I studied classical music. Does that make me racist?
Eons ago, in what I like to refer to as my “first career” — there have been several since — I was a classical music student. I grew up in what was called a musical household. At home, listening to music was like breathing, it was ambient, almost unconscious. We attended monthly performances by the local symphony orchestra, listened to classical music, jazz and blues on the radio, on records and later on cds, and there were of course, the weekly piano lessons which led to exams, recitals and competitions.
I pursued my passion for music straight through to university, enrolling at the University of Toronto faculty of music in the piano performance program. It was a time before the internet, a time that now seems quaint, where students would pore over orchestral scores spread out on heavy oak tables, or listen to records at one of the “listening stations” at the music library.
One of my professors was Dr. Timothy Jackson. Dr. Jackson was young and very enthusiastic; we were his first cohort. The subject of the course he taught was the daunting-sounding Schenkerian analysis, an analytical technique applied to the works of classical composers as a method for discovering the structural harmonic underpinnings of their compositions (as obscure an area of study as it may seem, its adepts have their own Journal). Our final assignment: producing a Schenkerian analysis of the Kyrie movement from Mozart’s requiem. Mind: blown.
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Fast forward 30 years. I am now on career 3 (or 4, if you count raising a family). And although music is still a very intimate part of my life, it is now just that — part of my life; it no longer completely defines my life as music tends to do when you are seriously engaged in training to be a professional performing musician.
Given my musical interests and musician friend connections, the internet has put before my eyes a video with a deliberately shocking title: Music Theory and White Supremacy. Despite my initial reaction (denial, tacit rejection, assumption of sensationalism) I am curious enough to give it a listen, all the way through. And it is here that I learn that this particular area of study — Schenkerian analysis — has come under criticism for its alleged racist undercurrents.
Without going into the details of the debate (I’ll let the reader do her own investigating) the controversy appears to hinge on a conference given by cellist and music theory professor Philip Ewell alleging that that Heinrich Schenker not only held documented racist ideas, but that his analytical technique was explicitly developed as a means to prove the cultural superiority of the music of Western European composers, a sort of corollary and crowning argument to the theory of Western European — specifically German — racial superiority. Coincidentally, Schenker developed his theory in the first part of the 20th century in Austria, just as German nationalism was gaining ground.
“Impossible!” — came Dr. Jackson’s swift retort — “Schenker was a Jew!”
Impossible for a Jew to hold ideas of national supremacy? Improbable perhaps, but certainly not impossible. Could accusing Schenker of racism be a veiled form of anti-semitism? Again — no.
Rather than staying on the surface of this argument — Was Heinrich Schenker a racist? — a far more interesting question to ask is: Was a racist world view structurally transmitted to generations of music students through theories designed to establish the supremacy of musical forms created by white European males?
The answer to that question is an uncomfortable yes. It is deeply destabilizing to think that art, which we like to believe exists on another plane, in a “higher realm” so to speak, can be brought down through its association to identity politics, and used as a means to further oppression. But this, indeed, has been an underlying cultural bias in the world of classical music as it is taught in universities.
Let’s revisit the source: when Mozart wrote his grandiose final work, the Requiem, the larger contextual motivation for his music is anyone’s guess to try to establish. Was it fear of God? His own illness and impending death? A desire to create a testimonial of his own existence? Literally no one is suggesting that Mozart was attempting to create an argument for European racial superiority; that is something that has been layered over his work, and the works of others, by creatively impoverished successors.
That is not to say that this debate is unproductive. On the contrary, it is high time western classical music was put into the greater context of global cultures and art forms. “Supremacy” is not a word that should be associated with art any more than it should be with race. The characteristics of western European classical music may make it more or less conform to a certain “Schenkerian ideal” — that should in no way be peddled as cultural superiority.
Studying music in the western European classical tradition is a wonderful training in musical architecture, melodic motif, harmonic complexity. It is its own universe, up until now a little too precious, a little too hermetic. So much can be learned from studying the forms perfected by other composers following other traditions. This is not about us versus them. This is about the universality that we attribute to certain musical forms, and how we can truly work towards acknowledging, then dispelling cultural bias, to be enabled to see and to appreciate true universality.
