I can't help but agree about the observation that the academic fights can be so vicious because the stakes are so small. That classical musicians should be conversant in jazz I agree with. Drums? Eh, I'm a guitarist so no one is going to be surprised if I say you should study the Sor Op. 6 and Op. 29 etudes but also through in as many Robert Johnson songs as you can, and learn to play bottleneck. Blind Willie Johnson did most all his recordings about a century ago. Johnson recorded between 1927 and 1930 and in 1933 Frank Martin published Four Brief Pieces for solo guitar, if memory serves.
Richard Taruskin wrote in his Oxford History of Western Music that the guitar was basically not part of the Western literate musical tradition. Talk about confirming Matanya Ophee's riff on bias against the guitar in classical music journalism and musicology in "Repertoire Issues"! Ophee gave his lecture in the 1980s and said that we guitarists should not have any inferiority complex about what we bring to the table but that instead of pandering to audiences who want to hear the same pieces over and over we should strive to make music and write music and write about music that wins the respect of fellow musicians. When I read stuff like what has happened with and to Ewell and how Ewell has responded to it I can't help but think of Kyle Gann's old blog post "make way for the guitar era". Maybe it won't happen but Gann's observation that guitarists differ from pianists in being far less fussy about genre distinctions and that would track with what the Cuban guitarist composer and conductor Leo Brouwer said decades ago about how guitarists benefited from being outside the mainstream of classical music. Why? Because we can think across any and every popular or "classical" form or style on our instrument.
So, sure, I'm building up to a case that guitarists should be willing to play Sor sonatas and Ponce sonatas but then turn around and play "Boogie Chillin'". It's my guitar-centric variation on Ethan Iverson's suggestion.
Iverson thinks Ewell is on the warpath and Ewell's critics are arguably on a warpath, too. Iverson's observation that people who actually make music generally don't have much at stake in this intra-scholastic battles is one I agree with, despite the fact that I obviously have written thousands of words about how and why I think we live in an era in which theory and praxis could allow most of the boundaries between pop and classical to get easily bridged if we commit to making music that shows that can happen. The music has to be made before the theorists can fight about it and it's as though ever since the theoretical cart was put before the musical horse in the era of high modernism in the early 20th century academic musicology has not quite recovered from that. That would be why musicians should keep making whatever music sounds good to them. Leonard Meyer had that observation that plenty of composers wrote their music and never bothered to write extensive theoretical justifications for it and he named Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev and I think Bartok as the exemplars on that front.
I've been loving the work of Hepokoski and Darcy on sonata theory and the way scholars have interacted with that. There's been a boom in scholarship going back to 18th century musical life, practice and works and reassessing the extent to which our whole way of understanding that music has been blinkered by the ideologies of Romanticism. Ewell is, in that sense, not even remotely unique, which is why I can kind of take him or leave him. I am on board with attacking highbrow elitist Western-fixated art religion but I think the challenge with that is that for many black scholars there's a variation of that in rock and blues and jazz. Raymond Knapp was right to point out that rock and jazz and blues scholars and music journalists tend to just flip the script of Romanticism and the German Idealist program so that "freedom" is no longer some German symphonist in the Alps writing his masterpiece but is the soul brother or soul sister playing the blues. The art-religion is still paradoxically the same and it may be "that" from which we need to liberate ourselves most of all. Even Adorno wrote, "Perhaps
that art alone would be authentic that would be liberated from the idea of
authenticity itself, of being thus and not otherwise."
3 comments:
"Iverson thinks Ewell is on the warpath and Ewell's critics are arguably on a warpath"
Ewell made some fairly obvious remarks in his original SMT paper, The Journal of Schenkerian Studies then published their hack job to which he was not invited to respond, and ever since he's assumed that everything is adversarial.
I can't necessarily blame him for this, or claim that I would have responded differently were I in that situation, but that's where we are.
Iverson is wrong that the stakes are low. Maybe practicing professional musicians outside the concert hall don't traffic in Schenker much, but music *educators* have extensive contact with him, directly and indirectly. Teachers pass along their indoctrination to their students, which is why I know so many excellent rock, blues and country players who self-deprecate about not being "real" musicians. People are free to disagree with Ewell's specific diagnoses and proposed remedies, but a music educator like Iverson should know better than to minimize the problem that Ewell is trying to solve.
I'm not sure how closely you've read posts about the "reading list", Ethan, but it's interesting that African theologians and biblical scholars have floated the idea that in Pauline discussion of "principalities and powers" there's an idea that the lack of definition means that the powers and principalities that dominate and oppress humanity are mysterious and shifting but also confine and constrain human imagination, or at least that's how Robert Ewusie Moses approached the topic writing the book Practices of Power.
In musicology and secular approaches to musicology there's the "white racial frame" but in global Christian theology there's a different way of approaching that topic, that racialized notions of musical purity could be construed as powers and principalities. The church historian Johann Quasten pointed out that ancient Mediterranean societies believed music was gifted to humanity by gods and that humans gave it back to invite those gods to show them favor. The Native American theologian Richard Twiss pointed out that white Anglo-American theologians tend to talk about "syncretism" as though it's something only non-whites have done without examining the ways that white theological traditions have had their own unexamined syncretisms. If that has been an open topic of discussion in Christian theological and scholarly circles over the last half century what Ewell has been trying to do, as best I understand his work, is "just" try to get musicology to catch up to observations that have happened within global Christian scholarship about the hegemonic influence of Western European ideas in academe about what counts as proper theology.
Maybe it's a paradoxical thing that because I've been reading about the development of early Jewish and Christian demonologies in response to imperial occupation by Rome that I think there's more to Ewell's polemic than scholars of music who have probably never bothered to do any research on the reception history of Ephesians 6, for instance, or the role Enoch literature played in early Christian and Jewish thought about sources of evil and oppression.
But demonologies by themselves don't tell us a lot, there's philosophies of history like postmillennialism that we have to tackle. Manifest Destiny didn't just spring from nowhere, there's an English legacy of postmillennialist cultural entitlement that Crawford Gribben and other scholars have looked at that may be relevant to the background of what Ewell describes as the white racial frame of music education.
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