It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Philip Ewell’s SMT plenary talk last year on music theory’s “White racial frame”—and also including the expanded essay he published this past summer and the recent issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies (devoted as a response to Ewell’s SMT talk)– has ignited a debate within the music-theoretical community that is unprecedented, a debate that has spilled over the boundaries of our publications and chat lists into the wider public sphere. (When was the last time the name of Heinrich Schenker or a mention of the Society for Music Theory has appeared in the news section of the New York Times or the Economist?)
As we know, the aspect of Ewell’s argument that has provoked the most impassioned response—both in support and in opposition—was his searing indictment of our discipline for harboring deeply embedded racial biases in the repertoire, tools, and language with which we study and teach music. So ingrained are these racial contaminations, Ewell argues, that most of us are scarcely aware of their presence. Whether one agrees or not with his diagnosis of this condition and his prescription for cure, I think all of us should be grateful to Philip for the prod he has given us to face some uncomfortable questions honestly and fearlessly.
It is not surprising that Ewell focused much of his essay on the writings of Heinrich Schenker, since Schenker’s writings have long been known to harbor some notorious moments of racial and nationalist commentary. But I think Ewell is right when he suggests that the problem goes beyond Schenker, as obvious a target as he is. And this is where the history of music theory might be useful to test that hunch. As scholars of historical music theory, we have a particularly good perch to survey the history of our field and see what other skeletons might be hiding in our discipline’s closet. Thus we might have a useful role to play in confirming—or perhaps qualifying—Ewell’s indictment. For me, it is a charge that hit home personally.
In my own recently-published book on François Joseph Fétis (Stories of Tonality in the Age of François Joseph Fétis; University of Chicago Press, 2019), I stumbled upon a few of these skeletons as I read many of Fétis’s later—and lesser known—publications. And what I found was that it was not simply that Fétis expressed strong racial prejudices. (For a Belgian national writing at the dawn of Belgium’s infamous colonialization of the Congo, such prejudices were hardly unusual; on the contrary, they were ubiquitous and quotidian.) But what was truly startling, I found, was how these prejudices seeped into a key theoretical concept with which he is identified today: tonalité. As tonality is one of those “frames” by which music theorists have long used in their studies and analyses, it may come as something of a surprise to discover its deeply racist genealogy.
I won’t try to rehearse the entire history here. (For those readers who are interested, I’d refer them to the fifth chapter of my book, where the whole sordid story is told.) But I can reduce Fétis’s essential conclusions to a series of bullet points:
- For Fétis, tonality was a patchwork of scale systems that have varied over time and space.
- Each civilization, people, and race have had a tonality that was uniquely suited to their character and needs based on the pitch content and tuning of its chosen scale system (the ancient Greek modes, Indian rags, Arabic Maqam, Chinese and Celtic pentatonic scales, and so on).
- The tonality used by a given people determines—but also limits—the kinds of music that can be created with it.
- Only the European white race, with its advanced system of the diatonic scales of the 12 transposable major and minor keys, possesses a tonality that allows for true musical art.
The following quotation from the first volume of his Histoire générale de la musique of 1869 illustrates Fétis’s racist views bluntly:
The true history of music begins only with the general history of this privileged [white] race, one which never has known the state of savagery, and who, upon making their first appearance in the world, showed themselves relatively advanced, cultivated, and of such great superiority over all other races that no comparison between them can be made. The white race alone is endowed with the faculty to modify itself perpetually, to present itself in history in a thousand differing ways. Contrary to the other races, one of which [the black race] remains in servitude and stays in a permanent state of social infancy, and the other [yellow race] which has attained a certain degree of civilization but one that it can never surpass, the white race has developed over time all the consequences of its moral organization. It perpetually adds to the knowledge it has already acquired. It possesses a sentiment of beauty, of grandeur, and it is to it that we owe the creation of pure art and the progress of science.
(Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’à nos jours. 5 vols. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1869-1876. Vol. I, 108)
And what is the reason for the superior development of the white race and consequently the music that it has produced over time? It turns out it can be attributed entirely to biology. The very opening sentence of his Histoire makes this clear: “The history of music is inseparable from the degree to which the special faculties of the races were cultivated” (HGM, Vol. I, i). If there was any doubt as to what Fétis meant by those ”special faculties,” he cut to the phrenological core in the opening sentences of Volume 2:
The sentiment for music, among nations as well as individuals, is due to the conformation of the brain. . . . The relations of sounds do not affect people of races in the same way; what charms one displeases the other, precisely because the organs of the brain are not of the same dimensions.
(HGM II, i)
And let there be no mistake as to which race has won the prize in the lottery of brain size: it is the race blanche—the white race, “which alone has produced music that may be elevated to the dignity of art” (HGM I, vi).
This last point should turn some heads with its obvious nod to the discredited “science” of phrenology. But Fétis was actually relying here upon the fashionable writings of Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, whose four-volume book “Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines” (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853-55) he had devoured—and annotated–with enthusiasm. (Again, details and references to this information may be found with some further contextualization and elaborations in my book in Chapter 5.)
(to be continued)
Continuation: Part II