From The Spectator, 9 October 2021:
Ian Pace
How the
culture wars are killing Western classical music
People are increasingly made to
feel guilt or shame for loving or teaching Bach, Beethoven or Wagner
Striking
the wrong note: musicologist Philip Ewell claimed that Beethoven was little
more than an ‘above average composer’
Musicology
may appear an esoteric profession. But several events in the past few years
have pushed musicological debates into the columns of national newspapers, from
the American academic who claimed that music theory was a ‘racial ideology’ and
should be dismantled, to the Oxford professor who allegedly suggested that
studying ‘white European music’ caused ‘students of colour great distress’, to
the high-profile resignation of a professor at Royal Holloway, University of
London, reportedly in response to academic ‘cancel culture’.
These
disputes have not emerged from nowhere. They are the result of longer processes
that have forced serious questions about the very place of music, and above all
the Western classical tradition, in Anglophone education.
Music
theory has existed in Western universities since the Middle Ages, but the term
‘musicology’ dates from the late 19th century. It refers broadly to the
academic study of music, which can encompass areas such as music history,
theory, analysis, the study of global musics, acoustics, and more. This type of
study, practised in universities, is distinct from that traditionally offered
by conservatoires, which focus on high-level professional training on an
instrument or voice.
Western
classical music long held a central place in university music departments,
though from the beginning of the discipline musicologists also investigated
folk and vernacular traditions and their social and cultural contexts. But
three historical developments underpin the current situation. One of these was
the growth of British ‘cultural studies’ from the 1970s onwards, and work from
this field mostly on popular musics. Often undertaken by those without
specialised musical skills, this study concentrated on the social position of
music, associated imagery, fashion, etc., while the sounds it made were
frequently a secondary or minimum concern.
Another
came from the rise in importance of ethnomusicology, a discipline that
developed in the 1950s out of vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, the
comparative study of global musics, which had added immensely to the knowledge
of these in the West. While still undertaking some of this type of research,
ethnomusicologists’ emphasis was as much upon the role that music played in
societies as about the sounding music. The latter could become neglected,
leading one to sardonically quip the term ‘Eth-no-musicology’.
Many
Anglophone ethnomusicologists were also frequently hostile to aesthetic value
judgments, recoiling from the hierarchical nature of this, despite evidence of
musical hierarchies and value judgments existing in most societies and
cultures. For this reason, the existence of a Western ‘canon’ of major works
came in for particular censure.
I fear for those in education who are made to feel guilt or shame for
loving Western classical music
From the
1980s a number of ethnomusicologists turned their disciplinary approaches to
practices within Western classical music itself. Their findings were often
roundly negative; selective and unverifiable sources (because they were
anonymised), or simply broad generalisations, were used to indict the Western
concert, conservatoire, or classical music culture in general, often from a
‘post-colonial’ perspective. (In Christopher Small’s studies of concert
rituals, for example, concerts were ‘a celebration of the “sacred history” of
the Western middle classes’.)
These
attitudes were also found in the third major development, the ‘New Musicology’
that emerged in the US in the mid to late 1980s, many of whose protagonists
argued that social readings of music, which reveal its ideological content,
should be the musicologist’s principal concern. While this approach was much
less ‘new’ than its proponents often claimed, the emphasis shifted towards
questions of gender, sexuality, race and elitism. Notoriously, the feminist
musicologist Susan McClary likened a passage in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to
the frustrated, murderous rage of a rapist. The New Musicologists also took a
harsh view of much avant-garde music, claiming popular music as a more worthy
object of study.
The
result of all this often led to what I have described as a ‘musicology without
ears’: in other words, a further de-emphasis upon listening or studying the
sound of music. This was especially the case as a result of a new emphasis on
ethnographic methods based on participant observation, and focused on the
verbal rather than the aural, which could be undertaken by those with few
specifically musical skills.
A shift
from aesthetic to moral judgment accompanied this. McClary, for example,
censured Charles Rosen for critiquing certain operas on the grounds of
‘old-fashioned hierarchies of tastes’ rather than for ‘something ideologically
pernicious, such as anti-Semitism, orientalism, or misogyny’. A work could only
be judged bad if it fell foul morally.
All of
this has led to a situation in which it is common to read quite stentorian
denunciations primarily of Western classical music and its standard repertoire
and long-established scholarly methods for investigating it. Thus, in 2016, the
one-time pianist turned video-game musicologist William Cheng published his
book Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good. Cheng wrote
dismissively of such concepts as ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘aesthetic autonomy’, or
‘academic freedom’ and even ‘the belief that academics have a right to pursue
their work free from political pressures and without fear of termination’. In
place of these, which he associates with a ‘paranoid’ approach, Cheng advocates
‘a care-oriented musicology — namely, for a musicology that upholds interpersonal
care as a core feature’. Whether musicology is to be judged to have achieved
this was presumably to be determined by him or other ideological
fellow-travellers.
Cheng’s
passive-aggressive arguments — employing the tropes of victimhood to propound a
highly censorious agenda — and some of the extensive praise they have
received, are among the most disturbing developments in recent musicology. It
is not hyperbolic to compare them to those common under Soviet-style communism,
in which academic freedom and integrity were sacrificed in favour of
ideological conformity.
Many
others have called for the ‘decolonisation’ of the musical curriculum, the
‘colonial’ aspect usually serving as a cipher for the whole Western classical
tradition, while others have directly associated Western musical notation or
theory with ‘white supremacy’. Then, in 2019, the musicologist Philip Ewell,
previously noted for his work on Russian music, shifted direction with a series
of publications claiming that music theory embodied a ‘white racial frame’, and
that Beethoven was little more than an ‘above average composer’. He focused in
particular on a range of nationalistic and racist sentiments found in the work
of the Austrian-Jewish musician and theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935).
These were already well-known and published, but Ewell went further than others
in the equations he made between, for example, Schenker’s beliefs in
hierarchies between pitches, and in racial hierarchies in society.
This led
to a series of responses, some very critical of Ewell’s arguments, in the Journal
of Schenkerian Studies, and in turn to an unhappy series of highly
publicised denunciations of the journal, its editors and some of the authors,
leading to suspensions and legal actions. To defend anything about Schenker’s
work became in some people’s eyes little more acceptable a position than to
defend the killing of George Floyd.
Most
recently, the musicologist J.P.E. Harper-Scott, author of a range of monographs
and articles on Elgar, Walton, Britten and others from a radical left-wing
perspective, resigned from a chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, and
from academia in general, at the age of 43. Harper-Scott published a statement
about this on his blog. In this, he claimed that universities had become
dogmatic rather than critical places, and that musicologists were ‘frankly
insane’ for believing that cutting Beethoven, Wagner and others from the
curriculum would ‘somehow materially improve current living conditions for the
economically, socially, sexually, religiously, or racially underprivileged’. He
also objected to the ways in which the term ‘decolonisation’ was used to shut
down debate and shame dissenters.
Harper-Scott’s
resignation statement deserves to be read in the context of his wider writing,
expressed most strongly in his books The Quilting Points of Musical
Modernism and The Event of Music History, which disprove
any suggestions that his is a conservative critique. He had produced scathing
critiques of aspects of popular music studies, ethnomusicology, ‘sound studies’
and other developments which he described as ‘crypto-capitalist’, for their
denial of the value of a music that does not simply reflect an existing
capitalist world but has the ability to reflect back on it or point to other
worlds or forms of experience. With the decline in the aesthetic, the only
value left for music is its exchange value, and he viewed these movements as
openly embracing music as commodity. In contrast, he celebrated radical musical
traditions that he felt resisted such a thing, and had personally found some
self-liberation in first discovering them while growing up in the north-east of
England where such culture was commonly marginalised.
While I
believe Harper-Scott’s characterisation can be too all-encompassing, I
certainly recognise the situation he describes in some contexts. It is
exacerbated by a marked decline in the provision of state music education,
especially that involving induction in musical notation and theory. Someone
like Harper-Scott would today be much less likely to find a route into becoming
a classical musician or a musicologist, and this option may soon become limited
to the privately educated.
As one
from a similar background to Harper-Scott (though privately educated at music
school), who came to classical music simply through natural curiosity and
accessibility of materials in a provincial local library, and was transfixed by
first encounters with Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Ravel or Stockhausen, I find
this immensely saddening. These composers will continue to be taught, but to an
increasingly restricted social demographic, turning claims of ‘elitism’ into
self-fulfilling prophecies. Furthermore, I fear for those in education who are
made to feel guilt or shame for loving Western classical music, or those who
one American educator asked to undertake an especially demeaning ritual in
which students had to step forward to check their privilege if they were taught
music theory, cared about notated music, or could read more than one clef.
Moreover,
if the teaching of specifically musical skills is allowed to decline further,
academic music may struggle to survive at all and could at best be relegated to
an adjunct of other disciplines — sociology, anthropology, cultural studies —
and might then dwindle through lack of a specific raison d’être.
These
various controversies are far from simple disputes between ‘conservatives’ and
‘progressives’ but emblematic of a discipline in which some protagonists lack a
sense of its purpose and identity, or any real belief that music has value in
and of itself.
It is
time to reassert the value of the study of music in its own right, as something
one loves or finds fascinating, regardless of whether it has achieved
mass-market commercial success. Listening to the music of Bach, Mozart or
Beethoven alongside some of their now all-but-forgotten contemporaries is the
surest way to appreciate just why such canonical figures are so extraordinary.
Attempting to understand why this is the case, which inevitably involves a
deeper analysis of the music in question, can be immensely enriching for the
ears and the mind, sharpening one’s focus and perception. The relationship of
this music to its social and ideological contexts is a vital area of study, but
this should be the subject of continuous critical inquiry, not dogmatic
platitudes.
There is
no need to assert any superiority of a Western classical tradition (I certainly
would not do so) over others from Africa, the Arab world, China, India,
Indonesia and elsewhere to recognise the important role this Western tradition
— like other Western high culture — has played in over a millennium of history,
and thus how utterly natural it should be to teach it in Western societies,
alongside other popular and vernacular traditions. Invoking Dante, Shakespeare,
Beethoven, Virginia Woolf or Pierre Boulez primarily in order to indict them
for a range of ideological crimes reveals more about those making the
indictments than about these artists.
Ian Pace.
Ian Pace
is a pianist, musicologist and head of the Department of Music at City,
University of London, but is writing here in a personal capacity. He is
co-convenor of a forthcoming 2022 conference on ‘Music and the University’, to
take place at City.
