Philip Ewell: "Exactly seven persons have written to me ... mean commentary about my work ... all pianists", because white guy pianists committed knowingly or not to a Germanophile art-religion would have the most to lose from Ewell's proposals

https://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2020/07/5-questions-philip-ewell-author-music-theory-white-racial-frame/
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HOW HAVE YOUR COLLEAGUES RESPONDED TO YOUR WORK, AND HAS ANYONE PLEDGED TO MAKE CHANGES TO THEIR OWN RESEARCH AND TEACHING BECAUSE OF IT? 

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Over two years ago, when I began this work, I knew that I’d lose some friends and colleagues once it came out. I speculated that, for every friend/colleague lost, I’d gain two or even three more. I was wrong. For every friend lost there have been more like 20–30 friends gained. It’s not even close. Exactly seven persons have written to me with angry, sarcastic, and mean commentary about my work. None of them engage my scholarship, but just call me an “idiot,” “racist,” or “inept.” They are all white men. And, also significant I think, all pianists.   ...

For this guitarist who's dad was American Indian but who reads in any social context as a white guy, that observation is interesting.

My take on that is that the white male part might ultimately not be as significant as the pianist part.  The death of Julian Bream, a lutenist and guitarist who was as well-versed in Dowland as he was in Britten's work when he approached Britten to compose Nocturnal after John Dowland, has gotten me thinking about how the piano and the instruments of the orchestra have been the default definition of what's colloquially called classical music, even though as a former choral singer and current guitarist you could spend your whole life playing in a pit and never hear Byrd's Mass for 5 voices or any of Poulenc's penitential motets.

This guitarist recalls Kyle Gann's comment about how we should "make way for the guitar era" and all that, which I've blogged about in the past.  Guitarists can steep themselves in nineteenth century literature of necessity, seeing as the guitar as we've known it wasn't all that codified in its modern six-string version until near the end of the eighteenth century and didn't get anything like a stable body of performable literature in modern notational form until the 1800s.

Another reason I respectfully dissent from Doug Shadle's "cancel the nineteenth century" ideas.  I'd have to cancel ragtime and nascent classical guitar literature (pioneered by Spaniards, French, Italians, Austrians and Bohemians in the West and Russians in the East throughout the nineteenth century).

That said, I've been pretty outspoken about my conviction that we don't have to be beholden to a Germanophile post-Wagnerian art-religion.  If there are any groups within classical music as a nexus of industries with an incentive to hang on to a Germanophile art-religion spawned in the wake of the German Idealists in classical music the pianists would be the musicians with the most to lose.  Even in the orchestral pits there's so much music from so many countries that an orchestra could just go through the Bachianas Brasileiras cycle, for instance, or play the Myaskovsky symphonic cycle.

If you pivot away from the piano literature as one of the pillars of music education then a whole lot of the Germanic art-religion canon gets sidelined.  Not all of it will.  J. S. Bach isn't going anywhere any time soon as best I can tell.  His music wasn't even written for the piano.  To say that Beethoven was a better than average composer who benefited from non-musical aspects of sex and race might be shockingly iconoclastic and blasphemous for those whose religion is art but for those whose religion is some actually recognized religion there's no blasphemy involved.  Shifting the rhythmic profile of Luther's "Mighty Fortress" into the dance rhythms of the figured bass era in contrast to the rhythms of Luther's age clearly didn't cause one of Luther's most famous hymns to get sidelined out of liturgical use.   

Saying Beethoven was a better than average composer and leaving at that is okay by me, honestly.  I've written about what I love about Beethoven's last piano sonata at this blog, but I've written a lot more about Matiegka's guitar sonatas, who doesn't even rate highly among guitarists, let alone pianists, because I've found Matiegka's guitar music fun to study.

Since I'm not an academic in music theory, music history or musicology I don't exactly have a dog in the fight (or fights) that have emerged in the wake of Ewell's presentation but I have read some of the debates and conversations with interest.  I have mentioned before I'm sympathetic to Nicholas Cook's feeling that his presentation on the ways in which Schenkerian thought has been mutated in crossing from Europe to the U.S., for instance, even as I am still incubating a potentially long post on all the ways the late Roger Scruton had pointed out the problems in Schenkerian analysis as far back as about 1999.  I am not a formal academic but at one point I was considering seminary back in the 1990s and in the mid 2000s I was considering grad school in music, possibly music history, possibly guitar.  Neither of those things happened.

But I can keep up with scholarship as I can, and I can keep track of associated debates about scholarship.  I'm disappointed by the ways in which debates about Hepokoski and Darcy and whether or not their theories are germane to, say, Bruckner symphonies, has been the focus.  Maybe music theorists are just the sort in Anglo-American academics to debate about the theoretical uses of theories to analyze literature without any regard for the relevance of theories of form to composers.  I've already written 130 some pages on the relevance of Caplin, Hepokoski and Darcy to ragtime-sonata fusions earlier this year if you want to read a long-form case as to why theories of formal analysis should be considered in light of what contemporary compositional problems they can be used to solve.  That, too, gets at another aspect of my stance against a post-Wagnerian German Idealist derived art-religion--theories that are subject to debate only for whether or not they are relevant to the canonized works of the Western Romantic and post-Romantic art religion stay literally academic and all the more useless for not being brought into play for other things besides analyzing canonical works, most particularly composing new music.

So it's interesting and not the least bit surprising to read Ewell report that the people with the harshest stuff to say about things he's said have come from white male pianists.  It also got me thinking about some stuff Jacques Ellul wrote in The New Demons about how the iconoclasts of yesterday become the icons of today but that is an observation that can be left in its cryptic form and considered in some other context for some other time. The German Romantics who displaced the ostensibly shallow Italianate schools of music that were the most prestigious institutions of Haydn's day may themselves be getting displaced and while it's easy to understand that those who committed themselves to a kind of German art-religion can't abide the blasphemy of rejecting their canons the German Romantics were the iconoclasts themselves at one point, whose works may have been iconic for long enough to now be on the receiving end of what Romantic era theorists and critics dished out centuries ago.