two pieces from Current Affairs discussing Philip Ewell's book, some semi-organized thoughts on epistemic trespass that happens when musicians and music theorists opine about religion

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/a-music-theorist-on-how-white-supremacist-assumptions-have-shaped-the-evaluation-of-music

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But when people in the United States say “European” music, it’s really just a few places—German-speaking territories, prime among them—and we present it as the way we should think about music. And of course, the idea that pitch, the piano, and 12 tones in a system that emanated—to be blunt—from the Catholic Church is the system that represents all music, that’s kind of what we’ve been teaching. And, of course, colonization: you have to immediately think about the idea of presenting what were essentially white supremacists and patriarchal ideas across the globe in a colonial context. Of course, Christianity played a massive role.

I’m teaching Theory 1 currently, and to just look at all the music theory textbooks, literally last night I thought, Oh, my God, all of these hymns, all of these chorus, all these “Jesus, my pain and suffering”—there’s a lot of Christianity in the music theory textbooks, which I didn’t really dig into in my book. Maybe that’s the next project because that’s what we’re talking about: Catholic traditions morphing into German Protestant traditions of making music.

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As Taruskin pointed out in The Ox, consolidating and ratifying liturgical music within Carolingian Catholicism is more or less why we began to have the musical notation traditions we have.  Now, obviously, just because those were the historical seeds of what Taruskin called the literate musical traditions of Europe and the United States doesn't mean for a second things stayed that way. Although Taruskin name-checks him, he doesn't mention that Charles Garside Jr. made a case that Zwingli and Bullinger, by banning music from church services, functionally created the realm of fully secular music that was not automatically in service of throne or altar.  

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a sprawling links for the weekend post, variations on a ground bass--counterpoint under fire in the 1470s. laments about a loss of Catholic liturgical music that was lambasted in the years it was being written, and how fifteen C. musicians defended their jobs at the expense of ordinary musicking people

https://mereorthodoxy.com/musical-localism-and-the-rebirth-of-culture

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The ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino has written on this distinction, which he takes to be more fundamental than any genre distinction, between “participatory” and “presentational” kinds of music. “If we briefly consider the products of the music industry over time,” says Turino, “we can glimpse cosmopolitans’ gradual shift in thinking of music making as a social activity to music as an object.” He talks about what it was like interacting with Peruvian festival music of the 1980s, before (or athwart) the arrival of the various technologies that have enabled our presentational era. “For them,” says Turino, “a recording is to ‘music’ what, for us, a photograph is to the person in the snapshot: a representation of something else, not the real thing.”

 

It is worth asking for a moment where and how the change occurred in music. Here I depart a great deal from other traditionalists and conservatives who talk extensively about music, particularly the late Roger Scruton, as well as the various others who have written on the topic such as E. Michael Jones and Julian Johnson. For many of these thinkers, the moment of decline occurred somewhere in the twentieth century or perhaps the nineteenth, and the culprit was, variously, dissonance, a rejection of long-standing norms of form, professionalism, and, most of all, the rise of commercial recording technologies that allowed music to become abstracted from live, public performance.

 

Here I am much more radical: Classical music is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem. I consider the shift from Palestrina to Monteverdi, from Bach to Haydn, as far more fundamental than the shift from Wagner to Schoenberg or from tonality to atonality or from Rachmaninoff on shellac to the Beatles on vinyl.

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Well, to go by Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europea 1470 to 1430, classical music, in the sense of being elite music produced by elite for elites that was bankrolled by a system of indulgences has always been the problem.  I know John Ahern knows about this book because I discovered it reading a couple of his blog posts at Ad Fontes Journal online.