How “Taruskin is Dead” Is Actually a Celebration of His Accomplishments, Or, What Is China’s “New Musicology,” Post-Taruskin?

By Gavin Lee

This is a translation and expansion of my Chinese article published in Shanghai Conservatory’s Taruskin series on Oct 12, 2022. I aimed to be polemical, criticizing the near exclusive Chinese focus on Taruskin as an occlusion of other New Musicologists as well as new decolonial and posthumanist research. I am grateful to Xu Lufan, Liu Peng, He Xian, and Hong Ding for discussing Taruskin and Chinese musicology with me.

 

When Boulez announced that Schoenberg is dead, it was entirely in keeping with the modernist ideology of innovation that perhaps ameliorated any perception of disrespect. Now in 2022, just months after Taruskin’s death, the title of this article might also, in the same way, be received as a call for innovation that is after all the hallmark of academia. Because the “death” we are referring to here is not Taruskin’s biological death, but to his oeuvre of scholarship, the announcement that Taruskin is to be superceded is above all a recognition of his decisive influence in musicology. There is, in this sense, no higher praise than to announce that Taruskin is dead. I hope can only hope that someone announces that “Gavin Lee is dead” when the time comes.

Taruskin's influence in China has largely to do with his monumental Oxford History of Western Music, as opposed to his research on Russian music, nationalism, early music etc. Although the Oxford history is a work of history (rather than historiography), it contains significant considerations of methodology and summarizes others's musicological research, and has become a source from which Chinese scholars deduce historical methods. While Taruskin has been known in China for some time, more attention was paid to him around 2017, especially his Oxford History, which led to the publication of an edited volume from Yang Yandi and Liang Qing, entitled Taruskin: What Is the Essence of Music History? (2019). This contained essays explaining Taruskin's historical method, with his Oxford History being a central reference point; in a sense, what we have is Chinese scholars interpreting Taruskin's interpretation of Western music and history. We might understand the recent attention on Taruskin in China as a reflection of the longer-term project scrutinizing the writing of Western music history, led in particular by Yang.

Bearing in mind that the Oxford History is currently absorbing a significant amount of attention from Chinese musicology, I provide in this article an extremely brief but timely assessment of its 6 volumes as well as Taruskin’s entire oeuvre. I pay attention in particular to Taruskin’s relation with New Musicology, and the possibility for new thinking through his transculturation in China. To do that, I need to first lay out arguments for why Taruskin is dead. Again, I see this as the highest recognition of Taruskin’s achievements. In ancient Chinese martial arts stories, it is the always the most formidable swordsman who protagonists want to challenge. Taruskin is one of the intellectual giants of musicology.

Taruskin is dead because:

1) For those of us thoroughly familiar with Taruskin’s overall research, it can be curiously difficult to pinpoint his achievements: What is Taruskin’s innovation? The reason, I think, is because his once novel ideas have become so influential that they are simply part of mainstream musicological thinking. You wouldn’t even think twice about critiquing “authenticity” in early music because it’s so obvious that authenticity is merely a construct, and that history cannot really be recovered in 2022. Because we have already learnt Taruskin’s lesson by heart, it is perhaps time for us to move on from him.

2) For those of us familiar with his monumental Oxford History, it is not that easy to pinpoint his achievements, because, as Susan McClary pointed out, much of the 6-volume work is a distillation of multiple authors of New Musicology. Thus Taruskins’s views on Schubert or the Cold War, as embodied in the Oxford history, are not really his views, but the views of others. It is perhaps time for us to move forward from him to those other authors.

3) For those of us who are familiar with Taruskin’s work on Stravinsky and Russian music, it is not that easy to pinpoint his influence among Chinese scholars of Russian music, because Chinese scholars have generally turned to primary and secondary materials in the Russian language directly, rather than receiving Russian music through Taruskin’s English language writings. This is a reminder that there is such a thing as “global musicology” (to use Daniel Chua phrase), which refers to an enlarged conception of musicology beyond that in Europe and North America.

4) For those of us familiar with Taruskin’s polemical diatribes against New Musicologists, it can be surprisingly difficult to discern the continued relevance of this debate. Arguably, after 30 years of construction and deconstruction, New Musicology might, in a way, actually be dead. The hallmark of New Musicology was its interdisciplinary hermeneutic interpretation of musical works through literature, art, philosophy, and various critical, postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories. By the 2020s, the musicological world of the West has shifted. Today, emancipatory music studies proceed not by hermeneutic interpretation of Western musical works, but by statistics and old-fashioned history. For example, Philip Ewell points out that almost 100% of the music examples in music theory textbooks are by white composers—where are the black, Chinese, Egyptian, Brazilian, Japanese, Indonesian and other composers? Tamara Levitz has studied the early history of the American Musicological Society in 1930s, revealing how its then leaders deliberately excluded world musics from their society. In posthumanist studies, writers like Rachel Mundy, Holly Watkins, and Robin James are interpreting music in terms of plants and robots. New Musicology is dead, and so is Taruskin’s annoyance with it.

5) Since New Musicology is dead, I think it’s a good time for those of us working in China and who identify as Chinese to think about what a Chinese, Sinophone, East Asian, or global musicology might look like. We live in a multi-polar world where there can be multiple viewpoints. Maybe what I’m really trying to say is that Western musicology is dead, in so far as it has diminished importance for Chinese thinkers with our own points of view.

In discussing Taruskin with students in my graduate seminar recently, I had assigned the topic of “New Musicology in China,” intending to refer to the application of US/UK new musicological methods by Chinese scholars such as Xu Lufan (postcolonial theory) and He Xian (feminist and queer theory). Students commented that it was rather difficult to find such research, as most related Chinese writings focus on explicating particular US New Musicologists’s writings, rather than bringing, say, Taruskin’s methods to bear in one’s own areas of musicological inquiry. What struck me in particular was one student’s impassioned query about why we are focusing on the application of Western scholars’s methods in China. Why can’t New Musicology in China be about home-grown methods? What exactly does “new” mean for China?

Those of us in academia know from our earliest pursuit of scholarship that it is innovation that determines whether we sink or swim in this profession. In a sense, what is new is simply that which different from and supersedes the established. According to Michael North (in Novelty: A History of the New), however, nothing is 100% new, for old components are necessarily incorporated in the new product—how can something arise out of nothing? A perception of the new, then, arises only in two ways: recombination of old, or recurrence of old. In scholarship, what is recombined or recurs is old ideas. Following this line of argument, there can’t be anything absolutely new in either new music or New Musicology.

The other thing about the new is that it is always relative. A new idea ceases to be so once it is mainstreamed. This has been the case with scholars who once proposed novel ideas in the 90s, but whose work have been mainstreamed to such a degree that they are no longer new. We wouldn’t think twice about deconstructing authenticity in early music, nationalism or gender norms because of Taruskin’s and McClary’s achievements. In its earlier days, what was new about New Musicology was its interdisciplinary borrowings from queer, feminist, postcolonial, and other theories. This conforms with North’s idea that the new arises from recombination, in this case, of musicology with other disciplines.

But what does innovation mean when we enlarge the discursive space to include the entire globe? My observation is that, again the rules of relativity and recombination apply. What is new in China, even now, is New Musicology, which is still new, relative to Chinese scholarship. Because of the language barrier, it was only in recent years that New Musicology has become more widely known in China, primarily through Taruskin’s distillation of multiple authors’s thinking in his Oxford History. New Musicology is still relatively (and thus by definition) new in China.

Another source of newness in Chinese musicology is some of the more original recombinations of Chinese scholars’s positionality, on the one hand, and Western methods, on the other. Ye Songrong has applied Chinese philosophy in the hermeneutics of Western music; e.g. he argues that the Chinese philosophy of moderation known as zhong yong zhi dao might shed new light on the pursuit of the new in musical modernism, and I would add, in musicology. In the field of global music history, Zhang Yuexin has explored Beethoven in China, Fang Xueyang has examined the circulation of Chinese instruments in 18th-century Europe, and Cheong Wai Ling, Hong Ding, and Kevin Tam have investigated 12-tone musical circuits between Berlin and Wuhan. Lin Binqing has referred to the presence of Chinese “native” researchers to decenter the primacy of insider/outsider as a central tenet of Western ethnomusicology; Chinese scholars could prioritize other issues such as sustainability.

In the light of North’s deconstruction of the “new,” I began to wonder what really is the point of scholarship, if it is not a race for novelty. One answer of course lies in the emancipatory impetus of feminist, queer, and decolonial theories. But I also tried to think about what musicology is like for folks who aren’t engaged in these specific fields. As a reference, I turned to the winners of the AMS Kinkeldey prize over the past decade and saw publications on Stravinsky, Wagner, and Mozart by familiar names, Tamara Levitz (who has engaged with decolonial theory in recent years), Scott Burnham, and Karol Berger. Their hermeneutic and historical re-interpretations of canonic composers embody the mainstreaming of New Musicology that, using North’s criterion of “relatively new,” is finally old (and perhaps even “dead”).

Chinese musicology is still processing Taruskin his tribute to New Musicology, the Oxford History, both relatively new in China. But after we have heeded Taruskin’s lessons, it may be that the best thing he can do for us is to light a blazing path for us like a phoenix, so that a new kind of Chinese New Musicology may be born in his place.

 

Works Cited

Berger, Karol. Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016.

Blazekovic, Zdravko and Xueyang Fang. “Chinese Instruments and Performers in 18th-Century Europe.” Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music 2019, issue 4. 兹德拉夫科·布拉兹科维奇，方雪扬，18世纪欧洲的中国乐器及乐器演奏家，中央音乐学院学报，2019年第2期：11-27。

Burnham, Scott. Mozart’s Grace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Cheong, Wai-Ling, Ding Hong, and Yi-Ching Kevin Tam. "From Berlin to Wuhan: Twelve-Tone Composition and the Pedagogical Legacies of Kohoutek, Krenek, and Smith Brindle in China." Acta Musicologica 94.1 (2022): 48-67.

He, Xian. What is Fatal? The Femme Fatale and Consumerism in Lady Gaga’s Telephone.” Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music 2022, issue 3. 何弦， 何以致命？：Lady Gaga音乐录影带《电话》中的“致命女人”与“消费主义”，中央音乐学院学报，2022年第3期。

Levitz, Tamara. Modernist Mysteries: Persephone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Lin, Bingqing. “Way Out of the Myth of Western Ethnomusicology Theory.” New Voices of the Music Office, Yuefu xinsheng 2011, no. 3: 104-108. 林冰清，走出西方民族音乐学理论的迷思，乐府新声 2011年第3期：104-108。

McClary, Susan. “The World According to Taruskin.” Music & Letters 87.3 (2006): 408-415 

Xu, Lufan. “Entangled Writings: Exoticism in Busoni’s Turandot,” Huang Zhong 2021, issue 4. 徐璐凡，缠绕的书写：析布索尼歌剧图兰朵的异国情调，黄钟，2021年第3期。

Ye, Songrong. "Western People's Music, Chinese Scholarship: Researching Western Music from a Chinese Perspective." Music Research 2013, no. 6: 39-51. 叶松荣，《西方人的音乐 中国人的学术 ——对以中国人的视野研究西方音乐观念与实践问题的理解》，音乐研究 2013年第6期：39-51。

Zhang, Yuexin. Beethoven in China: Research on a Case Study of Issues in the Reception of Western Classical Music. Beijing, China: Central Conservatory of Music Press, 2013. Landmark study of Beethoven reception in China. 张乐心，贝多芬在中国：西方古典音乐接受问题个案研究，北京：中央音乐学院，2013。

以“塔鲁斯金已死”致敬这伟大音乐学家。希望到时，有后人宣告“李勋康已死”

布列兹宣布勋伯格已死当时，完全符合现代主义的创新意识形态，也不一定有任何不尊重的感觉。现在是2022年，就在塔鲁斯金去世几个月后，本文的标题也仍然应该被当作是创新的号召，这毕竟是学术界的标志。这里提到的“死亡”不是塔鲁斯金的生理死亡，而是在宣布塔鲁斯金将被取代，但这不仅不含贬义，反而是对他在音乐学上的决定性影响的认可和最高评价。在武侠小说中，人们只会想要取代称霸武林的大侠，不是那些所谓的虾兵蟹将。 从这个意义上说，没有比宣布塔鲁斯金已死更高的赞扬。我只能希望有后人在时机到来时宣布“李勋康已死”。 

古代的中国哲学早已提出，生与死、阴与阳、和空与形色都是相对概念（这是不是建构与解构的前生，后来在20世纪法国哲学家笔下“投胎”？），所以在中国语境中用“已死”解构一下塔鲁斯金的成就可能是最适当的选择。以下列出塔鲁斯金已死的5个说法：

关照塔鲁斯金的总体研究，要确定他的成就有可能不是很直接达到答案的一件事。原因在于他曾经的新思想已经变得如此有影响力，以至于它们是主流音乐学思想的一部分，有一种理所当然的感觉。你不会再三考虑批评早期音乐中的“本真性”，因为很明显，本真性只是一种建构，历史无法在2022年恢复。因为我们已经牢记了塔鲁斯金的教诲，也许是时候离开他了。

关照塔鲁斯金不朽的《牛津西方音乐史》，要确定他的成就也并不容易，因为正如苏珊·麦克拉蕊（Susan McClary）指出，这6卷作品的内容是新音乐学多位作者的升华。在牛津史中塔鲁斯金对舒伯特或冷战的观点，其实不是他原创的观点，而是借鉴其他人的科研。也许我们是时候离开他去看向其他作者了。

关照塔鲁斯金关于斯特拉文斯基和俄罗斯音乐的出版物，要确定他在研究俄罗斯音乐的中国学者中的影响并不容易，因为中国学者通常直接参考俄语的一手和二手资料，而不是通过塔鲁斯金的英文文献接触俄罗斯音乐。这牵连到国际音乐学学会主席Daniel Chua的“全球音乐学”概念，它指的是超越欧洲和北美而包含全世界的音乐学家的大学术范围。

关照塔鲁斯金在牛津史中对其他新音乐学家的强烈批评（美国音乐学学会在他的讣闻中提到他武侠乞丐“pugilistic”的辩论方式），不容易辨别这场辩论在2022年的关键性。可以说，经过30年的建构和解构，新音乐学实际上可能“已死”。新音乐学的特点是它从后殖民和女权主义理论对音乐作品进行诠释。而当今西方的音乐学界已发生变化。有解放意识的音乐学研究不再是通过对西方音乐作品的诠释进行，而是通过统计学和老式的历史。例如，菲利普·尤厄尔（Philip Ewell）指出，音乐理论教科书中几乎100%的音乐例子都来自于白人作曲家的作品——黑人、中国、埃及、巴西、日本、印度尼西亚和其他作曲家在哪里？塔玛拉·莱维茨（Tamara Levitz）研究了20世纪30年代美国音乐学协会的早期历史，揭示了它当时的领导人是如何故意将世界音乐排除在他们的学会之外。在后人类主义的研究中，像雷切尔·芒迪（Rachel Mundy）、霍莉·沃特金斯（Holly Watkins）和罗宾·詹姆斯（Robin James）这些学者用“植物”和“机器人”来解读音乐。新音乐学已死，而塔鲁斯金的烦恼也随着已死。

既然新音乐学已死，对于在中国的学者来说，现在是思考中国、华语语系、东亚或全球音乐学的好时机。我们生活在一个多极的世界，可以有多种观点。甚至可以说，“西方音乐学已死”，意味着西方思想在一个多极世界的重要性必定有与之前相对降低的趋势 。无论是塔鲁斯金、新音乐学或西方音乐学，“已死”这说法意味着它们的主导地位，是最高的认可，但也标志了终止和超越。(《美国音乐学的终止/目的》The End of American Musicology是詹姆斯·柯里James Currie在2019年国际音乐学学会东亚分会会议的主旨演讲标题；“end”是多义词，在他演讲里有双重意思。也许对他而言，美国音乐学“已死”，甚至于“该死”？)

当然，从以上第一点（塔鲁斯金的主流化）就可以看出，其实塔拉斯金“未死”(这也是塔鲁斯金读书会的出发点），只是创新是科研的使命，而生死可能带来不同的思考，算是从事有价值的精神追求的一种概念建设吧！但是学术一味的创新也有可能僵化，成为一种“自律”的固定形式，就是为了创新而创新，和真理的追求脱节。“已死”-“未死”以双重概念考核可以互相克制，可称为中国哲学的“中庸之道”，指的是只有达到平衡才能稳定长久。“塔鲁斯金已死”的真正意义正在其中，即是往前迈一步，也同时把他最核心的贡献传承下去。

Epistemic Re-Colonization of Musicologies Elsewhere, Or, Orientalism

This is a follow up to my 2021 post on How Other People’s Conception of Difference Erases My Lived Experience. Since then, I’ve recalled or experienced further incidents that I now regard as the colonization of global musicologies and musicologists. As someone who has lived and worked in Asia for most of my life, I count myself among global musicologists. (It's not so much that I identify as a musicologist as that others see me as one.)

The re-colonization of global musicologies is something that occurs when North American/European scholars appropriate the anti-racist movement led by BIPOCs, and then adopt a purist position, from which they paint global scholars outside of colonial-imperial centers as regressive. It is with the most “advanced” theory on race and decoloniality emanating from North America and Europe, which regards themselves as the vanguard of knowledge, that global scholars, often in former colonies, are re-colonized. The way this re-colonization occurs is through both publications and microaggressions, often a combination of the two. 

Frequently, it is the case that the anti-racist and decolonial tenets in question (often new, but sometimes also old), are a much better fit for North American/European contexts than for material global practices with different histories and formations of racism, classicism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Yet when I point this out, I am treated as a country pumpkin from elsewhere. (As a counterpoint, let me simply say that excluding study group panels, I’ve convened 14 panels at AMS/SMT/SEM conferences since 2014). These newest ethical tenets become the means by which North American/European scholars impose their own understanding over global geographies and global scholars. Any deviation from the latest anti-racist/decolonial rules set in stone by North American/European scholars is taken to mean that global scholars are uneducated, drawing on methods as outdated as those from the 19C. There is little recognition that the methodological landscape of North America/Europe is a product of colonial history and designed to ameliorate asymmetries from the perspective of the colonial-imperial epicenter. For instance, anti-essentialism (in global music history) and identity have different significance globally than in North America/Europe because this is a matter of how global people are seen through North American/European lenses. What counts as, looks like, and is critical or feasible in “musicology” or “sociology of music” or “X of music” is not the same everywhere. For example, it is much easier to conduct research on queer musical modernism in the US than in China, where queer composers stay in the closet, and where queerness is often expressed in the form of its absence—in performances of straight-acting (see Wang's chapter in Lee 2018).

Often, when I raise the issue of racism and coloniality, I have been treated as being ignorant of research, some from the 80s, which is regarded as having satisfactorily addressed racism. From my perspective, this inability to discuss remnants of racism and coloniality in the music disciplines is a form of what Robin DiAngelo calls "white fragility." The problem is that music research—music journals and monographs—are regarded as anti-racist panaceas that have taken care of social problems in music-making and musical institutions. Racism is regarded as having been resolved for some time now, which implies a dismissal of recent discussions of anti-racism and decolonization. As for why global musicologists are treated as if they come from a land where knowledge is outdated and frozen in time, we have a familiar term for this—orientalism.

How can we counter epistemic recolonization and orientalism? I would be interested to know your thoughts.

How people’s conception of difference erases my lived experiences

(updated draft, Oct 31, 2021)

This post is part of my rethinking of difference. I talk about the opportunities and costs of difference—the armor and the crucible—at social and disciplinary margins. The "cost" is about how people’s conception of difference erase my lived experiences.

Armor: The Opportunities of Disciplinary and Social Difference

In a previous post, I wrote about my interdisciplinary outlook, which crisscrosses the music disciplines, as well as other humanities. I do so in order to supplement each individual music discipline's blindspots, allowing historical, theoretical, and ethnographic insights to converge in a way that presents a model of renewal as all of the music disciplines struggle with their exclusionary paradigms. Over the past few years, I've navigated AMS, SMT, and SEM by working with allies who have given me incredible support, and who I continue to rely on in my musical journey.

In my work, I position the music disciplines in a critical way to one another, which can be uncomfortable. For my work on alienation in the Sinophone soundscape, I integrate the historiography of Sinophone modernity with extended music analysis and ethnography; to some readers, this may appear to be a mix of oil and water (but remember that emulsions exist!). My work on queer music theory combines queer theory and music theory in an investigation of queer listening—how listeners have appropriated all kinds of Western and global sounds in queer world-making, regardless of one's ethnic identity.

Part of the reason why I pursue interdisciplinary work is because as a BIPOC and queer person, I see things in a different way than most of my European and US American colleagues—including even my BIPOC and queer colleagues who grew up in the West. Even though we may share the same commitment to countering oppressions, we approach things very differently, because our live experiences have been very different. I've lived in 4 different countries, and race and LGBTQ+ issues look very different from outside the West. For example, it continues to be possible for gay men to be prosecuted under Singapore's penal code, and people in China look at me as an outsider from Singapore who is "not Chinese enough." I think living at social and disciplinary margins necessitates that I, and others like me, learn the alchemist art of spinning an unwelcoming world into a habitable space, making it our own through reinvention. I believe the necessary remaking of the world by the marginalized is what is behind the incessant anti-normative power of queer theory—when you are marginal, you have to somehow repurpose oppressions into opportunities, however challenging that may be. I believe this is the root of my interdisciplinary outlook in which I reconfigure the music disciplines in relation one another, such that musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology end up looking different than they did before.

But working at the margins has come with difficulties that I would like to focus on in this post. I've come across the narrative that marginality is a source of strength and creativity, and my purpose in writing this post is to show that if the marginalized have come out of the crucible of oppression with an armor, this is not a matter of choice, but one of necessity. Marginality is painful, and I want to make an unequivocal statement on that, so that allies can take that extra step to help out your colleagues who may not occupy mainstream positions. Sometimes all it takes is a kind word. This may be a simple conversation to you that you may not register as significant, but I can tell you that I have a vivid memory of all those times when people have made the effort to express support for me and my work. I can recall the occasion, what we talked about, and the simple relief I felt in making that connection in what often seems like an inhospitable space. No words can express how much I value the support from allies and from fellow BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people in this difficult journey, which I will recount below. For others out there who have been working on social and disciplinary margins, I hope that this post shows that we are part of a community that shares similar experiences.

Crucible: The Costs of Difference

I’ve always felt uncomfortable at AMS, SMT, and SEM conferences because the simple demographic fact of being a BIPOC person in a majority white space is enough to be daunting. When I first started going to AMS and SMT around 2010, there weren’t any spaces where East Asian musics were prominently featured. It was only a few years later that I discovered the SMT Analysis of World Music group, but East Asia was just one among many global musical regions, and researchers seemed to prefer the rhythmic and textual complexities more commonly found in other musics. The first time I felt like I had a community was when I co-founded the SMT Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries group and the AMS Global East Asian Music Research Group. There were more BIPOC and global peoples at SEM but I work on Singapore avant-gardism through musicological and music-theoretical methods, and there have been multiple instances when I was regarded with skepticism, made to feel like an outsider, and unintentionally or purposely sidelined. I’ve also served in the leadership of the LGBTQ+ groups of all three societies, working with a majority white demographic. The truth is I have never felt at home in any of the LGBTQ+ groups I have served, in part because of my odd disciplinary position. To musicologists and ethnomusicologists, I’m the suspicious “theorist.” Sometimes, I feel that I’m resented for being in a leadership position, by other people who think it should be them leading the group. When I’ve criticized the way that these groups have operated, I’ve been made to feel like I’m rocking the boat. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of what I’ve experienced stems from assumptions that I’m ignorant about a particular issue because I’m differently construed as “outsider” and "different" in various contexts. I’d like to talk about how in almost all the areas that I conduct research in, there is a significant body of people who directly or indirectly question my competence. These research areas are: Western music, musicology, and music theory; Sinophone soundscapes; critical race theory and queer theory; and, ethnomusicology.

1. Western music, musicology, and music theory. I’ve played the piano since age 7. When I was at King’s College London and Oxford, there were no ethnomusicologists on the faculty, and all my courses were in Western music. When I was at Duke University, only one ethnomusicologist offered graduate seminars; I took one seminar on anthropology of sound, and almost 10 in Western music. In my publications, I’ve written about tonal music and Schubert. The body of global avant-garde music I examine is in the style of 20C European/US concert music, even if this music was written in Southeast and East Asia. I know Western music.

2. Sinophone soundscapes. I don’t study traditional Chinese music, but I’ve lived in the Sinophone soundscape of Singapore for 27 years, and China for 6 years—this is compared with the cumulative 2 or more years of fieldwork experience of Europeans and US Americans. Yet, when I’ve presented on my work on Sinophone soundscapes, the response has often been dismissive. Sometimes, the response is to cite a published piece of research, without an awareness that what is published in English and European languages represents only a small fraction of what is happening in a particular soundscape. Based on these publications, which are usually limited to specific time periods, say, the interwar years, my responder might make extrapolations to form a composite, sometimes heavily misconstrued mindmap about the soundscape. Another time, my whole framework was called into question, but when I make an argument about the affective dimension of the Sinophone soundscape, this is not just an academic argument—it is based on 33 years of embodied experience as a real live social being. In dinner conversation, some responders assume that I’m just expressing my own prejudices instead of presenting my research. 

3. Critical race theory and queer theory. For my book project in progress, I’m working on self-alienation felt by Sinophone composers who are confronted with a global ecumene saturated with racist Chinese stereotypes like the pentatonic cliché, chopsticks in women’s hair, the Kungfu master, and slitty eyes. This results in composers pulling back from using Chinese musical elements, or having an ambivalent relationship to them. Against this backdrop, the positionality of East Asian scholars who research Western music, such as Schumann scholar Roe Min Kok, becomes complicated. There is the universal expectation that BIPOC people should study BIPOC music and generally behave like BIPOC people—Ellie Hisama revealed in her 2019 plenary paper that she was asked if she knew how to make sushi—at a job interview. 

But it doesn’t stop there, I’ve been directly questioned about whether “I know anything about postcolonialism,” though I was born in a former British colony. I’ve been questioned by someone who presumed to be an expert on race because that responder wrote 1 article on BIPOC music. My concerned about “Chinese privilege” (Chinese oppression of minorities in Singapore and China) have been dismissed because in European/US context, white privilege is a universal, daily affair. 

Being Chinese and being queer is more complicated than people think. When I first started going to queer spaces in the UK at age 18, I quickly discovered that I was wrong to think that this was my community, because as a Chinese person, I fit into the category of rejection that some Grindr users describe as “No Asians.” Being Chinese and queer has always been complex. As has been noted (by E. Patrick Johnson), queer BIPOC people’s oppressive experiences stem from our being BIPOC, rather than being queer. This is the true meaning of intersectionality, i.e. the unpredictable interaction between race and sexuality, rather than hybridity, which is frequently presumed. There are different times when I experience the effect of: 1) being Chinese, 2) being queer, 3) being both Chinese and queer, and 4) when I don’t experience the effect of being either Chinese or queer. I think these phenomenological experiences have to do with different ways of being ostracized and minoritized. I feel Chinese in white spaces like SMT, queer when I’m in straight spaces like high school group chats where everyone is straight and married, both Chinese and queer when I’m in white heteronormative spaces like the Oxford undergraduate common room, and neither Chinese nor queer when I’m hanging out with queer bipoc friends. In other words, the hybridity of Chinese and queer identities happens at points when I feel most oppressed.

As queer bipoc people, we have no choice but to remake oppressions as opportunities for survival. And in music theory scholarship, we have an opportunity to envoice the lives of the marginalized. I believe that as a queer Chinese person, I have a special responsibility to write about Western and global composers, and queer and non-queer issues and composers, in the same breadth. I’ll keep thinking about the line connecting Schubert and Singaporean avant-gardism, and queerness, and if these things don’t seem to go together, this is conceptual baggage from a colonial and cisheteronormative framework we need to discard. These days I’m thinking hard about how to bring a queer perspective to bear on the Chinese pentatonic scale, and to the study of composers like Tan Dun. 

4. Ethnomusicology. As a global BIPOC person written about in ethnomusicology, I have thoughts about ethnomusicological constructs and institutions. But some responders assume that I don’t have even the most basic knowledge about the methodological tenets of the discipline, though I’ve convened and chaired panels at SEM for 7 out of the past 8 years. When I point out certain trends, such as researchers’s alterity to the researched <1>, I’m referred to another subsection of ethnomusicological research (ethnomusicology at home) and told that I’m out of touch, when it’s clearly the case that European/US research on foreign musics constitutes at least half of all ethnomusicological research. I’m told that I’m mischaracterizing ethnomusicology in this straw man accusation and it is implied that the trend which I’m referring to doesn’t exist. Am I crazy to point out that European/US researchers continue to work on foreign musics? What I’ve concluded is this—straw man accusations are ostrich defenses where you have to blinker your view to only the model of ethnomusicology considered to be justifiable within a specific discursive context, and ignore the rest. 

 

<1> I have not analyzed the 2021 SEM membership survey report, which was released after I had completed the following analysis in 2020. SEM's 2014 membership survey report suggests that around half of SEM research involves cultural alterity of scholars who are not people of color. According to the membership survey, ethnomusicologists self-report as having (on average) 2-3 areas of speciality, and the percentages for those researching Europe and North America come close to half or more than half. What does this mean overall? The membership survey shows that 3/4 are US citizens; of the US citizens, 3/4 are "Euro-American" (using the terminology in the survey). Of the 1/4 international members, 7 of the 9 countries with most members are European/Australasian (the other two are Japan and South Korea), which suggests that about 3/4 of the international members are European/Australasian. This suggests that overall, SEM membership is about 25% people of color. In contrast, the percentage of members conducting research in areas where people of color live are: Africa (35%), Latin America (41%), Asia (73%). (Recall that members may choose several research areas.) If you add up the total percentages for all research areas, this comes to 268.6% (because you can choose more than one area). The numbers for Africa, Latin America, and Asia alone add up to 150.1%, more than half of 268.6%--without including 63.8% for US, of which a huge chunk of research is focused on minority musics. This percentage rises to 182% (out of 268.6%) of research on the music of people of color, if one assumes that at least half of the research in North America is on minorities. Converted to 100%, the percentage of research in the music of people of color stands at c. 67% (or 182/268.6). Assuming that half of the 25% people of color study non-European, non-North American, or minority musics (i.e. 12.5%), a significant chunk--around 50% (67%-12.5%)--of SEM research involves cultural alterity of the European or Euro-American scholar. (Cultural alterity of the scholar is not reflected in the membership survey data, so I had to put several figures together, and make "50%" assumptions about how much of the North American research is on people of color, and what proportion of people of color are "native" researchers. In the absence of actual data, I don't feel comfortable gauging percentages based on my own observations.) This is not to say that most ethnomusicologists do not engage in counter-alterity research, defined in terms of the relationality between people of color versus Europeans/Euro-Americans, but that around half of ethnomusicological research involves alterity of the European/Euro-American scholar to the music being researched.

Queering "The Chair": An Improbable 100% Straight, 100% Tenured/Tenure Track Faculty.

As a queer person of color, I don’t always enjoy watching casts of 100% straight characters. Being queer, like being a person of color, is 100% of my life. It is therefore natural for me to want to see queers and people of color on screen. Despite the success of some queer shows, the vast majority of Netflix is a cisheteronormative ocean, and that has got to change. In my preferred version of the The Chair, McKay (a black woman going up for tenure) would have an affair with Kim (the Asian American chairwoman); this is dramatically plausible, in my view, given the prominence of scholars who engage in queer of color critique, such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed etc. 

I did enjoy binge-watching all six half-hour episodes of The Chair on Saturday morning though. Throughout the intrigues familiar to faculty members (wrestling over invited guest lecturers, tenure review, asymmetrical faculty power, pressure to grow class enrollment etc.), it is two narrative threads which provide the necessary dramatic tension to tie the entire story together: 1) the romance between the chair, Kim, and Dobson, and relatedly, 2) Dobson’s mock Hitler salute during a lecture, which devolves into a social media fiasco, student protests, Kim’s attempts to navigate the controversy both as chair and as Dobson’s partner, and Dobson’s eventual firing. The multiple plot elements are satisfactorily complex and sympathetic—Kim’s struggles as a single parent of an adopted child Ju-Hee who experiences anxiety over cultural identity; Dobson’s depression and struggle over the recent death of his wife; and most of all, Kim’s seemingly futile attempts to make any headway as chair, constrained by the Dean, senior faculty members, and the force of social media. I heard once that chairing a department means that everyone wants something, nobody gets anything, and everyone hates you. Sounds about right. 

I was happy to see women of color centered in The Chair. Kim’s and McKay’s struggles ring true to me as a scholar of color who works within the ambit of US academic discourse, though I am geographically located elsewhere. On the one hand, there is an emerging awareness that the work of people of color is critical to the next chapter in the development of many disciplines. On the other hand, people of color are assessed within the confines of institutions that have historically been dominated by white, male, cisheteronormative voices, necessitating a complex dance of pushing the envelope in a way that is ultimately addressed to those who wield institutional power. Thus a tenure track faculty member is likely, like McKay, to be forced at some point to propagate the discourse of a senior faculty member—McKay does this literally when she distributes Rentz’s lecture notes, though she confronts both Rentz and Kim on other occasions. The usually unseen labor of women, especially women of color, is brought to the forefront. McKay’s high enrollment section is combined with Rentz’s poorly attended one to “save” the latter; a large part of Kim’s struggle lies in the responsibility of caring for her daughter as a single mother. 

There is some distance between women of color in The Chair and in reality, which should be noted: most single mothers are not tenured faculty, and black women faculty are disproportionately represented among adjunct instructors (as opposed to ladder faculty). Against this backdrop, McKay’s positionality as tenure track faculty requires some consideration. McKay’s success on the tenure track not only represents many black women's forefront research. Her success in the show also quietly suggests that The Chair is shaped by the romance and fantasy of tenure at an elite institution. There are of course some prominent women of color at elite institutions such as Yale, which prizes McKay in the show, but this is unrepresentative of the disproportionate number of adjunct women of color in academia. If McKay does join Yale, she is likely to join the ranks of multiple brilliant women of color in Ivy League universities who have been unfairly denied tenure. The show presents a positive image of McKay as the "cream of the crop," but this could be read in terms of the neoliberal narrative of competition and scarcity; this narrative is particularly insidious given that the show hides the reality of accumulation under racial/racist capitalism in US universities, built on the backs of adjunct women of color. On that note, where are any of the adjunct instructors in the show? 100% tenured professors is a Harvard fantasy (from where one of the show's writers Annie Wyman graduated with a PhD) that doesn't pan out even at Harvard. With a 100% tenured faculty, the neoliberal decimation of tenure is itself completely blotted out. 

In centering women of color, The Chair makes an encouraging step towards inclusion. However, in the wake of hit shows such as Orange Is The New Black, Glee, and Tales of the City, I believe audience’s expectations have been raised. These hit shows, which also feature women of color, are notable for the significant presence of queer-LGBTQ themes, and other recent shows have also included important queer narrative threads (The Politician, Hollywood, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). I find it highly improbable that the English department faculty in The Chair is presented as 100% straight. In my preferred version of the show, Rentz would be a closeted gay man who finds liberation through McKay’s course “Sex and the Novel.” And McKay would have an affair with Kim; this is dramatically plausible, in my view, given the prominence of scholars who engage in queer of color critique, such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed etc. Dobson would be a single gay parent with a crush on David Duchovny. 

As a queer person of color, I don’t always enjoy watching casts of 100% straight characters. Being queer, like being a person of color, is 100% of my life. It is therefore natural for me to want to see queers and people of color on screen. Despite the success of some queer shows, the vast majority of Netflix is a cisheteronormative ocean, and that has got to change. 

The Chair’s central plotline of faculty and student response to Dobson’s mock Hitler salute requires some concluding notes. It's clear that the show's portrayal of so-called "cancel culture" is written from the perspective of the professoriate rather than students. Firstly, for a show centered on the Holocaust, where are the Jewish characters? The Jewish students? Especially without their presence, without individual stories, the students may come across as a mob. Yet the show does strike a point about the discursive truncation of social media, including the selective editing of video (to show just Dobson’s mock Hitler salute, extracting it from the context of a lecture on facism/absurdism), which is precisely the same method used in fake news. Clearly, the student protests and fake news are not the Same, but they are both structured by the materialities of social media platforms. 1) Truncation: extended thoughts that require more than 140 characters to express are atomized and fall into the collective unconscious. 2) Research shows that posts that go viral tend to evoke strong affect, which means that social media-driven ethics is shaped by affect rather than actual ethical analysis; this is shown in the university's truncated disciplinary process, regardless of whether you agree with the outcome (Dobson was fired not because the ethics committee found his actions to be wrong, but because they wanted the student protests to end; as an outcome-directed, teleological rationale in an ethics-framework, this circular logic is itself fundamentally wrong). Ultimately, what I personally like most about the show is two things: 1) it’s centering of people of color (albeit in a somewhat unrepresentative, romanticized way), and 2) the mirror it positions in front of the structure of social media, asking pointed questions about the critical processes by which we come to decide issues of ethics and morality.

We Are All in Music Studies Now (But I'm Not Really Talking About That)

This less than polemical title is what Amico is actually (kind of) suggesting (via Nooshin) in his recent article (30), despite the language about “The End of Ethnomusicology.” As one of the people cited as being “discipline-defying,” I have to say Amico articulated most of the frustrations I have about disciplinary definitions. The top three issues which have caused concern for me (not the issues themselves, but the way in which they are positioned in discourses) are: 1) ethnic identity, 2) ethnography, and 3) Western music. These are issues that I have had conversations with ethnomusicologists about, or on which ethnomusicologists have spoken about in public fora such as email lists or conferences (as opposed to scholarly publications). My focus on ethnomusicological common sense as embodied in public discourse is in line with Amico’s critique about the reliance of ethnomusicologists on the “one percent” (10) vanguard of scholarship, as evidence that problems related to the three issues above have been more or less resolved.

I have benefited from the friendship and feedback of several ethnomusicologists over many years, including the 22 in the 6 panels I convened at SEM conferences from 2014-2020. Thus, the following account of some expressions of ethnomusicological conventional wisdom is not intended to disrespect anyone, but to gently point out that my advice has generally not been sought with regards to the specific musical cultures that I have been enculturated in for many years (27 years in Singapore, 5 years in Suzhou, China).

1) Ethnicity. My research reveals what should be common knowledge, that traditional musical forms face declining audience numbers over subsequent generations of listeners, such that some young people have no relationships with traditional musics. This information has been received with skepticism, perhaps unconsciously reflecting the belief that ethnicity is a unified entity with ethnic identity and musical preference in alignment. It has been suggested to me that my preliminary "assumptions" will be proven false through interactions with music-makers (this was after my research had been completed). The problematics of the ethnicity concept reflected in these interactions is outlined by Amico as implicit or “ascribed” (12) authenticity/reality putatively unearthed through ethnography taking place in particular localities, thus reinforcing/naturalizing differences and stable ethnic identities.

 

2) Ethnography. Many well-intentioned ethnomusicologists have explained to me ethnomusicology’s methodology-based definition as ethnographic research on both global and Western musical traditions. (Such explanations are not necessary if one’s interlocutor has been present at SEM conferences for a few years, or if they have read Slobin’s Micromusics.) Those who have been in the field for longer can speak to this better than I can, but isn’t the “universal” outlook a reaction to postcolonial theory that forced academia to reckon with the power asymmetry inherent in disciplines based in Western universities but with a global purview? As Amico points out, the coloniality of the disciplinary “ethno” prefix continues to be a source of contention, suggesting a need for decolonization efforts that must incorporate historical perspectives on the discipline. The near exclusive reliance on ethnography (also pointed out by Amico) is interconnected with other issues. First is the assumption that cultural others are so different that ethnography is the only means by which musical reality can be assessed. Putting aside whether reality can be assessed as such (or whether it is always a construction, a view which is mainstream in anthropology), the difference of cultural others can be exaggerated without a close examination of the precise musical practices in which they engage; consider that e.g. the high school music curriculum in Singapore was 100% Western music until around 2000. Second, the idea that reality is accessible has contributed to resistance against research collaborations (e.g. with “native” co-authors, research team members), perhaps because the "authenticity" of data retrieved is assumed to be guaranteed by first person ethnographic experience.

 

3) Western music. It is conventional wisdom among some ethnomusicologists, many of whom work in departments dominated by Western music, that the latter music is oppressive. This is not necessarily the case for postcolonial milieus in which political, economic, and military power has been returned to the former colonies, and where Western and traditional musics are inextricably intertwined. The assumption of certain musics as having an “inability to engender resistance” (Amico, 16) (and thus not worthy of study) is countered by the central anthropological tenet that all cultural (re)production involves the exercise of agency. This is why Beethoven was deemed to be sounding out both Marxist revolution and bourgeois-capitalist capitulation from the 1950s-70s in China. The oppressor in post-independence China is not Western music per se, but the communist party’s state apparatus, which included musical appropriation and censorship. That is to say, it is not music per se which is oppressive, but the uses to which music are put (cultural imperialism does not exhaust the full range of musical functions, including what may seem like the paradoxical appropriation of Western sounds for anti-racism). The exclusive study of musical cultures in a counter-hegemonic frame that is distinctive to ethnomusicology has sometimes meant the elision of critique of oppression in global musical cultures (including heteronormative readings of female impersonators in China opera, or purely aesthetic assessments of cultural production during the Cultural Revolution in China). I wonder if it is the disciplinary counter-hegemonic stance which is preventing some of our most well-respected ethnomusicologists from taking further steps towards decolonization. When one is focused on putative externalities (like Western music), internal problems of one’s home discipline may not be as obvious?

The US Musicological Frame: “Western Music” Redacted, But Is History Now Anti-Racist?

In the wake of the recent controversy over music theory’s white racial frame, there is heightened awareness among musicologists of the need for anti-racist research and pedagogy. One type of anti-racism has taken the form of removing “Western music” from the academic lexicon (a project begun in global music history; see Irving 2019), much as “Westernization” and the “West” were previously discursively redacted, because the former is oppressive, and the latter is over-generalized. Against this background, consider three historical developments: the dissemination of European music to East and Southeast Asia since the 1800s; the diversification of the Singaporean high school curriculum around 2000 from 100% Western music to 60%, with 40% newly-introduced Asian musics; the establishment of the Tianjin Julliard School in China in 2019. What all this points to is the historical fact of Western music’s expansion and contraction in the global arena. The ease with which the term “Western music” is dropped points in part to the gap between musicological research and musicologist-designed course syllabi, versus the material world of global musical practices, far removed from the pages of US musicology journals and from US music classrooms. Though it is possible to replace “Western” with words like “modern” and “cosmopolitan” to describe global musical practices, these terms refer to the positionality rather than sounds of musicians performing the same four notes of Beethoven Fifth. Discursive redaction of Western music in US academia has little effect on sounds from across the Pacific Ocean; consider that of the nine oldest conservatories in China, only China Conservatory is dedicated to Chinese music, with the rest competing to produce the next Lang Lang. (For the purposes of this short post, I am considering only US musicology and not other musicologies.)

I make the foregoing argument not to detract from US musicology’s anti-racist efforts, but to point out the ways in which such efforts ultimately reflect US priorities, namely, the urgent need for a concrete response to the violence of racism, horrifically evidenced in the murder of George Floyd. Racism is one of the reasons why conceptual revision in disciplinary and curricular reform—including in the form of discursive redaction—are sometimes emphasized over the actual history of global music that would require a reliably specific musical nonmenclature for naming the (Western, modern, cosmopolitan?) sounds that are impacted by waves of westernization, dewesternization, and rewesternization (corresponding respectively to the three historical developments listed in the opening paragraph). Discursive redaction has been given new life in the age of social media, but it is rooted in post-structuralist approaches in which there has long been a tension between naming and redacting a marginalized identity, where the former alternately allows for the object to be named (for the purposes of resistance) and reified (as an unchanging essence), while the latter points to a future in which oppression of that identity has ceased and thus the identity itself becomes obsolete.

 

After redacting “Western,” “music history” itself could become the object of musicological study and teaching. In theory, this could take the form of emphasizing and expanding the lessons of new musicology: non-teleological historiography refuting “heights” of musical development by geniuses such as Beethoven; refusal of historiography itself as overly generalized, focusing instead on “centuries”-framed cultural studies (18^th-, 19^th-, 20^th-centuries). In theory, that is, the new music history could end up like much of the New Musicology of the 90s—examining primarily Europe and North America. Against this possibility, there is some utility in arguing explicitly for the inclusion of global, non-European, and non-North American locations in the new music history.

 

Despite the redaction in “Western music history,” a contradiction persists in that such history typically redacts "Western music" that has been sounded globally e.g. in East and Southeast Asia since the 1800s, but projects a US redactional construction of anti-racist music history over the global history of Western music. I would argue that the ability to articulate such contradictions are necessary to a responsible anti-racist musicological agenda. Consider another contradiction: the complexities of racism are such that even global sounds, when included as tokenism in a conservatory environment, can—in that specific setting—become part of the apparatus of institutional racism. That is to say, it is not Western or global musics that are essentially racist or anti-racist, but discourses that construct musics as racist or anti-racist. It is often easier to redact terms than to address pervasive, often clandestine ideologies that are intertwined with various histories and historiographies.

 

Indeed, the vagaries of history begin with the very concept of history, which is tied up with the racist bifurcation between Western music, literacy (notation), and history, on the one hand, versus global music, orality, and ethnography (which emerged in the age of European imperialism), on the other. Even assuming that the problematics of history have been resolved and we can proceed with music history, problems can easily occur without a comprehensive global historiographical framework. An anti-racist music history that is entirely methodological in its revisionary efforts might end up focusing on postcolonial issues such as Western musical orientalism, without stepping out of Europe and North America, or it may do so only  minimally. Even a diversified history can still be Eurocentric if it commences with chants (folding outward from Gregorian to e.g. Buddhist chants) that constitute the conventional originary point for European but not global music histories. Such a chronological history can reproduce Eurocentrism in the periodization of everything before 1500s as the Middle Ages, whereas it is only Europe that was in the “middle” of the fall of the Roman empire and Europe’s recovery. 

 

From a pedagogical perspective, in many cases, the primary purpose of the undergraduate Western music history survey was never to teach about music history per se (archival research, historiography), but to provide a diachronic array of chronologically-ordered background contexts in which musical works are foregrounded (this is not necessarily a problem from a pedagogical point of view, as long as there is an understanding that music and "context" are co-constituting, e.g. Chinese composers's symphonies co-constructed Chinese modernity). If the pedagogical necessity of history proper is asserted, this needs to be clarified in the light of the racist conceptual bifurcation of Western music notation's historical trace and global musics's orality. I would point to the common undergraduate pedagogical ground of context for both Western and global musics, since the latter are presented in a “synchronic” array of contexts in which social function is emphasized (c.f. diachronic contexts of Western music). This raises the issue (and the promises and dangers) of merging musical disciplines and courses, which may be inevitable for anti-racist music research and teaching.

From Selective Disavowal to Comprehensive Anti-Racism in Music Theory

The symposium on Philip Ewell’s SMT 2019 plenary presentation, “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame,” in the most recent issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies (JSS) has been widely criticized for its systemic racism. (Note the difference between (i) individual racist beliefs, versus (ii) social structures that systematically exclude and disadvantage people of color—i.e. "systemic racism," or just "racism." The “social structure” definition applies in most contemporary discussions of institutionalized racism.) As I observe the unfolding reactions to the JSS issue, with anti-racist statements by formal and informal collectives as well as individuals, I thought it is important to direct attention also to the need to not just disavow systemic racism in Schenkerian theory and JSS, but to take further concrete action now by looking within our individual and collective teaching and scholarship, rethinking every element of music theory—i.e. to immediately and systematically materialize the promise made in several anti-racist statements (and in yet other words, action commences rather than concludes with drafting and signing a letter). Disavowal needs to be accompanied by a commitment to rooting out systemic racism in all areas of music theory, and in ethno/musicology if that is one's discipline. This is in part because selective disavowal can lead to distortions and unintended forms of coerciveness against minorities. Selective disavowal without a wider systemic anti-racism has the structural effect of at least temporarily implying that other areas of music research and teaching are not racist, excusing them from critique—clearly, music theory as a whole (beyond Schenker) is embedded in systemic exclusions that we know as systemic racism. Selective disavowals have the effect of ascribing a "racist" identity to the discarded object (as opposed to racist approaches to a given music-theoretical object), potentially re-inscribing violent epistemologies of essentialist racial identities onto people of color—through the implication that people of color "ought to" be anti-racist and thus cannot authentically teach or conduct research in Schenkerian theory or Western music in general. A similar problem is found with blanket decolonial projects aimed at dismantling Western music, which ignore the presence of composers, performers, and music scholars of Western music who are people of color. Any kind of dichotomous bifurcation, such as that effected by a selective disavowal, inevitably implies dualist-essentialist identities that always turn into the epistemic violence of coercive minority identity, commonly known as minority stereotyping. Put more simply, racism does not inhere in particular musics or theories; rather, racism is a social structure within which musics and theories are embedded, and thus all musics, theories, and disciplines have racist elements which need to be confronted.

 

As the contribution by Suzannah Clark in the JSS issue shows, it is possible to trace the racist elements in Schenkerian theory, as a first step in revising the entire theoretical apparatus. While Schenker was clearly racist, and his theory necessarily has racist elements, there are a wide range of ambiguities, complexities, and multiplicities which unfortunately were raised in the JSS issue for the purposes of deflection and defense, thus posing the real danger of shutting down all discussion of various issues: (i) race and racism, (ii) context and history, (iii) Schenker’s Jewish identity (not as a "defense" of Schenker, nor as an attack taking the form of accusing critics of Schenker of anti-Semitism; but as a real facet of his identity), (iv) the complex co-constitution and separability—or not—of music theory and race, (v) the applicability—or not—of facets of Schenkerian theory to repertoires beyond Western music, and more. Future scholarship will need to consider the contingency of racist elements of the Schenkerian apparatus, making difficult judgements on what elements can reasonably be regarded as having musical explanatory power and may be separable from racist ideology, on the one hand, and what elements are inextricably intertwined with racism (Clark suggests that Schenker's privileging of the dominant and exclusion of the subdominant speaks to his racial ideology). Various components of Schenkerian theory such as centricity-hierarchy or diminution were infused with his racism but have not been shown, by themselves and across musical genres, to be universally co-constituted with racism. I believe the work I outlined here is what Ewell is referring to when he wrote in his recent article in Music Theory Online: "If Schenkerian theory is to survive in the twenty-first century, as I hope it does, we must confront the uncomfortable realities not just of Schenker himself but, more important, of the legacy of how we have engaged with his ideas and what that means with respect to race in American music theory."