John Halle's take on the Ewell presentation, two of the three claims about Schenker are easily proven but the third is more debatable

John Halle's apparently initial response to Ewell is moderately long but a relatively quick read.  While I suspect that liberals, progressives and leftists may differ on a number of points Halle makes I try to keep the three categories very distinct, much like I try to maintain a distinction between Buckley style conservatives, Pat Buchanan types, Glenn Beck types, Ayn Rand types, etc.  Halle's overall case that Ewell's approach to Schenker misconstrues which invidious ideology is most responsible for Schenker's most ghastly ideas (I couldn't resist pulling a Taruskin by using "invidious", sorry); and that rejecting Schenker's hierarchical presuppositional approach in music analysis risks becoming what Chomsky has called "a gift to the right" could certainly be subject to spirited debate.  That's obviously not what I plan to have go on here, just to be clear, but I want to mention that preliminary summary of Halle's writing before getting to extensive quotation after the break:



https://johnhalle.com/on-tonal-stability-and-white-fragility-music-theorys-gift-to-the-right/

...
Schenker’s aesthetic elitism is one of many frequently encountered manifestations of the broader worldview Corey Robin identifies as The Reactionary Mind (2011). Following Robin’s line of analysis, elitism is not the disease but a symptom of a social pathology: what is decorously but inaccurately referred to as the “political philosophy” known as “conservatism.” 

It is therefore disappointing to find Ewell confusing cause and effect in focussing almost exclusively not on the underlying ideological condition, but on another common symptom, namely,  what Ewell correctly refers to as Schenker’s “ardent racism.” 

Disappointing but not surprising given a cultural climate now dominated by anti-racism with the performative style of the Black Lives Matter protests having exerted an influence up to and very much within the halls of academe.
Reflecting this set of priorities, Ewell’s piece focusses on three main areas: 1) evidence of Schenker’s racism in his published and unpublished works, 2) the desperate measures undertaken by Schenker’s numerous acolytes and disciples to suppress evidence of Schenker’s racism, and 3) the manner in which Schenker’s racism was and is reflected in the Schenkerian analytical method.
...
The first of Ewell’s objectives is easily achievable as the bulk of Schenker’s writings are now on line. A simple text search will, as Ewell informs us, turn up 57 “hits” on phrases such as “less able or more primitive races,”“inferior races” and the necessity for the “white race” to “annihilate” the Japanese “animals.” [emphasis added] These are, of course, vile but will not shock anyone aware of, for example, the documentation in volume 1 of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) of what were then prevalent attitudes of the German academy of Schenker’s epoch. 

The second requires only slightly more exertion though plenty of examples are easily available. For decades, distinguished scholars have embarrassed themselves in ignoring or explaining away words, sentences, paragraphs and indeed entire essays attesting to Schenker’s repulsive social and political views. [emphasis added] In their response published in their own professional journal, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, the Schenkerians managed to heap further ridicule on themselves by completely abandoning the most minimal trappings of scholarly objectivity, denying Ewell the right to respond and allowing for anonymously published smears of Ewell’s scholarship. This led to further denunciations including from the lead professional organization in the field the Society of Music Theory.
...
Of Ewell’s three objectives, it is the third which rests on the shakiest foundation though this will not be apparent to those unfamiliar with the basic subject matter and procedures of the field of music theory. [emphasis added] Suffice to say that Schenkerian analysis is a technical discipline involving the manipulation of a relatively well defined formal system applied to the objective, quasi numerical specifications of a musical score. Key to this is the notion of a “reduction” which specifies the hierarchical relationship of strings of musical events....
Ewell cites theorist Carl Schachter’s observation that “Schenker is hardly the first to think of tonal music hierarchically.” Schachter is of course correct. But it is also the case that Schenker was the first theorist to attempt to fashion an analytical method capable of revealing the full complexity of these hierarchies. 

With this recognition it is necessary to discuss a key but widely misunderstood fact having to do with the hierarchies which Schenker’s method detects. Contrary to Schenker’s belief, these are not inherent in the structure of musical masterpieces, but in shared human psychology. Specifically, they denote the psychological representation of all musical structures-from the most culturally elevated to the most socially reviled. [emphasis added]

While profoundly at odds with Schenker’s underlying agenda, this re-interpretation of Schenkerian reduction is entirely consistent with a fully established result attested to by countless studies cutting across numerous domains of cognitive science: core properties of cognition are based on the creation of hierarchies, likely through a domain specific application of what linguists have identified as the operation “merge”. It is unclear to me how many music theorists subscribe to this dissident, cognitivist reading of Schenker, but as recognition of the close connection between musical and syntactic analysis has become better understood in the field,  a gradual drift towards locating the core empirical domain of music theory in shared capacities of the human mind as opposed to in the unique character of the “masterworks of music” has been clearly apparent. 

It is with that in mind that Ewell’s claims for Schenker’s dominant status in the field should be understood. Perhaps it is so that “If Beethoven is our exemplar of a music composer, Schenker is our exemplar of a music theorist.” This, I should say, has not been my experience of nearly thirty years teaching undergraduate music theory where Schenker has assumed little to no role, at least nominally. But if it is so, the variant of Schenker understood and promoted by many music theorists has little to do with elevating the unique “German genius” solely capable of producing “musical masterworks” still less with a German “race” situated at the top of an all-too-familiar pyramid. 

For me, and I imagine others, it is about fundamentally *subverting* the reactionary, racist and elitist assumptions on which Schenkerian ideology (as opposed to Schenkerian theory) is based. Rather than taking “Such hierarchies (as) reflective of hierarchies of human races” we take them as reflecting the profound commonalities of all members of the human species, all deserving of a decent existence “according to their needs” contributing “according to their abilities.”

aka an "oppositional reading" of the "what" of Schenker's theoretical method as a rebuke to the "why" of its making.

As music theorists who propounded an idea that if there even are musical absolutes they exist strictly in the realm of acoustics on the one hand and the realm of human cognition on the other perhaps the easiest example would be Leonard B. Meyer who is, understandably, a scholarly hero to Richard Taruskin.  There may be a quest for "musical universals" at a strictly popular level among people who write about music (aka Ted Gioia) but as Ted Gioia has noted, musicologists and ethnomusicologists seem positively against the idea of musical universals and he seems at a loss as to why.  Heinrich Schenker could be one reason why, to toss out a name.  

Roger Scruton has made some arguments that the whole idea of finding musical order in "generative" processes or in human cognition might be interesting but incomplete.  Still ... my own reading of Scruton has left me with the impression that Scruton, like Adorno, had more fun continuously building upon the foundation of his own ideas and assertions rather than dwell too long on the idea that how the human brain deals with music at the level of short and long-term memory might open up possibilities for musical conventions.  Perhaps I'm being too harsh but Scruton's "semaphore test" is one of the "tests" I found completely unconvincing.  Music is a set of conventions and admitting it is a set of conventions is what allows us to manipulate, adjust, change, accept or reject conventions.  Continuity at one level can ensure discontinuity at another level is mitigated. To put that in more colloquial terms, the music of J. S. Bach might sound more "deep" to people who have gone to the trouble of cultivating an ability to hear the difference between equal tempered tuning and the tunings available in Bach's lifetime but the rest of the J. S. Bach fans who only listen to Bach played on contemporary instruments are not exactly "bereft" of an ability to understand and appreciate Bach.  

At the risk of attempting to explain what Halle seems to be getting at, the fact that Schenker had odiously white supremacist views doesn't necessarily detract from the salience of his method at observing multiple levels of hierarchical relationships within tonal music.  That such a method of analysis will be more or less worthless for anything before J. S. Bach and anything from Debussy on out is moot, in a way, to this larger observation.  Schenker's supremacist problems don't preclude granting that even if the "why" of his insights at a theoretical level are shot altogether through with racists ideas, the idea that human cognition is a necessarily precursor to musical order can still be a good idea.

Since I recently finished St. Augustine's De Musica and found that basic idea floating around within the often mind-numbing to downright picayune technical minutiae of Latin poetics for rhythm, meter and verse, Schenker can hardly even be said to be the first person to arrive, however indirectly, at the idea of hierarchical orders.  Augustine;s Pythagorean approach to meter could include an observation that heroic verse had a unique appeal for containing within its macro-level symmetry an inner asymmetry.  I plan on writing a little more about that later.  I realize that reading Augustine's never-completed treatise on music isn't most people's idea of a good time but I mention it because while Halle's made an observation about Schenker and hierarchical patterns in music now is as good a time as any to point out, by way of Roger Scruton's dismissal of Augustine's approach being antiquated because we no longer accept the Pythagorean cosmology, there is a baby in that bathwater when we look at more isolated axioms in Augustine's work about how those who cannot use reason will never master art and art resides in a mind with a capacity to remember it.  That the baby may be swimming around in an awful lot of bathwater in the case of Augustine is a point I readily grant!  In the case of Schenker, Halle's proposal seems to be that the racism is inextricable from Schenker's approach at the level of biography but that thanks to research in the last fifty years in the realm of cognitive sciences it's possible to relocate hierarchical organization away from racist and racialized theories toward the realm of human cognition.  

All of which might be boiled down to the old proverb that says that even a broken clock can be right twice a day.  One of the central conclusions of Nicholas Cook's The Schenker Project was that we are now free to accept or reject the viability of the racist ideology of Schenker but if we're going to try to understand how and why a Galician Jew who assimilated into German culture was so committed to a specific vision of German nationalism that could paradoxically include Chopin or maybe even some Bohemian composers we might want to find out what that idiosyncratic vision of "German" music was--Cook's proposal was that Schenker was attempting to define a form of German music that fit within an ideal of German supremacist thinking but made room for Jews to participate, something that Wagnerian forms of German nationalist thought increasingly precluded.  

Now it's possible for us to cast all that aside as stuff that's not useful to us as Americans but a value in taking time to study such a topic could be in this, it can make us more cautious about the possibility that just as German artists and musicians developed a default German-supremacist conception of the arts, Americans can develop a default American supremacist mentality that traffics in ideals of organic racial cohesion, such as Wesley Morris' 1619 Project contribution that I've written about before, or, for instance, an article at HyperAllergic that points out that whatever Beyonce presents about African history is for Americans with African ancestry far more than it is about or for actual Africans or African diaspora people outside the United States.  In other words, it's possible to object to the cultural imperialism of others while not noticing it in ourselves; it's possible for Americans to see how supremacist the views of 19th century Germans were without thinking through the supremacist ideologies that are explicit in, say, Star Trek as an American utopian franchise.  We Americans could be as supremacist in our ideologies as Schenker was in his day and paradoxically be unable to realize it.  

Whether or not Halle writes more on the topic of Schenkerian theory vs ideology remains to be seen but the initial posts suggests there may be more to come. 

POSTSCRIPT

Something that comes to mind, as it often does, is that it is possible there are people who would think of themselves as thoroughly liberal who might object to objections to Schenkerian ideas or, more specifically, to claims that the "canon" of classical music is racist because, as I have admittedly beat this drum for a bit, they are embracing an art-religion that they conflate with a vision of liberalism.  The crisis of Western liberals with respect to legendary artists in the last century has, as Richard Taruskin put it, come about through a failure (an often deliberate failure) to acknowledge that famous artists embraced totalitarian political ideologies, whether fascism or National Socialism or communism or something of the kind.  The retreat into theory and an arc of history that tends toward a never-ending avant garde could be seen as a retreat from the odious ideas that animated some unforgettable contributions to the arts. 

Only those who have invested their identity in sacralizing the consumption of specific forms of arts and entertainment need see an attack on art-religion as an attack on the arts in general or the work of an artist in particular.  I can still admire the late Beethoven piano sonatas while regarding Western art-religion as dubious.  So for me, when I read Ewell's statement that Beethoven was an above average composer and we can leave it at that I basically agree with that.  Paul Hindemith once wrote that there are no "eternal" or "timeless" pieces of music, even the most acclaimed works have a shelf life of some kind past which point they fade into obscurity.  Beethoven's Ninth will at some point fade away, for instance.  Far more of Hindemith's music than Beethoven's has faded into obscurity but perhaps that's all the more reason to take his observation about the shelf-life of the supposedly "Timeless" works of art more seriously!