The connection between racism in music theorists’ social views and their theoretical frameworks—the part of Ewell’s argument that ought to be the most airtight—turns out to be the flimsiest. In his discussion of early-nineteenth-century French critic and theorist François-Joseph Fétis, Ewell cites Fétis’s opposition to racial miscegenation and his ownership of a book by scientific racist Arthur de Gobineau, but he makes no substantive link to Fétis’s musical theories.
Ewell accomplishes little more with his nemesis Schenker, asking us, with a suggestive wink and a nod, whether Schenker’s privately articulated belief in a hierarchy of races and his music theories’ reliance on a hierarchy of tones can possibly be a coincidence. And consider this spectacular non-sequitur: “Schenker believed that the fundamental structure must ‘govern’ and ‘control’ the middle-ground and foreground elements of the music composition. Similarly, Schenker believed that blacks must be governed and controlled by whites.”
And second:
Ewell fails to suggest any frameworks that might replace Schenker in the classroom, and he makes no attempt even to prove that Schenker’s theories are analytically unnecessary or unhelpful. The enduring prominence in academia of Schenker and other music theorists like Hugo Reimann arises from their analytical and explanatory power. But the musical knowledge we stand to lose by cancelling (or “decentering”) them seems not to concern Ewell. In one astounding passage, Ewell responds to Jack Boss, a music-theory professor at the University of Oregon who published an article in JSS using Schenkerian techniques to analyze a piano solo by the black jazz pianist Art Tatum. Boss purported to show that Schenker’s analytic insights were by no means limited to white composers, or even to classical music. Providing no evaluation of Boss’s analysis of Tatum, Ewell offers a disconnected rebuke: “Whiteness not only does not honor blackness by applying white-male analytical methods to black music, it does immeasurable harm, since whiteness only profits and benefits itself.” He adds that, by analyzing Tatum, Boss is presuming to “elevate” his music to the realm of the great (white) composers, as if Tatum were not there already by his own merits.
conservative’s conservative philosopher on the
aesthetics of music, was openly dismissive of the value of Schenkerian
analysis.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/08/roger-scruton-vs-schenkerian-theory.html
I hesitate to say there’s “no” value to Schenkerian analysis or theory but a lot
depends on who is using the theory and to what end. Victor Zuckerkandl’s purple
prose remains off-putting but he formulated an idea about musical time and
space that George Rochberg extended in his own proposal of thinking of musical
time and space in terms of timespace and spacetime and the question of the
distinctions and definitions of musical time and space must at some point
detain us who have interests in music theory because, well, Adorno claimed that
in Stravinsky the “spatialization of music is absolute”. I am not even into
Jason Yust’s
Organized Time yet but thinking about the nature of what
musical time and space are in human cognition is something that, for all his
faults, Heinrich Schenker had some ideas.
Don Baton’s argument that is tacit in his review could, if I’ve read it
rightly, be brought to the surface. Ewell’s case can be read as one that
invites us to keep Schenker’s white supremacism conjoined to his advocacy that
we think of music as organized by pitch hierarchies or tone hierarchies. I’m
not interested in the pitch/tone distinction that has been propounded at this
point, however.
The trouble Baton sees with Ewell’s conflation gambit is that it fails to
account for directions Schenkerian theory has gone in the last century. Dismissing
a Schenkerian analysis of Tatum as not respecting blackness may depend on a
surmise that a white supremacist’s theory is incapable of being extracted from
white supremacism. Baton notes Ewell makes nearly no mention of Christianity as
a formative influence in Western cultures. Perhaps neither Baton nor Ewell are
familiar with James Cone, with liberation theology, or with African biblical
scholarship on powers and principalities in Pauline literature but contemporary
Western scholars and musicians can seem to be even more illiterate on religious
texts and their reception histories than average. How white supremacists wield
Ephesians 5 on an plantation will not be the same interpretation of Pauline
transformations of household codes as read by a 21st century
preacher in the United States or by 19th century abolitionists. We
might be confused into thinking that nothing Stuart Hall proposed about readings
of resistance could be applied to Schenkerian theory, for instance.
Baton only touches on the fact that Schenkerian analysis has been brought to
bear on jazz performances. Ewell may dissent that Schenkerian analysis applied
to black music is not going to be respectful to it, which Baton notes. But I’ve
got Drew Nobile’s recent book Form
as Harmony in Rock Music and while I’m
only a few pages into it what becomes clear is that a Schenkerian analysis of a
rock song can happen that does not even presuppose major and minor key scales.
If Schenkerian analysis in theory and practice can branch out into modal
mixtures or to mixolydian rock songs then the question of which tonal hierarchy
is surmised to be the “ground” of analysis is open-ended. To restate my point in another way, what Edmund Burke wrote is not the same
thing as what William F Buckley or Russell Kirk told us Edmund Burke meant. The
reason scholarship will go on is because these kinds of things happen. I would
not for one second trust what Ted Gioia claims Augustine of Hippo said about
music, having read Hippo’s work in translation myself. Rather than reducing
music to “number” Augustine told us that memory is the faculty that is most
important for the perception and interpretation and reception of music and
number, with all the attendant tedium of neo-Platonic concepts of what it
means, is relevant as a way to understand what makes it easier for us to remember.
Rhythm and meter are mnemonic aids and catalysts. Augustine wasn’t writing
about what we’d call music at all, he was writing about rhythm and poetic
rhythm. Hip hop artists who could slog through De Musica might even get
the impression that everything Augustine wrote about rhythm in De Musica
could be about establishing “flow”. If you want to read through what I’ve
written about Augustine and De Musica I think this tag may be handy
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/search/label/Augustine
Sure,
someone like Ted Gioia can keep claiming Augustine reduced music to number; and
Roger Scruton claimed that Augustine’s theorizing about music has no relevance
to us since the neo-Platonic cosmology of yore has long since been dismissed (a
paradoxical thing for a self-identified conservative to say). But the
opportunity for those of us here and now in reading Augustine would be to take
up his observation about the essential role memory and perception plays in
hearing and loving music and understanding it, which often comes in that order.
As I noted earlier, Augustine’s pedantic interest in poetic rhythm could be of
interest to hip hop artists, or at least Christian hip hop artists, who might
be able to translate Augustinian reflections on language, music and memory into
new directions. Revisiting the classics and to use them as springboards for new
explorations would be a pretty rote defense of tradition, and one that was
noted merely in passing by Jaroslav Pelikan in his Vindication of Tradition.
Baton didn’t “go there’ but he could have easily made the case that the problem
with Ewell’s take on Christianity is merely mentioning it as instantiating
white supremacist views when a majority of Church Fathers East and West lived
in Asia and Africa. If you wanted to read an explanation of how and why Western
literate music traditions emerged from Catholic liturgical practices Richard
Taruskin’s first volume of the Oxford History of Western Music does a
good job laying that historical groundwork.
As for memory and
music and perception, I think Baton could have come up with a stronger argument
against collapsing appeals to hierarchies in tonal organization with appeals to
racial hierarchies.
That many 19th and early 20th century music theorists did
do this is not prima facie evidence that appeals to hierarchical perception as
part of the process of hearing music is always everywhere racialized. I find it impossible to take seriously any
insinuation that when Augustine of Hippo distinguished between rhythm and meter
by saying all meter has rhythm but not all rhythm is metrical Augustine was,
for those who don’t know of him, one of the most famous African bishops in the
history of Western Christianity. He remains controversial even among Christians
for a wide variety of reasons but I refer to him because he wrote one of the earlier
treatises on music in antiquity that has survived and even if he never finished
the work and probably did most of the writing of it before his conversion
experience it’s still of historical interest.
Now, as for hierarchical cognition of sound and sight, we have some fairly
standard works in the last sixty years to establish that hierarchical perception
and interpretation is how our eyes and ears work with our brain. Robert Snyder's
Music and
Memory: An Introduction and Richard L Gregory’s Eye
and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing have been around for some time and
both books establish the ways in which our senses and brain interact in perception,
cognition and memory formation in hierarchical ways. Leonard B Meyer, appealed
to hierarchical ways of hearing and remembering music in tonal terms as an
argument that integral serialism and post-tonal music would probably ultimately
never catch on.
MUSIC, THE ARTS, AND IDEAS
Leonard B. Meyer
Copyright (c) 1967. 1994 by The
University of Chicago
ISBN 0-226-52143-5
From page 258
...
It is, as we have seen a serious mistake to assume that the principles or
"laws" governing the organization of one hierarchic level are
necessarily the same as those of some other level. As a rule, the forces
creating structure and organization do not remain the same--are not uniform,
from one level to another. "The fallacy of reductionism" writes on
biologist, "lies in assuming a one-one relationship between different
levels of organization." ...
Similarly in the theory and analysis of music it is doubtful that the several
different hierarchic levels are governed by the same syntactical and
grammatical principles of organization.
...
Just as the forces governing the
ways in which chemicals unite to form molecules are different from the forces
involved in the organization of molecules into cells, so the ways in which
tones combine to form motives are different from the ways in which motives are
organized to create larger, more complex musical events.
From page 259
...
The world is understandable, not because it is uniform and homogenous but
because its rich variety can be organized into complex but functionally related
structures.
None of which appeals to hierarchy in racialized ways. I
would be surprised if Ewell didn’t know Meyer’s work and also surprised if
Baton didn’t know Meyer’s work. Meyer contended that in the long run atonal
music would not stick around because people had put pseudo-scientific theories
ahead of heard sounds. Ironically, people who refused to accept that we humans
hear and then interpret sounds according to hierarchical concerns consigned
themselves to academic niche audiences. Meyer, along the way, does not come
across as some white supremacist for pointing out that because the human brain
relies on interpreting sensory date in hierarchical ways integral serialism and
its rejection of tonal hierarchy was not likely to “catch on”.
It's been hard to shake a sense that Baton's main interest was dismissing Ewell's conflation of hierarchical taxonomies in Schenkerian thought as unproven when a more robust counter-argument would be to point that however Schenker's views may have reflected taxonomies of racial and tonal hierarchies this is not necessarily where the theory and interpretive historical use of the theory has stayed on the one hand and, on the other, that research into cognition and the relationships between the senses and the brain suggest that hierarchical information sifting and interpretive patterns are built in to how humans see and hear. Writing music that keeps these aspects of humanity in mind can respect that memory works in hierarchical ways without being implicitly or explicitly as racist as Heinrich Schenker was.
The trouble I've seen is that some of the traditionalists who contemptuously dismiss Ewell and scholars like him are equally contemptuous at the thought of leaning in to cognitive and sense integration research. Roger Scruton came up with his philosophy of mind in aesthetic perception back in the 1970s, for instance, and had no real interest in letting his view be informed by or changed by any research over the last fifty years as far as I can tell. The strongest case that conflating one hierarchy with another is a sloppy move is in paying attention to research on how the eye and the ear and sight and hearing relate to the brain, cognition and memory but that seems to be precisely what the defenders of "tradition" have not wanted to do. Dismissing someone like Ewell? Sure, they can't wait to do that. It can feel as though there's too much bad faith and well-poisoning across the field.
Which would be a shame, if true, because we are living in an era of music theory in which the conceptual resources to
broker a synthesis of American vernacular popular styles with 18th
century approaches to large-scale form is more possible in theoretical and
practical terms than in possibly any previous era. Music theory has always
lagged behind practice and Adorno noted that in earlier eras of
treatise-writing authors gave instructions on ornament and style and only later
did treatises on music become more concerned with matters of form and “substance”.
That we are in all sorts of ways trying to shake off the worst elements of the
long 19th century and its legacy of theory, formal analysis and
harmony I don’t need to belabor.
My point is that we can very easily do work showing how ragtime sonata forms
can be done in our day and age. We could just as easily discuss how to make a
sonata movement out of tunes by Thelonious Monk. Give me the sloppiest take on
the chord changes from the synth break in Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City”
and I could probably make a twelve-minute long sonata rondo form using those
chords as a starting point. Theorists are fighting about matters that are
academic in the most literal sense of the term but that’s not the same as
opening up new possibilities. I wrote
this a while back in response to a Ted Gioia post but academics have the same
problem as journalists, you cannot champion new and potentially liberative
directions in music as an educator or a journalist inasmuch as the very nature
of your job is that of a trainer or a gatekeeper.
I’m not saying don’t read Caplin or Hepokoski or Darcy or Burstein or Taruskin
or Ewell or McClary or Kernan or Rosen or whoever. What I am saying is that
academics tend to digress into turf wars and pissing contests about whose
theoretical tools are better or best or bad or worse for what are generally
academic concerns.
Long ago when I was considering seminary I got some advice from the late
William Lane (let the reader understand). He said that he was troubled by the
extent to which academics in biblical studies and theology (in the U.S.)
continually displayed a guild mentality, particularly in the Ivy League and the
high-powered institutions—the goal seemed to be impressing other academics
rather than serving the local church. He believed that no matter how academic
your pursuits you should still have rank and file Christian believers in mind
as people to love and serve. Anyone who
has read Wenatchee The Hatchet since 2006 probably doesn’t have to guess that I
have taken on that sympathy and have tried to write with that kind of ideal in
mind. No matter how abstruse and obscure
I can get I hope that in some way I can be helpful to someone.
A Few months ago I tried reading Cynical Theories by
James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose and I couldn’t finish the stupid book. Merely
being against critical theory says nothing about what you are for. James
Lindsay comes across as one of those sorts of also-ran new atheists who had
none of Christopher Hitchen’s gifts for writing and direct expression and none
of the scientific knowledge of a Dawkins or a Dennett but all the smugness that
those other authors sometimes displayed. Lindsay has become a name checked by
conservative Protestants to the point that Mark Driscoll shared he was reading
Cynical Theories via social media a few years ago. Why do I mention this? Because if you disagree with Ewell you
certainly can but coming up with an alternative theory or, better, an
alternative practice or, better yet, new music that attempts to tackle the
issues he has raised sounds better than just disagreeing with his polemic. As a
guitarist I would propose that much of the academic fighting over the symphonic
canon is moot as the very future of the symphonic canon is not clear. I suspect
there are better odds for Florence Price’s piano music than symphonic music,
for instance. Don Baton, I think, addressed that issue, too, at one point.
What Don Baton has not addressed at all (and probably won’t) is something Jeremy
Begbie has been writing books about in the last thirty years—theologians,
liturgists and musicians and music historians have started to actually compare
notes. For those who are not religious
the prospect seems pointless but when I finished reading William T Dargan’s
book on the history of evolution of the lining out tradition in black American
churches I was struck by how inescapably the low church Calvinist traditions in
Anglicanism in Scotland, for instance, informed the liturgical norms and musical
possibilities of American low church musical traditions.
To put my point more starkly, partisans of art religion based on highbrow or
lowbrow or white or black essentialism are not likely to explore these options
if they only define religious traditions in strictly pejorative terms. Baton
gets that part but that some interesting work on defining and defending
aesthetic pluralism as a Christian liturgical discipline in the work of
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Frank Burch Brown, Maeve Louise Heaney or Jeremy Begbie has
clearly not come up in the Baton or Ewell neck of the woods. The reason may be
that among theologians and liturgists and people concerned about church music the
possibility of thinking about what might be beneficial and do reconciling work
in the realm of not-church-music hasn’t been on the table. I hope by now it’s obvious I think that
should be on the table.
Paul Hindemith is largely nobody’s favorite composer these days but he contended
that music educators can too often forget that their best audiences are the amateurs.
Most music will be made by, with, for and for the sake of amateurs. If music
educators only kept turning out music educators then that’s all the musical
culture would be and Hindemith believed the biggest lie American music
education sold to its students was that they would actually be professionals.
He found that prospect troubling.
I’ve never been a professional musician and never anticipate being one. I’m a
hobbyist, an amateur. I may be an
amateur who has had a lot of fun reading Elements of Sonata Theory and
thinking through how readily Type 1 Sonatas lend themselves to rock `n roll
vocabulary but for all that I’m still an amateur. When it comes to religious
studies I’m an amateur and a layman.
Yeah, I might be excited by books by Richard Bauckham, Ephraim Radner,
John Neville Figgis, Francis Young, Christoph Heilig, Gordon Fee, Graham
Twelftree, Loren Stuckenbruck, Jaroslav Pelikan and others but I’m an amateur
there, too. Ewell’s proposals for changing music education ultimately don’t
concern me because I’m not anticipating getting more music education in a
formal way than I have gotten so far. I didn’t even major in music. I got a
journalism degree and before this century began realized I would never land
steady work in journalism. I’ve slogged away at a variety of dead end office
jobs ever since but I’ve had time after I’m off the clock to write stuff like
this.
Which is another way of saying that whatever the future of music is, we may
find that the role academics play in that future is hard to anticipate, which is
why debates about what academics say about the nature of academic study of
humanities remains a largely in-house affair.
Perhaps there is a permanent crisis in the humanities and perhaps John
Guillory has a point that criticism was the avocation of amateurs before it
never quite gelled into an actual academic discipline.
