[…] Continuation of: I. Prequel: Five Classics […]
But there was no resting on laurels. No sooner had I completed the syllabus than I started reading some recent inquiries into critical race theory and music theory—especially Phil Ewell’s series of blog posts “Confronting Racism and Sexism in Music Theory” and Vijay Iyer’s analysis of recent theorizing on improvisation [paywall]—and what I read gave me pause. What our syllabus didn’t do was to step outside of the heteronormative white-male framework. It reinscribed the same canon of sanctified figures that is apparently gender- and race-neutral, but is in fact simply white and male. Forget omitting Fux, Koch, and Marx—what this syllabus didn’t have was any women, any people of color, or any LGBTQIA+ persons.
Why this is noteworthy:
- Representation matters. (As a gay white male, I confess that I sometimes forget this point. It’s easy to argue that we should be interested in the ideas behind the people. But if all the theorists look like me, it’s only fair to acknowledge I am plenty represented, and that others might not feel that way.)
- If we don’t work toward representation ourselves, then it will never happen. The pretext that we cannot change history—that certain figures were simply more central than others, that certain figures brought new ideas to the discussion—is irrelevant. If we select five figures from a timeframe that spans one and a half millennia, we make massive omissions however we slice it.
Would such a goal even be achievable? What would an equivalent syllabus look like if it tried to add this level of diversity? What if it included no white males and instead elevated a canon made up entirely of women and POC persons? To plan this out, I decided to stick with our five-figure structure. Here is what I came up with in my thought experiment:
- Ptolemais of Cyrene (3rd century bce?)
- Al-Fārābī (c. 872–950/51)
- Zhu Zaiyu (1536–1611)
- Johanna Kinkel (1810–1858)[1]
- Julián Carrillo (1875–1965)
There is a fairly coherent story around these figures as well. It is a story of tuning and consonance, and the various larger units that can be created out of our decisions to divide tones in particular ways and not in others. (For what it’s worth, other figures I considered but ultimately did not include are the Japanese scholar Shohe Tanaka, on whom Danny Walden has written in his dissertation, and the American experimentalist Henry Cowell, on whom I will write more later. There are doubtless plenty others who are not even on my radar.)
In putting together this alternative “Five Classics,” I was looking for a number of different factors at the same time, and it’s worth laying out clearly the kinds of calculations that went into this.
- What are the topics worth covering? Specifically, what key concepts will students be able to further explore in other contexts?
- What historical timeline will provide us with a relatively coherent narrative that could, ideally, span the entire semester?
- How can we cover a reasonable range of different historical and cultural constellations and periods? What arguments and issues from any one debate can we build on in future topics?
As a side note, I have been quite interested in the kinds of instruments that music theorists use in order to demonstrate their ideas, such as the monochord and the piano. The affordances and constraints of these instruments can tell us quite a lot about the musical universe in which the theories operate. The diverse theorists also introduce a new range of music-theoretical instruments: the oud of the Arabic world and the Chinese twelve lü.
Most of the concerns and considerations here are not fundamentally different from the earlier syllabus. In our effort to cover a large timespan, we aimed to find connections and coherence wherever possible.
Of course, certain things that we assume in conventional (let’s just call it heteronormative white male) histories of music theory cannot be carried over into this conglomerate. In this conventional world it is possible to write history as a series of dialogs, in which later theorists critique earlier theorists. In my old syllabus, we can read Helmholtz picking up ideas from Rameau, Rameau taking issue with Zarlino, or Zarlino referencing Boethius. We can be fairly sure that each theorist on the old syllabus was familiar with the works of the earlier ones, at the very least certain works of the previous generation. This syllabus can easily be read as a meeting of minds in timeless space in which heteronormative white male theorists discuss music-theoretical issues and illuminate them from all sides.
Such a meeting of minds is more difficult to construe for a more diverse group of theorists. There is no evidence that, say, Johanna Kinkel read Zhu Zaiyu, or was even aware of his groundbreaking work in Ming-dynasty China. Al-Fārābī pays, as far as I am aware, no particular heed to Ptolemais’ work, just as Julián Carrillo, while trained in Germany, does not shed any light on Johanna Kinkel. Any connections between these figures must remain imaginary and imaginative. But this is not to say they cannot coexist—in theory.
We will simply have to try a little harder to uncover such connections. It may not always be possible to make links on a person-to-person basis, but the links exist on a discursive level, in which Ptolemais—whose work we only know obliquely, through Porphyry—becomes the figure through whom we explore the world of ancient Greek music theory. Once we broaden out in this way, it is no problem to link Ptolemais’s work with that of Al-Fārābī, who expanded Greek principles into the Islamicate[2] context of the tenth century ce—or rather, the third century ah in the Islamic calendar, to further decenter our sense of chronology. The famous story of Zhu Zaiyu, who calculated equal temperament in China in 1584, some years before Simon Stevin made the equivalent calculation in Europe, using his own methods and technologies, offers its own global context.
[…] Continuation: III. Some Consequences […]
[1] Thanks go to Danny Walden for introducing me to Johanna Kinkel, the female composer and music theorist in the circle around Karl Marx exiled in London, and her remarkable call to Emancipate the Quartertone!
[2] With thanks to Siavash Sabetrohani, I adopt this term from Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: 1. The Classical Age of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1975), 59. “I have been driven to invent a term, ‘Islamicate’. It has a double adjectival ending on the analogy of ‘Italianate’, ‘in the Italian style’, which refers not to Italy itself directly, not to just whatever is to be called properly Italian, but to something associated typically with Italian style and with the Italian manner. One speaks of ‘Italianate’ architecture even in England or Turkey. Rather similarly (though I shift the relation a bit), ‘Islamicate’ would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.”