Moving Beyond Music Theory’s White Racial Frame

Talk about spectacle: the Triumphal March in act two of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at New York’s Metropolitan Opera house features four horses, six trumpeters, 16 dancers, 94 chorus members, 150 actors, 30 bows and quivers, 41 swords, and 62 spears.

You, however, will never get a chance to see this marvel.

After 268 performances, Sonja Frisel’s staging is now retired, no doubt in part because of the production’s expense, the shrinking audience for this warhorse and, I suspect, criticism of this this production of Aida as the epitome of Orientalism in opera—the stereotyped and colonialist ways that the production represents Asia and especially North Africa.

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In Edward Said’s pointed words: given European ventures in Egypt around 1870, Aida is “not so much about but of imperial domination.” As he explains,

Certainly, Aida, which premiered in 1871, embodies a European fascination with the non-Western world. With its unrestrained pageantry, lavish sets, extravagant costumes, elaborate props and music that uses Eastern scales, the opera does offer a highly romanticized depiction of pharaonic Egypt as exotic, violent and uncivilized. The featured characters’ portrayal as ferociously emotional does reflect European cultural stereotypes, and its plot certainly reflects a colonialist perspective of a violent and “savage” East.

And yet, Aida—with its sweeping melodies; intricate harmonies and powerful orchestration; richly drawn, emotional complex characters; and dramatic story of love, jealousy, duty, sacrifice and the conflict between familial and national loyalty—is nevertheless one of 19th-century opera’s greatest artistic achievements.

Which raises the issues of how to treat works that convey retrograde views or that are products of a very different cultural milieu. As I shall argue, it will require us to do more than broaden the existing canon, but to encourage the development of new works that reflect contemporary sensibilities.

My view of 19th-century opera embodies and reflects arguments that Friedrich Nietzsche made about the works of Richard Wagner, before the two broke over the German composer’s antisemitism, extreme nationalism, embrace of Christianity, cultural pessimism and musical excess and bombast:

• That opera represented a supreme effort to revive the spirit of the ancient Greek tragedy, which provided a forum in which a community could confront suffering and tragedy and nevertheless find meaning, beauty and catharsis in the experience.
• That opera represented a grand synthesis of art forms; it was what Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” that integrated music, drama, dance, poetry and visual arts into a single, unified, deeply immersive artistic experience.
• That opera was the most emotionally intense art form, with its richly expressive arias and recitatives, chromaticism, leitmotifs, and dramatic orchestration that gave psychological depth to the stories it told and provoked a profoundly emotional response in its audience. As in ancient Greek tragedy, the passionate emotional outbursts of the opera’s characters conveyed the irrational, while the chorus served as a collective emotional voice.
• That opera, more successfully than any other art form, combined the Apollonian (the rational and orderly) and the Dionysian (the emotional and the chaotic) and grappled with profound philosophic and cultural themes involving love in its myriad forms, sacrifice, redemption and tragedy.

The great operas offer spectacle and emotional impact on a scale unmatched by any other mode of cultural expression. Opera combines:

• The visual—elaborate sets, costumes and stage design;
• The aural—singing that involves extensive vocal range, resonance, oscillation of pitch and dramatic ornamented, at times acrobatic performances of complex musical passages in tandem with vivid, richly textured, expressive, complexly structured orchestral music;
• Dance and movement—often including ballet and group dances;
• Dramatic storytelling—often rooted in myths and historical epic; and
• Scale—including extensive casts and choruses.

Opera, at its most powerful, offers an immersive, overpowering experience that is transcendent and transformative. Is it beyond our society’s composers’ ability to produce new works that can draw upon more diverse musical traditions and speak to our time?

All of which brings me to an important, if extraordinarily controversial, new book by my former Hunter College colleague, Philip Ewell, a professor of music theory. Entitled On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcome for Everyone, this book, which combines history, memoir and prescriptions for the future, is part of the University of Michigan Press’s Music and Social Justice Series, and its overarching argument is that the canon of Western music is “a mythological human construct meant, in very large part, to enshrine white-male dominance in the academic study of music.” “Falsely imagined and narrowly conceived,” the canon enshrines particular composers and musical forms that ensures the canon’s whiteness.

You probably remember the controversy that swirled in 2019 around The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which had a paid circulation of only about 30 copies a year. Ewell, a cellist and a scholar of Russian classic music, had delivered a paper to the Society for Music Theory, which “described music theory as dominated by white males and beset by racism” and “held up the theorist Heinrich Schenker, who died in Austria in 1935, as an exemplar of that flawed world, a ‘virulent racist’ who wrote of ‘primitive’ and ‘inferior’ races—views, he argued, that suffused his theories of music.”

The journal published 15 responses to Ewell’s address, five favorable, 10 harshly critical. The Society for Music Theory’s executive board subsequently criticized the journal for publishing “several essays [that] contained ‘anti-Black statements and personal ad hominem attacks,’” ignoring peer review and failing to invite Ewell to respond to his critics.

To the uninitiated, Schenkerian analysis is an influential approach to understanding the structure and organization of Western classical music developed by Schenker. Even though this method is, at times, criticized as overly prescriptive, complex and difficult to apply to many types of music that aren’t tonic in a classical sense, it can, nonetheless, offer insights into the way that a composer arranges, shapes, develops, embellishes and transforms a piece’s tones, notes, harmonies, voices and other component devices in order to understand a work’s emotional impact and thematic development.

With his distinctive vocabulary, which includes such terms as hierarchical levels, prolongation, reduction, voice leading, linear progressions and motivic coherence, Schenker helped make the analysis of music seem more scientific. Schenker, as one commentator observed, was “part of a larger European movement that seeks to understand underlying structures in human activity: [Ferdinand ] de Saussure in linguistics (and much later Chomsky), Vladimir Propp and many others in literary criticism, Durkheim in sociology, Levi-Strauss in anthropology and perhaps even Freud.”

Why should we care about a seemingly narrow in-house academic dispute? Isn’t this merely one more example of the hoary adage “in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake”?

In fact, much is at stake in this controversy. There’s the specific question: Are racist and classist ideas of hierarchy embedded within the Schenker’s approach to harmonic analysis? Then there’s a more general issue: Why is it that after more than a quarter century of efforts, the major conservatories orchestras and opera companies remain “remarkably white, not only in terms of the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges”?

In his new book, Ewell looks at how the field of music theory has addressed issues of race; offers racial and demographic data about music theory textbooks; examines the development of the Western musical canon; analyzes Schenker’s legacies and the Journal of Schenkerian Studies controversy; offers a description of how Music Theory Online sought to suppression publication of Ewell’s “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” essay; and provides examples of antisemitism within his discipline.

To address the issue of bias within the field of music theory, Ewell draws upon a conceptual framework developed by the Texas A&M sociologist Joe R. Feagin. The white racial frame “encompasses not only the stereotyping, bigotry and racist ideology emphasized in other theories of ‘race,’ but also the visual images, array of emotions, sounds of accented language, interlinking interpretations and narratives and inclinations to discriminate that” normalize and perpetuate inequality. This worldview, instilled in schools and other key cultural institutions, is, in Feagin’s view, is “essential to the routine legitimation, scripting and maintenance of systemic racism in the United States,” with a profound impact “on public policymaking, immigration, the environment, health care and crime and imprisonment issues.”

The white racial frame treats Western European ideas and practices as the essential standard of cultural achievement. In music theory, this frame, Ewell argues, is reflected in a series of euphemisms for whiteness: “authentic, canonic, civilized, classic(s), conventional, core (‘core’ requirement), European, function (‘functional’ tonality), fundamental, genius, German (‘German’ language requirement), great (‘great’ works), maestro, opus (magnum ‘opus’), piano (‘piano’ proficiency, skills), seminal, sophisticated, titan(ic), towering, traditional and western.”

Ewell does not hold back his punches. At his most provocative, he has written, “To state that Beethoven was any more than, say, above average as a composer is to state that you know all music written on planet Earth 200 years ago when Beethoven was active as a composer, which no one does.” He also insists that “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is ‘no more a masterwork than [the Grammy winner jazz bassist, singer, songwriter and composer] Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells.’” He also called for the removal of Stephen Foster’s minstrel songs from music theory textbooks.

In addition, he calls on graduate programs in music theory to scrap German language requirements, do more than add a few composers of color to music theory textbooks and welcome those scholars who have decamped for the more diverse field of ethnomusicology.

He calls out a series of rationalizations for inaction:

• If music theory is so flawed, what would you have it replaced with?
• We would love to have another [nonwhite] music theorist, but we don’t see any really qualified candidates.
• We will judge the qualifications of the candidate (or dissertation, article, proposal, etc.) based solely on the merits of the case—race has nothing to do with it.
• But that’s not really music theory, is it?

To move beyond the racialized frame of European concern music, Ewell calls on conservatories orchestras and opera companies to:

• Expand the music theory curriculum to include non-Western music theories and repertoires that reside outside traditions of Western tonality and nurture students who value pluralism and diversity and demonstrate global musical awareness.
• Challenge and dismantle the racialized structures and frameworks that dominate music theory, “with respect to the composers we choose to analyze and teach and the theorists we tend to study and admire.”
• Decenter Western classical music education in favor of new academic tracks like “sound recording and engineering, pop music studies, music copyright law (possibly in conjunction with a law school), music business (possibly in conjunction with a business school or MBA program), global music traditions, video and gaming music or turntablism and beat making.”

Among his many interesting suggestions is a “flipped mentoring” initiative in which more senior scholars in the field learn from more junior colleagues and students about how to reframe music theory from a social justice perspective.

Ewell is not alone in condemning the failure of conservatories and academic music departments to give proper weight to Black and other underrepresented musical tradition and to composers, musicians and audiences of color. There is, for instance, “The Hidden Curriculum in the Music Theory Classroom” by Cora Palfy and Eric Gilson; “Promoting Equity: Developing an Antiracist Music Theory Classroom” by Dave Molk and Michelle Ohnona; and Olly Wilson’s older “Black Music as an Art Form.”

Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music critic, has also expressed concern that academic musicologists have elevated “the European tradition while concealing its cultural bias behind eternal, abstract principles.” As he points out, “Not until the forties and fifties did Black players begin joining upper-echelon orchestras.” Denied opportunities within classical institutions, Black composers and artists “found a place in jazz and other popular genres.”

I find Ross’s argument undeniable:

Ross ends a recent New Yorker article with a phrase that we should all take to heart. “Living with history,” he writes, “means living with history’s complexities, contradictions and failings.” It requires us to do something that Ewell’s On Music Theory tries to do: to recognize and confront a discipline’s failure to embrace broader perspectives; to move beyond the gradualist, incremental, assimilationist strategies that have, thus far, failed to work; to do more to integrate the rich diversity of musical traditions into its curriculum; and to act aggressively to encourage the pursuit of new frontiers of musical expression.

Whatever your discipline, be willing to do what Ewell has done. Question established orthodoxies. Identify your discipline’s blind spots, oversights and omissions. Embrace unconventional and critical perspectives. And, most important of all, encourage new work that moves beyond existing paradigms.

Do not allow your discipline to stagnate, stall or stand still. Remember: a discipline that fails to innovate and move forward is a discipline in steep decline.