Blackout Tuesday protest can swiftly repair.

But in the meantime, Black women and girls will make their voices heard in the blogosphere, and on Twitter and Instagram. They'll be there to hold the Grammys accountable when "Lemonade" is snubbed or when Nicki keeps it real with Taylor or Miley, reminding both superstars how racism and privilege operate in their own careers.

These fan warriors are part of a legacy that stretches back 100 years. Mamie Smith's achievement not only made way for the Billies, Arethas, Whitneys and Beyoncés who followed her path to pop dominance. She also changed presumptions about what popular music was, what it could do - what kind of language it could speak to us about the depth and intricacies of our inner lives. Her record hailed us, and we responded by carrying it into the center our lives and the intimacy of our homes, building entire life worlds around it, sound fortresses to resist the catastrophe of our chronic invisibility.

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of "Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound," forthcoming in 2021 from Harvard University Press.

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100 Years Ago, 'Crazy Blues' Sparked a Revolution for Black Women Fans (Published 2020)

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Mamie Smith's song wasn't just an artistic breakthrough. It proved Black women and girls bought records, paving the way for today's fan armies. "Music was my refuge." This is how Maya Angelou opens her third memoir, "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas," from 1976.

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A virtuoso of the mbira, a plucked instrument, he shared his knowledge with the wider world to preserve wisdom handed down orally. He died of Covid-19.

Cosmas Magaya was a master of the mbira and a repository of Zimbabwean music and culture. Credit... Rhonda Klevansky

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.
In his village in northern Zimbabwe, Cosmas Magaya played music to summon ancestral spirits at traditional rituals of the Shona people: ceremonies to request divine guidance, to ward off illness, or to call for rain.

The same music made him an internationally acclaimed performer and teacher of the plucked instrument called the mbira. He toured the world, made recordings, taught at universities and was a fountainhead of Shona cultural knowledge.

Mr. Magaya died of Covid-19 on July 10 in Harare, the capital, his daughter Tsitsi Hantuba said. He was 66.

Mr. Magaya played the mbira dzavadzimu, the "mbira of the ancestors": a wooden plank with tuned steel prongs and buzzing resonators attached. He improvised around complex, age-old multilayered patterns, at once percussive and meditative.

In a long collaboration and friendship, Mr. Magaya helped Paul Berliner, an ethnomusicologist and now a professor emeritus at Duke University, to learn, analyze and transcribe the deep structures and improvisatory extensions of Shona mbira music. They worked together to impart the tradition to musicians worldwide.

In recent years, Mr. Magaya made annual visits to perform and teach in the United States, and he had students in Europe and Africa as well.

Some Zimbabweans thought he had revealed too much to outsiders. But, Ms. Hantuba said, "He was so passionate about mbira and traditional beliefs that he wanted to share as much as he could."

Mr. Berliner first studied with Mr. Magaya in 1971 in the country then called Rhodesia, when the virtuosic 18-year-old Mr. Magaya was a principal member of a renowned mbira group, Mhuri yekwaRwizi. Mr. Berliner recorded the group's music on albums released for the Nonesuch label's Explorer series - "The Soul of Mbira" (1973) and "Shona Mbira Music" (1977) - that introduced many Westerners to traditional mbira music. Mr. Berliner wrote books about the tradition, including the "The Art of Mbira: Musical Inheritance and Legacy" (2020), guided by Mr. Magaya's understanding of a profound, evolving cultural heritage.

In addition to Ms. Hantuba, Mr. Magaya is survived by his wife, Patricia Nyamande; two other daughters, Matilda Magaya and Rutendo Magaya; a son, Mudavanhu, who plays mbira in his father's style; and 11 grandchildren. His first wife, Joyce Zinyengere, whom he married in 1976, died in 1999.

Cosmas Magaya was born on Oct. 5, 1953, in a rural area of the Mondoro (now Mhondoro) district. His father, Joshua Magaya, was a farmer, a traditional healer and a spirit medium. Cosmas began playing mbira when he was 8, initially taught by a cousin, Ernest Chivhanga, who also built mbiras. He was 12 when his cousin began taking him along to play at ceremonies. The leader of Mhuri yekwaRwizi, the singer Hakurotwi Mude, heard the teenage Mr. Magaya and invited him to join the group, and Mr. Magaya moved to the capital.

During the protracted civil war that led to an independent Zimbabwe in 1980, Mr. Magaya moved to Bulawayo in the south. He taught mbira at the Kwanongoma College of Music. But he mainly earned a living, from 1973 to 1997, as a depot manager for the government's Dairy Marketing Board.

Mr. Magaya rejoined Mhuri yekwaRwizi as the musical director for its first international tours, in 1983 and 1985, in Europe. He later toured internationally on his own and with various ensembles.His teaching in the United States included residencies at Middlebury College and Duke, Brown and Stanford universities, and he regularly appeared at the annual Zimbabwean Music Festival in Oregon.

He returned to live in northern Zimbabwe, where he raised corn and cattle. In 2000 he became the program director for Nhimbe for Progress, a nonprofit organization devoted to health and education in the region's impoverished villages, and in 2004 he succeeded his father as village headman.

Mr. Magaya saw his collaboration with Mr. Berliner as a way of honoring the memory of his ancestors and teachers. In "The Art of Mbira," he told Mr. Berliner, "Once we've completed this study on behalf of our late mbira-playing comrades - leaving it for others who come behind us - I will know that if I die tomorrow, I can go to my grave satisfied."

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Cosmas Magaya, Musician and Teacher of African Traditions, Dies at 66

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A virtuoso of the mbira, a plucked instrument, he shared his knowledge with the wider world to preserve wisdom handed down orally. He died of Covid-19. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here .

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Listen to how artists have explored what it means - and could mean - to be American.

Credit... Yann Kebbi

A cone of silence hangs over the work of Black composers from Africa and its diaspora. It is not that Black men and women have not written music, but too often it has been ignored - and thus assumed not to exist at all.

The work of Black composers is more often heard if they are working in forms thought to exemplify "the Black experience": jazz, blues, rap. However, as the composer and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams once said, "We know that there are different types of Black life, and therefore we know that there are different kinds of Black music. Because Black music comes forth from Black life."

In the late 1980s, the Caribbean writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant proclaimed themselves "Creoles": "torn between several languages, several histories, caught in the torrential ambiguity of a mosaic identity." In that light, as we contemplate an Independence Day unlike any in my memory, I want to highlight some of the ways African-American composers have explored what it means - and could mean - to be American, helping to foster a creolized, cosmopolitan new music for the 21st century.

If Black lives matter now more than ever, hearing Black liveness in classical music also matters. The alternative is an addiction to exclusion that ends, as addictions often do, in impoverishment.

The first movement of William Grant Still's Symphony No. 1, "The Afro-American" (1930), develops a 12-bar blues using classical sonata form. This served Still's avowed purpose - consistent with 1920s New Negro discourses of racial uplift - of demonstrating how the blues "could be elevated to the highest musical level." Today, I also hear a foreshadowing of two musical cultures collaborating as equals.

One day in 1970, my freshman-year college roommate, the violist Miles Hoffman, mentioned that he was performing an unusual work with the Yale Symphony that I might like to hear. Indeed, the piece captivated me, and I was astonished to see a young African-American graduate student, Alvin Singleton - now one of America's most distinguished composers - take the stage to accept the applause. I don't think I had seen or even heard of a Black composer before. His "Mestizo II" is an ebullient infusion of free improvisation into the classical orchestra.

In 1999, Tania Léon created "Horizons" for orchestra, a work that is well described by the musicologist Jason Stanyek as a kind of sonic creolization: "All at once, this is music of the Americas, of the trans-Atlantic world, of the Cuban diaspora, of the European avant-garde. It is pan-Latin, local, intercultural, cosmopolitan, indigenous, global, transcendent, grounded."

The Haitian-American composer, flutist, vocalist, and electronic artist Nathalie Joachim's "Fanm d'Ayiti" ("Women of Haiti") is perhaps the quintessential example of the situation of the Creole. Ms. Joachim combines traditional and modern text and song in the kreyòl language with extended string techniques and electronics that bring musical Minimalism home to the African diaspora from which it has drawn so much. Black liveness, Black women and Black spirituality arrive at the center of the classical music table.

Ms. Joachim's project is close in spirit to "Coin Coin," the saxophonist, composer and visual artist Matana Roberts's series of extended works, now in its fourth volume of a projected 12. Ms. Roberts uses texts, field recordings, voice, instruments and visual elements to explore history, memory, legacy, family, sexuality and myth in the American Afrodiaspora, exemplifying the power of the creative artist to infuse history with the spiritual.

Before George Floyd, there was Sandra Bland - and far too many others. In July 2015, Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old Chicago native, was found hanged in a Texas jail cell, three days after her arrest during a traffic stop. In a Facebook video posted two months before her death, she said, "In the news that we've seen as of late, you could stand there, surrender to the cops, and still be killed."

By that point, the African American Policy Forum had already coined the Twitter hashtag #SayHerName to call attention to police violence targeting Black women. Courtney Bryan's "Yet Unheard" (2016), for soprano, chorus and orchestra, which premiered on the first anniversary of Ms. Bland's death, was a musical response to that call. As Sharan Strange's libretto demands: "My people, won't you sing her name?"

Born a slave in Georgia, the sightless composer and virtuoso pianist Thomas Wiggins (1849-1908), popularly known as Blind Tom, was promoted by his owner as an "idiot" to enhance his marketability. Willa Cather described Tom's performance of works by Liszt and Paderewski as "genius which has no basis in intellect," a common view of Black humanity that characters debate in Jeffery Renard Allen's 2014 novel about Tom, "Song of the Shank."

In Blind Tom's "The Battle of Manassas," from 1863,the sounds of cannons are recalled through tone clusters that anticipate early Henry Cowell. Created by an enslaved Southern composer in ostensible tribute to the first major Civil War battle won by the Confederacy, the work can be heard today as an anticipation of that regime's collapse - and as a soundtrack for the decommissioning of Confederate statues, those physically imposing paeans to Jim Crow that merely posture as history.

Since the end of the Great Migration in the 1960s, the African-American experience has been represented as almost exclusively urban. In "America's National Parks" (2017), the composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, rural son of a Mississippi Delta bluesman, reclaims the Western expanses that classical music has long ceded to Aaron Copland and Roy Harris.

Sections of "America's National Parks" refer to Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite - the country's national land trust (even if people are still harassed for hiking while Black). Another movement is named for the musicologist Eileen Southern, whose landmark 1971 book "The Music of Black Americans" is, as Mr. Smith puts it, "a literary national park."

Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), a major figure in the emergence of the transgressive new Black music of the 1960s, became a symbol of daring artistic mobility, in genre and practice, with his 1972 orchestral work "Skies of America." It is structured as a series of vignettes representing aspects of contemporary American life: "Holiday for Heroes," perhaps a reference to the Fourth of July; "Sunday in America," a possible nod to Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that "Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours in Christian America"; and "The Men Who Live in the White House," which I find reminiscent of John Williams's Copland-esque accompaniment to Richard Nixon's farewell speech in the Oliver Stone film "Nixon."

The operas of Anthony Davis - the recipient of this year's Pulitzer Prize for Music for "The Central Park Five" - are sonically audacious and politically pointed. "Amistad" (1997) concerns the 1839 revolt in which captured slaves took over their ship and demanded a return to Africa. They ended up in the United States, where an attempt to legally re-enslave them failed. As astonishing as Mr. Davis's music is Thulani Davis's libretto, which condenses John Quincy Adams's 130-page argument to the Supreme Court to a few potent lines that resonate this summer:

Here our laws permit bondage,

even beastly vengeance, within our shores.

But now with men taken hostage,

we seek to deny even nature's law.

This cannot stand

This cannot stand in our land.

George E. Lewis is a composer, a musicologist and the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University.

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Lifting the Cone of Silence From Black Composers

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Listen to how artists have explored what it means - and could mean - to be American. A cone of silence hangs over the work of Black composers from Africa and its diaspora. It is not that Black men and women have not written music, but too often it has been ignored - and thus assumed not to exist at all.

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Cosmas Magaya with his family mbira group in Zimbabwe - performing "Mahororo"

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Tanya Tagaq tells her story of #MyExperienceWithRacism #1

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The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery have galvanized protests against police brutality and the policies of a country that has forever held that Black lives don't matter. For many white people, this has been an awakening to the systemic oppression of BIPOC communities, a situation horrifying both because of its sheer magnitude and because of our long and willful refusal to see it.

Many people throughout our music communities have responded with calls for justice and pledges of allyship in the fight against white supremacy. Yet as we strive to create meaningful, substantive change, we must take care that our efforts actually confront these problems, rather than compound them. Amidst calls for more diversity in our pedagogy, we must recognize that diversity doesn't lead unfailingly to equity-a diverse curriculum rooted in Western art music is still a curriculum rooted in white supremacy.

Grounding a music degree's core curriculum in Western art music is an institutional declaration that this style of music is fundamentally more important than others. It's a statement that a pedagogy based in this singular style provides all the necessary knowledge for understanding "Music," or at least the music worth knowing. When we make a degree in music contingent on a student's ability to demonstrate proficiency in Western art music without requiring the same in other styles, we turn stylistic preference into institutional policy.

Attempting to understand something as richly varied as music through the lens of a single style is doomed to yield a monochromatic understanding of what music is and what music can be. This narrow lens then becomes the "neutral" framework with which students approach and attempt to understand other styles of music. Yet this framework is not neutral-Western art music is essentialized as the product of white male genius, and the normalization of this within the classroom is both a reflection and a reinscription of the normalization of our white supremacist patriarchal society.

As I wrote in " Teaching Inequality: Consequences of Traditional Music Theory Pedagogy," Western art music is not a universal language. It is not a better pedagogical tool, nor a necessary one-it covers some aspects of music well, others poorly, and many not at all. When academics require that any formal study of music start with an intensive study of Western art music, they unduly privilege certain musical elements, and they unduly privilege whiteness and maleness. It's easy to go from dismissing other styles of music to dismissing the people associated with those styles-the use of Western art music as "evidence" for white superiority is a literal white supremacist talking point. When white supremacist Donald Trump said, "we write symphonies," it was very clear whom his "we" included, and those who weren't included have borne the brunt of his abusive policies over the last three years. What we condone and what we condemn in the classroom matters.

We cannot diversify our way out of the deeply entrenched, pervasive whiteness and maleness of Western art music. Rather than reject an inherently flawed framework, we seek to validate it, and we court tokenism in the process.

This is not allyship. This is oppression.

What's worse, we can point to our now-diversified syllabi and convince ourselves that our work is finished. We can pretend that we've achieved justice-we haven't-and that justice is a static state-it's not. We can pass off the appearance of doing something in place of actually doing something. We can check a box and leave oppression unchecked.

For those reluctant to bring social justice initiatives into their classrooms, understand that your curriculum is already a political statement about what-and consequently who-is important. If you consider racism, sexism, and other identity-based forms of oppression to be unimportant, or to be other people's problems, you're perpetuating racism, sexism, and other identity-based forms of oppression. The default within a white supremacist system is not neutrality, but oppression. Education is never politically neutral.

When we don't acknowledge racism, sexism, ableism, class, or sexual preference-even though these all shape the music we study, the lives of those who make it, and the experiences of those who listen-we enable discrimination based on these identities. This has a profound impact on our lives and on the lives of our students. Pretending that we can set aside our humanity while in the classroom ensures that these forms of identity-based oppression will continue. Students learn from us whose voices are important and whose can be disregarded, and this helps determine their view of the world and the ways they engage with other people within it.

We need to embrace a transformative pedagogy, one that helps our students to become better people as well as better musicians. These aren't mutually exclusive goals, but they're often framed as such. Most of the people we teach will not become professional musicians, but they'll each make countless decisions throughout the day that will push us incrementally closer to or further from justice. As educators, it's not our place to make these decisions for them, but it's our responsibility to help open their eyes to what's actually at stake.

So what can we do?

We can start by taking responsibility for our own education, especially as it relates to systemic oppression. Read works by Black writers and thinkers like James Baldwin, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Search for antiracist reading lists and articles on critical race theory (see below for suggestions of where to start). Join conversations, but join as a listener first.

In terms of curriculum, developing a more inclusive approach to our current use of Western art music is essential, but it's only meaningful if we also change the curriculum to include other styles of music and place them on equal status with Western art music. We don't have to divest entirely from Western art music, but we do have to divest entirely from the notion of a stylistic hierarchy.

Questioning the curriculum begins with reflecting critically on what it is that we're actually teaching, the reasons why we're teaching it, and the reasons why we teach it in this particular way. What biases are we replicating through our pedagogy? How does oppression manifest in our classroom, our department, and our institutions, and what are we doing to disrupt it? These are just a few of the necessary questions to ask ourselves at the start of each semester and throughout the year.

In " Promoting Equity: Developing an Antiracist Music Theory Classroom," Michelle Ohnona and I argued for the necessity of disrupting the normalization of whiteness by making whiteness visible in the (music) classroom. Michelle and I presented a framework for developing an antiracist music theory classroom, based on centering students and using a polystylistic approach. While our work focused on music theory, I believe the principles of our approach could be modified as necessary to encourage similar changes throughout the music curriculum. My music theory course notes are available here.

To promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education as a whole, we must go beyond the syllabus and concentrate on identifying and dismantling the barriers that lock BIPOC people out of student, faculty, and administrative positions and lock white people in. White people must speak out decisively against oppressive ideas, policies, and colleagues. We will never have a more equitable society if we are not actively cultivating equity within our own communities.

Music is a social and cultural product, and we need to treat it as such. Compromising with white supremacy and patriarchy simply reinforces white supremacy and patriarchy. I'm sympathetic to the significant barriers to overhauling the way we teach music, but I'm not sympathetic to those who end the conversation because of them.

Coda

The latest volume of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies features a series of responses to Prof. Phil Ewell's 2019 Society of Music Theory plenary talk, " Music Theory's White Racial Frame." Much has already been written about the appalling racist nature of these responses-Prof. Kira Thurman provides some necessary context -and musicians on social media have responded with a widespread and well-deserved condemnation of the majority of the articles, their authors, and the gross misconduct by the editors of the journal, who did not invite Prof. Ewell to respond.

Oppression thrives in silence, and so these online condemnations are critical, especially as they seem poised to bring about changes offline. What's more critical, however, is fighting for the same principles within your own area of expertise, your department, your institution, among your friends and family, and throughout your life.

The issue of white supremacy within music education is so much larger than Schenker. Focusing only on overt white supremacy like that displayed in the recent Journal of Schenkerian Studies makes it tempting for white people to miss or to dismiss the less overt-though no less pernicious-white supremacy of a department requiring the standard three to four semesters of traditional music theory. How many of the people who condemned the actions of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies teach in a department like this?

I recognize that educators are faced with tremendous structural barriers and perverse incentives designed to perpetuate an unjust and abusive status quo within academia. I also recognize that this unjust and abusive status quo disproportionately harms people already marginalized by identity. Silent sympathies and good intentions do not overcome an inertia of oppression. What's your next move?

These are resources that I found particularly helpful-may they inspire you in your search for yours.

Sara Ahmed, On Being Included
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
James Baldwin, Collected Essays
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Tracy McMillan Cottom, Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility
Engaging Students
Philip Ewell, " Music Theory's White Racial Frame"
Fights We Done Already Had, Dangit
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Ethan Hein, " Toward a Better Music Theory" and " Teaching Whiteness in Music Class"
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Adrienne Keene, Introduction to Critical Race Theory course page
Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
Erika Lee, America for Americans
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music EducationTara Rodgers, Pink Noises
Cornell West, Race Matters

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Embracing a Transformative Pedagogy: Music Departments and White Supremacy

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The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery have galvanized protests against police brutality and the policies of a country that has forever held that Black lives don't matter.

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Like many academic debates, one currently rocking the music theory world is esoteric. But the controversy -- about the legacy of the late Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker -- has grown legs because it involves accusations of anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and, now, censorship.

Indeed, the University of North Texas is investigating its own press's Journal of Schenkerian Studies following a recent symposium on whether Schenker's known white supremacy pervaded his work. Graduate students and faculty members at North Texas and elsewhere have called the symposium racist and an example of editorial malfeasance.

The Society for Music Theory and Yale University's department of music have spoken out against the journal, as well. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, meanwhile, is defending it.

"I didn't expect this to make such a splash," said Philip Ewell, an associate professor of music theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York, on whose comments the symposium was based. "It's kind of strange to be in this position."

In any case, he said, at the heart of the matter is "latent white supremacy."
'White Racial Frame'
Late last year, when conferences still happened in person, Ewell delivered a plenary address at the society's annual conference. Ewell, who is Black, argued that Schenker's known white supremacist views informed his hierarchical approach to music theory. The talk, in which Ewell referred to Schenker as "an ardent racist and German nationalist," was part of a much longer, since-published paper on the "white racial frame" in music theory.

Ewell argued that music theory will only diversify through "deframing and reframing" that "structural and institutionalized" framework that Schenker helped build. He also pushed for a more diverse music theory curriculum. The talk was generally well received: Ewell enjoyed a standing ovation.

Soon after the talk, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, housed at North Texas, put out a call for papers responding to Ewell's plenary. Music theory is a traditionally white, male-dominated field and Ewell's comments -- underneath the applause -- apparently ruffled feathers.

Some of those who submitted articles agreed with Ewell's plenary and asked important follow-up questions about how to study, teach and write about great artists and scholars who were not-so-great people -- or even those who have been called " monstrous men." Others simply explained why they didn't see a link between white supremacy and Schenker's theories.

But some responses were highly critical of Ewell, even beyond typical academic sniping. One by Timothy Jackson, distinguished university research professor of theory at North Texas and a co-editor of Studies, was arguably the most critical of all: in it, Jackson seemed to accuse Ewell of anti-Semitism. Ewell in his talk did not discuss Schenker's Jewishness. But Schenker's wife was killed by Nazis and he likely would have ended up in their clutches if he'd lived past 1935.
'Bringing Blacks Up to "Standard"'
Ewell's "scapegoating" of Schenker and his intellectual descendants "occurs in the much larger context of Black-on-Jew attacks in the U.S.," Jackson wrote. Ewell "only attacks Schenker as a pretext to introduce his main argument: that liberalism is a racist conspiracy to deny rights to 'people of color.'"

Beginning a series of sweeping statements about Black values, culture and families, Jackson said Ewell "is uninterested in bringing Blacks up to 'standard' so they can compete. On the contrary, he is claiming that those very standards are in themselves racist." African Americans "have the right to embrace their own culture as precious -- i.e. rap music, hip hop, etc. -- and study and teach it in universities," he added, "so that the products of the 'defective,' 'racist' White culture -- i.e. classical music -- be shunted aside."

Jackson said Black people should set "different priorities" and that a "fundamental reason for the paucity of African-American women and men in the field of music theory is that few grow up in homes where classic music is profoundly valued."

Drawing comparison to his own white family, Jackson said that classical music was prized by his own working-class Jewish immigrant grandparents.

The line of thinking echoes, to some degree, a recently retracted commentary by Lawrence M. Mead in Society that blamed long-term poverty among Black and Latinx families on their "culture."
Demanding the Dissolution of the Journal
Finding the symposium disturbing, a group of music graduate students at North Texas petitioned their dean to publicly condemn the issue and investigate its editorial process, due to the apparent "horrendous lack of peer review, publication of an anonymous response and clear lack of academic rigor."

Going forward, the students also asked the dean and the greater university to dissolve the journal and discipline and potentially remove faculty members who used the journal "to promote racism."

A majority of the music history, theory and ethnomusicology program's faculty quickly endorsed the students' petition, saying in their own open letter that "responsible parties must be held appropriately accountable."

The "treatment of Prof. Ewell's work provides an example of the broader system of oppression built into the academic and legal institutions in which our disciplines exist," the professors wrote. "As faculty at the College of Music we must all take responsibility for not only publicly opposing racism in any form, but to address and eliminate systematic racism within our specific disciplines."

The graduate faculty in music at Yale, Ewell's alma mater, said a separate statement that it "rejects and condemns the racist and personal attacks on Prof. Ewell that appear in the most recent issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, and in particular the decisions by commissioning editors to include an anonymous critique and to exclude contributions from Prof. Ewell or indeed any scholar of color."

The whole symposium proves Ewell's points that "the white racial frame seeks to shield Schenker from unwanted criticism," the faculty said. " Studies failed to meet the scholarly and ethical standards that we expect of our discipline."

The Society for Music Theory executive board similarly condemned the "anti-Black statements and personal ad hominem attacks on Philip Ewell perpetuated in several essays included" in the symposium.

"The conception and execution of this symposium failed to meet the ethical, professional, and scholarly standards of our discipline," the board said. "Some contributions violate our Society's policies on harassment and ethics."
Investigation
North Texas said Thursday that it is committed to "academic freedom and the responsibility that goes along with this freedom. This dedication is consistent with, and not in opposition to, our commitment to diversity and inclusion and to the highest standards of scholarship and professional ethics."

As for the investigation, the university said it appointed a five-member multidisciplinary faculty panel "experienced in the editing and production of scholarly journals." Members, who are all outside the College of Music, "will examine objectively the processes followed in the conception and production" of the issue.

"The panel will seek to understand whether the standards of best practice in scholarly publication were observed and will recommend strategies to improve editorial processes where warranted," the university said. The resulting report will be made public.

Speaking to the fate of the journal, the university said Studies has made "many contributions to the understanding of music theory. We will continue to offer music theorists the opportunity to share and defend diverse viewpoints under the most rigorous academic standards and ethics."
The 'Cancel Mob'
Jackson did not respond to a request for comment. His lawyer, Michael Allen, said, "Please understand he is fighting to retain his job, his academic center, and the Journal of Schenkerian Studies that are currently under assault by a cancel mob. The stress has also severely affected his health."

FIRE has defended Jackson and the journal, writing to the university that "While some may find the viewpoints espoused by the Journal or Jackson, or the namesake of the Journal itself, to be deeply offensive, UNT has violated core principles of academic freedom -- and the First Amendment -- by initiating an investigation into the editorial practices and decisions of a journal produced by graduate students and faculty members." The journal should sort out its own internal issues, it said.

Of the graduate students' demands in particular, Samantha Harris, a senior fellow at FIRE, said in a statement, "If this doesn't send chills down your spine, I suggest you take another look at history. Each of us holds views that someone else would deem controversial. If we don't see our own freedom as threatened by this situation and the countless others like it, that freedom will perish swiftly and silently."
Refusing to Be 'Dehumanized'
Ewell said he values academic freedom, including his own, but he declined comment on the university's investigation. He questioned the journal's editorial practices, however, including the fact that he was not contacted to participate in the symposium.

"You can't have a debate if you don't invite one of the debaters to the debate," he said. "If they had just emailed me, I would have said, 'I'll shoot you a transcript if you want, and you might want to wait for the full article, which is about six times longer than my talk.'"

Ewell said some of the participants in the symposium sent him their pieces prior to publication, and he thanked them for doing so. But the general push to publish was about other contributors "being incensed very much about whiteness being challenged by Blackness."

Currently on vacation, Ewell said he'd seen some of "worst comments" being circulated online. He characterized them as anti-Black in that they express assimilationist but still racist views: that Black people should aspire to whiteness.

Ewell hasn't read the whole symposium and doesn't plan on doing so in the foreseeable future.

"I refuse to participate in my own dehumanization."

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Music theory journal criticized for symposium on supposed white supremacist theorist

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Like many academic debates, one currently rocking the music theory world is esoteric. But the controversy -- about the legacy of the late Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker -- has grown legs because it involves accusations of anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism and, now, censorship.

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Kira Thurman Twitter Conversation
https://twitter.com/kira_thurman/status/1287354686077575168

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I wrote up a thread on Twitter yesterday summarizing the worst takes in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies Vol. 12, which responds to Phil Ewell's plenary talk at SMT 2019 on what he calls Music Theory's White Racial Frame. In this blog post I want to build on that by pointing out how many of the responses raise concerns/questions that Ewell already addressed in his keynote. Instead of referencing the keynote video, which is a bit harder to navigate, I'll use his recent publication that is built on that talk.

In this post I'd like to highlight what I consider one of the most egregious failings of the issue: that so many of the published critiques were already addressed by Ewell in his talk and other scholarship (and for that matter, by other scholars too). Had these comments below been given proper review, their authors might have been able to frame their comments more productively.

On that note, here are some of the common points made by the responses and including quotes from various authors along those lines, followed by Ewell's own words that have preemptively addressed these critiques.

Everyone's a Little Bit Racist: Schenker's racism as a product of its time

David Beach: "I do not offer any excuses for these comments, but I do want to stress that it is important to understand the contexts under which they-at least some of them-were made."

Timothy Jackson: "Schenker's many earlier anti-French, anti-British, anti-American, and anti-Black vituperations- before, during, and after World War I-must be interpreted in the context of that war and its aftermath, in which these nations were all perceived enemies of Germany and Austria, and of German scientific racism. Furthermore, it must be recognized that racist and genocidal thinking was common among German intellectuals from the late twentieth century forward."

Anonymous (yep, really, a published anonymous response in an academic journal): "That Schenker, or anyone else alive during the turn-of-the-century time period, espoused racist views is completely unremarkable. For Schenker to have not, at some point, hold those beliefs would be truly exceptional."

Timothy Jackson: "German scientific racism-with genocidal implications-had become ubiquitous in German culture by the beginning of the twentieth century, and one would be hard pressed to find educated Germans at that time who remained uninfluenced. Therefore, we should not be at all surprised that some of Schenker's earlier statements decrying racial mixture reflect this mindset..."

Nicholas Cook: "What we can say is that Schenker believed in some form of cultural evolutionary'theory, implying that white people represent a higher stage of human development than the 'more primitive races' to which he referred. Clearly we would regard that as racist today, but the fact is that such thinking is found in a great deal of writing from the high point of imperialism a century or so ago; it wasn't exceptional, in the way that the extremity of Schenker's political beliefs was. The difference in worldview between now and then is something we should always attend to when we engage with the writings or more generally the culture of that period."

Schenker's views on race were extreme, to be sure, but he was certainly not alone. Hugo Riemann, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and many others on whose theories we rely all believed in German-and almost certainly white-superiority. ... In fact, much of how we understand race in the U.S. is part of a global western understanding of race that is, in fact, written by white persons. It is therefore unsurprising that white Schenker scholars do not point out the racialized aspects of the man and his work in the same way I do as a nonwhite. And it is exactly these nonwhite perspectives on race that are ignored or glossed over in global race theory, as described above by Heng.
Ewell 2020, par. 4.7.1

Unsurprisingly, Ewell is already aware that a lot of people were racist in the 19th century; the impacts of this should be scrutinized, though, and not ignored or excused.

#AllLivesMatter: Schenker wasn't just racist against Black people, and Schenker was Jewish, so.

Barry Wiener: "When Japan prepared to enter World War I on the side of Great Britain, Schenker simultaneously reviled the Japanese and the English ... In fact, Schenker condemned all of Germany's enemies equally-including the English, French, Italians, and Anglo-Americans-as members of primitive races ... As we have seen, for Schenker at the time, almost everyone on earth fit into the categories of 'wild and half-wild peoples,' and 'primitive nations and races," except for the Germans.'"

Timothy Jackson: "To be sure, the Great War provides ·the essential framework within which one must interpret Schenker's earlier anti-French, anti-British, anti-American, and also anti-Black comments in his diary and letters. Indeed, readers of Schenker's diary cannot ignore the extent and breadth of its author's virulent, visceral hatred of the French, a white race..."

Timothy Jackson again: "On the contrary, demagogues from the extreme right and left, Black Nationalist-and also White Nationalist-and also in academe, continue to legitimize scapegoating 'the Jews' for every conceivable ill. In this sense, Ewell's denunciation of Schenker and Schenkerians may be seen as part and parcel of the much broader current of Black anti-Semitism."

Nicholas Cook: "I am uncomfortable with a discussion of Schenker's racism that doesn't engage with the way in which racism impinged on his own life. ... And we should never forget that Schenker's wife Jeanette was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 and died there in 1945; I suppose Heinrich would have shared her fate had he lived long enough. In short, Schenker knew what it was to be a member of a racially marked minority."

One of the main goals of our white racial frame is to take the focus off of whiteness, and one of its main methods for doing so is, if the topic turns to whiteness, to immediately invoke other marginalized groups, thereby diminishing whiteness's role. I therefore, with this work, focus like a laser beam on whiteness and how it manifests itself in our field. I look forward to turning my attention to how our white frame intersects with all marginalized groups in the future, but for now I focus primarily on whiteness-first things first.
Ewell 2020, par. 1.4

Being Jewish or part of any other marginalized group does not excuse racism. Ewell notes that intersectionality is real and complex, but intersectionality isn't meant to obviate critique of whiteness and anti-Blackness.

You're So Articulate: Some Black Music Is Schenkable

David Beach: "My suggestion to Philip Ewell is that he stop complaining about us white guys and publish some sophisticated analytical graphs of works by black composers. I, for one, would welcome into the analytical canon works by both black and women composers."

Jack Boss: "It seems as if Philip Ewell has portrayed Heinrich Schenker as arguing from the premise that musical works of genius build themselves out from an Ursatz through diminution, and reaching the conclusion that Black musicians cannot produce works of genius. [But we can use] the premises of Schenkerian analysis to lead to the opposite conclusion; that Black musicians did indeed produce works of genius, works which ornamented their structures in new and fascinating ways, and are worthy of our study."

Allan Cadwallader: "I have spent my entire career involved with Schenker's work, mostly with his theories and his analyses alone, marveling at the musical insights they can reveal about a certain repertoire. Let us expand that repertoire and celebrate diversity in scholarship and in the classroom."

Timothy Jackson: "The great tradition of classical music includes Black, Jewish, and female composers, and remains, as Schenker ultimately recognized, an 'elitism of the hearing of the spirit, not of race.'"

The first solution the white frame will think of to solving the racial imbalance will likely be to find examples by Chevalier Saint-Georges, William Grant Still, and Scott Joplin. But stocking our textbooks with musical examples by these black composers is not the solution to this problem, which is a result of framing western functional tonality as the only organizational force in music worthy of music theory's consideration in the music-theory classroom. ... The fact that many of the ideas from functional tonality appear in so many of the world's musics is a direct result of the power of colonialism and hegemony. Thus, the problem of our white frame in our music curricula concerns not only the repertoire that we study, but also the music theories behind the repertoire."
Ewell 2020, par. 3.4

Ewell says that it's not enough, or even really a solution, to make an effort to include Black musicians if we are still operating within a curriculum/methodology that is built to support white musicians first.

OK fine, Schenker was racist, but his theories definitely have nothing to do with that, so we're good to go here

Barry Wiener: "While for Schenker, theory and musicology are tightly connected, there is no obvious connection between his politics and his musical ideas, other than the idea that some composers apply the laws of art in more creative ways than others."

Steven Slottow: "Schenker may have believed at some points in the evolution of his thought that his various political and racial beliefs were indistinguishable from his music theory and analytical methodology, but his successors haven't agreed, finding something very valuable in the latter but not in the former."

Boyd Pomeroy: "The facts are not seriously in question: Schenker was a deeply flawed and conflicted character whose virulently nationalist and racist views are unpalatable by any standards. ... But what of Ewell's evidence for his claim of racism's foundational role in the theory itself? It is, to put it mildly, flimsy."

Rich Pellegrin: "Hierarchy is natural, often a matter of life and death, and is in and all around us-from the fractal, branching structures of our circulatory and nervous systems to those of rivers and snowflakes; from networks of paths and roadways to electrical, plumbing, and delivery systems; and from rhythm and meter in tonal music to harmony and voice leading. It is only in social and political systems that hierarchy becomes oppressive, due to the human capacity for abuse of power."

Timothy Jackson: "Ewell argues, probably correctly, that Schenker would have objected [to moving his racist views to appendices rather than including them in the main text of Free Composition]. However, it is indeed possible-even desirable-to separate the technical musical-analytical aspects of Schenker's theory from most of his philosophical, political, and aesthetic claims..."

Allan Cadwallader: "My point is that Schenker was a practical theorist who drew upon practical musical ideas from the past. To espouse their principles, and the repertoire from which they are drawn, is at worst exclusionary, not racist. I believe that John Rothgeb was correct in asserting that Schenker's musical thought is 'not at all dependent on any of his extra-musical speculations,' despite what Schenker himself might have believed."

Charles Burkhardt: "[Ewell] is quite right to deplore Schenker's racism, but goes way over the top when he equates Schenker's ideas on the inequality of the races with his statement on the inequality of the tones of the scale, and, likewise, equates white control over blacks with the Urlinie's control of the subsequent structural levels. This is to confuse apples with oranges to an extreme degree. If Schenker actually believed such nonsense, he was simply wrong (and not for the first time)."

David Beach: "[Ewell] states that Schenker's anti-black racism informed his theory. This is simply not correct. Schenker developed his ideas about musical structure by studying the music of the great masters (indeed a group of white guys!), and one of the bases of his criticism of music he considered inferior was that they lack what he had observed in the 'masterworks.' .So, his views on black music did not inform his theory; rather it was his theory that led him to view the music of other cultures as lacking."

I feel that Ewell's entire talk/essay is about the inseparability of racism from music theory, so allow me to quote several passages.

Colorblind racism is the most significant form of racism in music theory's white racial frame and has been used for decades to dismiss those who wish to cite our racialized structures and ideologies. "What do music and music theory have to do with race?" is a common colorblind refrain, which accomplishes two goals: it allows for music theory's white-framed theorist to appear to be on the right side of racism, while allowing the very same racialized structures, put in place to benefit white persons, to remain foundational in the field without appearing racist.
Ewell 2020, par. 2.3

One of music theory's greatest feats is its ability to sever its own past from the present. If some historical aspect of a theory is unseemly or unsavory, we typically bury it, and move on. What, after all, do political, social, and cultural attitudes have to do with the content of someone's underlying theoretical thought? ... To put this another way, to consider these theories ahistorically is to surgically remove all traces of racism, insofar as racist strains do nothing to advance the theories in question, all of which allows the white racial frame music theorist to reside in a music-theoretical Witness Protection Program, never to be held accountable with respect to the difficult questions concerning race and whiteness.
Ewell 2020, par. 4.1.3

[Nicholas] Cook, in a parenthetical comment, makes it clear that he believes linking Schenker's racism to his musical theories is unhelpful ... What Cook means to say here is that it is unhelpful insofar as it calls attention to race-that is, unhelpful to music theory's white racial frame. I, however, happen to think it is extremely helpful, in terms of understanding how we deal with race in music theory, to draw this 'obvious parallel.' Finally, I point out that Cook's comment corresponds directly to white-frame belief that it would be inappropriate to critically examine race in music theory."Ewell 2020, 4.3.4

The respondents claiming that we can easily detach racism from theory seem to be willfully deluding themselves and ignoring what Ewell said in the first place.

Wake up.

These responses are written by people with phds and long careers in the humanities, yet they have allowed themselves to remain blind to some of the most obvious problems with their claim. I am disappointed with several of these scholars for refusing to apply the critical thinking and nuance they use every day in their teaching and research to something as important as these issues are. In 2020, they should do better. I'm infuriated (but not really surprised) that our current climate of hyperawareness toward race in academia and in broader US society seems not to have prompted these scholars to reflect on their own participation in the white racial framing of our field.

If any of these scholars happen to read this blog post someday: please, reread Ewell's article, and find your own arguments rebutted in it. You need to engage with those rebuttals in order to have responsibly held up your side of the bargain in this "scholarly exchange" (such as it is). Read some critical race theory. If you believe in anti-racism in other aspects of life, such as policing, housing, etc., try applying that to music theory too. Reflect on how Schenker's own framing and our acceptance of it might lead to this issue and the entire journal's editorial board being entirely white men plus one white woman (as far as I can tell; I could be mistaken); to Schenkerian conference programs and bibliographies being dominated by white men; to the music we spend time with and care about the most to be dominated by white men. Consider that maybe your defensive reaction comes more from personal pride and discomfort, rather than something more objective. Our growth as a field depends on our ability to critically self-reflect.

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Journal of Schenkerian Studies: Proving the Point

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I wrote up a thread on Twitter yesterday summarizing the worst takes in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies Vol. 12, which responds to Phil Ewell's plenary talk at SMT 2019 on what he calls Music Theory's White Racial Frame.

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Inspired by Naomi André's vision of an "engaged musicology" ( 2018), the members of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group collectively assembled the following bibliography to encourage music scholars to engage directly with issues of cultural politics-race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, intersectionality, decolonization, and disability-in their research and teaching. We especially highlight scholarly work that confronts the centralized, historically Eurocentric and heteropatriarchal framing of North American music theory. Thus we include scholarship that has explicitly and significantly intervened in our field's established practices at the time of publication, especially in terms of subject position, topic, methodology, and repertoire. While this list is not meant to be exhaustive, we hope it offers a starting point for engaged music theoretical research. It focuses primarily on music theoretical work as well as directly relevant scholarship from musicology and ethnomusicology.

The bibliography purposefully omits work by scholars who do not self-identify as music theorists or musicologists, but whose work is indispensable to the aims of our group. A list of these authors would include Sara Ahmed, Daphne Brooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Christina Sharpe, Eve Tuck, and Alexander G. Weheliye, among many others. We strongly encourage anyone who is interested in the goals of our group to read and cite this body of scholarship.

Please contact the administrators of this group at engagedmusictheory@gmail.com if you require assistance accessing any of the items on this list.
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Attas, Robin. "Music Theory as Social Justice: Pedagogical Applications of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly." Music Theory Online 25/1 (2019). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.19.25.1/mto.19.25.1.attas.html

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21stcentury

Ewell, Philip A. "Introduction to the Symposium on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly." Music Theory Online 25/1 (2019). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.19.25.1/mto.19.25.1.ewell.html

blackmusic

hiphop

popularmusisc

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21stcentury

Maxile, Jr., Horace J. "Extensions to the Pedagogical Canon: Expanding Perspectives on William Grant Still and the Teaching Applications as Realized in the Seven Traceries." College Music Symposium Vol. 55 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.18177/sym.2015.55.sr.10881

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About

The members of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group are:

Group Members
Clifton Boyd(he/him/his)
Michael Bruschi (he/him/his)
Samuel Chan (he/him/his)
Kristi Hardman (she/her/hers)
Mariusz Kozak (he/him/his)
Kara Yoo Leaman (she/her/hers)
Stephen Lett (he/him/his)
Vivian Luong (she/her/hers)
Nathan Pell (he/him/his)
Danielle Shlomit Sofer (they/them/theirs/she/her/hers)
Noel Torres-Rivera (he/him/his)

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Inspired by Naomi André's vision of an "engaged musicology" ( 2018), the members of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group collectively assembled the following bibliography to encourage music scholars to engage directly with issues of cultural politics-race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, intersectionality, decolonization, and disability-in their research and teaching.

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From Beethoven to Broadway, pianist and composer Rob Kapilow reveals the heart of the music with a touch of humor and humility.

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During my freshman year at college, I was fortunate enough to take an inspiring art history course with a wonderful professor named Robert Herbert. Before taking the class, I had enjoyed going to museums, liked certain paintings, didn't like others, but overall hadn't given much thought or attention to why. I knew what I liked, and that was enough.

In addition to classroom lectures, every Friday we would go to the Yale Art Gallery and spend an entire session on a single painting. These sessions were a revelation to me. I realized that I had never really looked closely at a painting. I was astonished week after week to realize how much I had completely missed in paintings that I thought I knew. Each week, prodded by the professor's careful attention, a painting would materialize before my eyes as if for the very first time. The course began to teach me the difference between looking and seeing.

What Makes It Great?® began for me with that course. In some ways music poses even more difficulties than art because it refuses to sit still for us. It happens in real time. And in great music, so much goes by-so quickly-that it requires enormous attention to hear it all.

That is what What Makes It Great?® is really about: Listening. Paying attention. Noticing all the fantastic things that might otherwise go by. When you begin to hear the things that make a piece great, it can spring to life as if you have never heard it before.

During each What Makes It Great?® program we take a piece of great music, tear it apart, and put it back together again. We rewrite it, sing it, tap it, clap it: in short, we do everything in our power to get inside to see what makes it tick and what makes it great. Then on the second half of the program we hear the piece performed in its entirety-hopefully with a new pair of ears. If my art history class was about the difference between looking and seeing, What Makes It Great?® is about the difference between hearing and listening.

-Rob Kapilow

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During my freshman year at college, I was fortunate enough to take an inspiring art history course with a wonderful professor named Robert Herbert. Before taking the class, I had enjoyed going to museums, liked certain paintings, didn't like others, but overall hadn't given much thought or attention to why.

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Especially during a pandemic, the graying of audiences has been seen as a sign of precariousness. But maybe these older listeners are a lifeline.

Credit... Holly Stapleton

The coronavirus pandemic poses a grave challenge to all of the performing arts. There are few ways to mitigate the risk from packing performers and audiences tightly together without fundamentally altering the experience of these art forms, which thrive on crowds.

Yet classical music has been singled out as being especially vulnerable at this challenging moment. Why? Because of the perception that its audiences lean toward the senior set. "In many places in America," David Rohde wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, "the classical audience is a snapshot of the most vulnerable population for bad Covid-19 outcomes."

It's true that classical music tends to attract older patrons, and that seniors are indeed the most vulnerable to the virus. The average age of the audience at the Metropolitan Opera last season was 57, the same as at the New York Philharmonic. About 62 percent of the Philharmonic's audience was 55 and older. (By contrast, the average age of the Broadway audience has hovered between 40 and 45 for the past two decades.)

The relative scarcity of younger people is discouraging. Especially the fact that just 24 percent of the Philharmonic's audience was younger than 40, people who may well have developed habits around the culture they do (and don't) consume that could last the rest of their lives.

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The closing night gala at the old Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. Credit... Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times

But the current fretting over classical music feels all too familiar: Yet again, aging audiences are pointed to as an ominous indicator that this art form continues on a slow, inexorable death spiral. The support structure for any of the performing arts cannot be sustainably based on older patrons and subscribers; at least that's the assumption, for which the only answer entails elaborate efforts to court new and younger audiences. In recent years, the Paris Opera inaugurated an ambitious program to catch the attention of people in their 20s with edgy promotional videos and to bring thousands of them to preview performances at discount ticket prices. "You have to find your public by taking risks," the company's general director, Stéphane Lissner, said in 2018.

Of course he's right. And the company has had success with the campaign. Still, elements of dismaying ageism run through the chronic bemoaning over the graying of classical and opera audiences, something that bothered me even before I entered this older demographic myself.

For one thing, audiences for classical music have always tended to be older. Demographic surveys from earlier eras are spotty. But images and television broadcasts make plain that even back in the 1960s, when Leonard Bernstein was galvanizing the Philharmonic and attracting young people like me to his concerts, audiences were dominated by those in their 50s and older. Yet, year after year, devoted older fans continued to appear. This suggests that the over-50 demographic keeps reproducing itself inside concert halls, a sign that at a certain point in their lives, many people start attending classical concerts, even if they did not when they were 20 or 30.

A study commissioned by 15 orchestras and published in 2002 found that about half of those ensembles' subscribers were 65 or older, and that 17 percent were 75 or older. Things haven't changed much in the past 20 years: Last season at the Met, the average age of subscribers was 65. (These days, few people of any age want to commit to buying tickets many months in advance, so the overall numbers of subscribers are widely decreasing - which is worrisome for organizations that have based their business models on this system.)

Classical music should do its best to cultivate new listeners - to be accessible to anyone who might want to participate. But having an aging audience is not necessarily dire.

At classical events, you tend to encounter more people with walkers, and to see older couples steadying each other as they make their ways to seats. Yet isn't that a testimony to the devotion of loyal patrons? It may take some doing to get to a performance, but they make the effort; they're not at home watching television. During a recent online panel sponsored by the League of American Orchestras, several artists and administrators commented that classical music attracts passionate fans, including older ones, and that institutions should cherish and serve that passion.

Many institutions seem to tie cultivating younger audiences to presenting newer repertory. But it's hard to generalize by age group about what kinds of music will bring in which audience members. I've argued for years that orchestras and opera companies inordinately beholden to standard repertory are not speaking to younger people who are instinctively curious about new, more adventurous work in all of the arts.

And it's always heartening to see many younger people turn up when an ensemble presents something new and bold, like the Philharmonic's 2019 premiere of Julia Wolfe's searing, multimedia oratorio "Fire in my mouth." Those coveted millennials have been ever-present, in my experience, at the Philharmonic's Sound On concerts of contemporary music.

The Coronavirus Outbreak ›

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated August 6, 2020

Why are bars linked to outbreaks?

Think about a bar. Alcohol is flowing. It can be loud, but it's definitely intimate, and you often need to lean in close to hear your friend. And strangers have way, way fewer reservations about coming up to people in a bar. That's sort of the point of a bar. Feeling good and close to strangers. It's no surprise, then, that bars have been linked to outbreaks in several states. Louisiana health officials have tied at least 100 coronavirus cases to bars in the Tigerland nightlife district in Baton Rouge. Minnesota has traced 328 recent cases to bars across the state. In Idaho, health officials shut down bars in Ada County after reporting clusters of infections among young adults who had visited several bars in downtown Boise. Governors in California, Texas and Arizona, where coronavirus cases are soaring, have ordered hundreds of newly reopened bars to shut down. Less than two weeks after Colorado's bars reopened at limited capacity, Gov. Jared Polis ordered them to close.

I have antibodies. Am I now immune?

As of right now, that seems likely, for at least several months. There have been frightening accounts of people suffering what seems to be a second bout of Covid-19. But experts say these patients may have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies, which are protective proteins made in response to an infection. These antibodies may last in the body only two to three months, which may seem worrisome, but that's perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University. It may be possible to get the coronavirus again, but it's highly unlikely that it would be possible in a short window of time from initial infection or make people sicker the second time.

I'm a small-business owner. Can I get relief?

The stimulus bills enacted in March offer help for the millions of American small businesses. Those eligible for aid are businesses and nonprofit organizations with fewer than 500 workers, including sole proprietorships, independent contractors and freelancers. Some larger companies in some industries are also eligible. The help being offered, which is being managed by the Small Business Administration, includes the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. But lots of folks have not yet seen payouts. Even those who have received help are confused: The rules are draconian, and some are stuck sitting on money they don't know how to use. Many small-business owners are getting less than they expected or not hearing anything at all.

What are my rights if I am worried about going back to work?

What is school going to look like in September?

It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California's two largest public school districts - Los Angeles and San Diego - said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won't be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation's largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There's no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.

But the whole story, I've found, is more nuanced. It's easy to overstate the instinctive curiosity of young people for new music, and unfair to assume that older people are conservative in their tastes and resistant to contemporary work. True, over the years the majority of notes I've received from readers complaining of some awful new piece they had to endure - "another 20 minutes of my life that I can't get back," one person wrote recently - have come from those who cite many decades of concertgoing to back up their assessments. But you can't attribute such close-minded attitudes to age. Lots of young people are similarly resistant.

Programs of ambitious contemporary fare still draw plenty of older people - many of whom, from my observations, seem eager to be there. This was certainly the case last summer for the premieres of two wrenching and timely operas on racial themes: "Fire Shut Up in My Bones," at Opera Theater of St. Louis, and "Blue," at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y.

For some time now, I've seen the main challenge of engaging new classical music audiences - of all ages - as related to diminishing attention spans in an era of nonstop connectivity. Whether a piece you're hearing is a compact Haydn string quartet or a teeming orchestral work, an audience at a concert has to settle in and really pay attention to a performance that, for all the dynamic involvement of the musicians, offers only so much visual stimulation. Classical music should embrace this reality and promote performances as rare opportunities to disconnect, at least for a while, from the digital life outside. Seated in an inviting hall with good acoustics, you enter a musical realm that a composer has created, passed on through the artistry of superb musicians.

This isn't necessarily a generational issue. Philip Glass's opera "Akhnaten" asks listeners to give themselves over to music that on the surface may seem strangely repetitive and hypnotic, starting from the first ripples in the orchestra. It's long and unchanging - and it had a sold-out run at the Met last fall, with lots of young people in the audiences.

Whether old or young, if you have the patience to embrace such experiences, you are primed to love classical music. If you're too fidgety, then this art form is probably not for you. It may be that simple, whether you're 25 or 75.

At this challenging moment, when new social protocols are being worked out and a deadly pandemic lingers, there has been a disturbing undercurrent in America, an exacerbation of existing societal trends, that marginalizes older people. This reached its zenith when the lieutenant governor of Texas said in March that "lots of grandparents" would be willing to sacrifice themselves to facilitate the opening of the economy. The implication of this disturbing argument is that old people are expendable.

In working so hard to engage younger people, classical music institutions must be careful, now more than ever, not to take older members its audiences for granted. These veteran music lovers keep showing up - something for the field to celebrate, not fret over.

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Classical Music Attracts Older Audiences. Good.

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Especially during a pandemic, the graying of audiences has been seen as a sign of precariousness. But maybe these older listeners are a lifeline. The coronavirus pandemic poses a grave challenge to all of the performing arts.

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🔊 Listen Now: Reframing History: The Commentator

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Today the foundations of philosophy are seen as a straight line from Western antiquity, built on thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. But, between the 8th c...

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