Sins of the Father: Schenker, Schenkerism and Ewell's On Music Theory

So, if one argues that the hierarchic thinking that lies at the core of Schenkerian theory is white and racist, what is one to make of the fact that in West Africa, too, modes of hierarchic thinking are pronounced and functionally indispensable to an understanding of many an expressive structure, musical as well as non-musical? The worst consequence of claiming technical procedures for whiteness is denying the existence of shared ways of proceeding, and in effect enjoining our hypothetical West African theorist to go look for something different, a new grounding principle, better if it is anchored in nonhierarchy, something uniquely his own, something 'black'. The domain of blackness is thus defined in its non-intersection with whiteness. I fail to see how such a strategy can be empowering for black scholars. (Agawu 2021, pp. 15–16) If the blogosphere, social media and the popular press are any indication, Philip Ewell's new book, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, provokes strongly positive and strongly negative reactions in its readers. But everyone in Ewell's audience – his ideological nemeses as much as or more than his sympathisers and proselytes – should agree that he has written a type of book that has never been written before: a music-theoretical page turner. Maybe this says more about me than it does about music theory, but I can't think of another book with a Library of Congress 'MT' designation that I simply couldn't put down. Ewell has a taste and a flair for playing the raconteur, and much of his manifesto is anecdotal, narrating the vicissitudes of Ewell's academic career and the circumstances of his (by his own account) road-to-Damascus awakening to the deleterious effects of what he calls the 'white racial frame', a term borrowed from the sociologist Joe Feagin (Feagin 2009). He also has a taste and a flair for playing the provocateur. On Music Theory is written with an intensity of candor that verges on yellow-journalistic stridency. It doesn't flinch at – indeed it revels in – airing music theory's dirty laundry and dragging skeletons out of closets. Regarding the maltreatment and prejudice Ewell has experienced lately and over the years, there is whistle-blowing aplenty. He publicises private email correspondence, reports the contents of presumably confidential tête-à-têtes and, with only a couple of exceptions, names names. Good, I suppose. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants, and there does seem to be some bigoted rot in need of some UV rays. Beyond what I freely admit were, for me, the voyeuristic enjoyments of beholding a good old-fashioned muckraking spectacle – some of what gets dredged up is pretty sordid1 – I also found that Ewell's indictments of individuals and institutions, his diagnoses of music theory's sundry counter-multicultural and Eurocentrist pathologies and his proposals for ameliorations and paths forward all left me on the edge of my seat, wanting to hear more in the way of explanation, elaboration and refinement. The book is so replete with innovative, in-your-face incitements that many of them are perforce conveyed in outline form, almost as hot takes, and, owing to their abundance and variety, most of them must lie outside the scope of my commentary here. This essay focuses on just a handful of items I would like to hear more from Ewell about. I will try to avoid making superfluous rhetorical flourishes when attributing views to Ewell, and will, most especially in the opening expository section of this essay, aim for a tone of balanced equanimity as I delineate his contentions, many of which seem calculated to unbalance equanimity. My goal at first will be to give what in jurisprudence is sometimes called a 'hornbook law' reading, one where the interpreter backs up every interpretative assertion about a text with a citation of particular sentences in it that can be plausibly understood (or cannot plausibly not be understood) to propound unambiguously the position the interpretative assertion imputes. That's a long way of saying that I plan to take Ewell at his word, to take all his claims at face value and to guard against reading anything into his argument that cannot immediately, and with minimal extrapolation, be traced to his published utterances. Sometimes it's okay – because it's apt, entertaining, illuminating, illustrative of deeper truths, non vero ma ben trovato, or whatever – for a reviewer to engage in 'the hermeneutic ventriloquism practiced when the author's lips move, but only the reader's voice can be heard' (Brandom 2004, p. 3), or to fill out an author's reasoning speculatively with a heavy hand and a broad brush, or to render her views grotesquely to set their notable features in relief, or to treat someone else's book as a grindstone for one's own political axe or as an anvil for one's own philosophical hammer. But Ewell's official platform has been repeatedly subject to gross mischaracterisation and overwrought caricature ('He's trying to cancel classical music!' 'He thinks it's racist to listen to Beethoven's music!') by those most viscerally averse to it, and I want to stay at a safe distance from anything in the neighbourhood of pearl-clutching hyperbole and satirical burlesque. In that same spirit of interpretative cautiousness, I will also resist the impulse to indulge in armchair psychoanalysis and will, by and large, withhold my spontaneous characterological impressions, and for that matter my considered characterological judgements, of the authorial personality that emerges from Ewell's text, even though cultivating and giving voice to such impressions and judgements is something that good reviewers sometimes do to good effect. I will not wade into the miasmatic swamp of the culture wars, at least not very deeply, which here means I will mostly eschew wider political and sociocultural framing and contextualising. I will proceed with a studied lack of attention to the broader cultural significance of Ewell's book, to the ways it sounds various keynotes of the contemporary academic-liberal (or 'rad-lib') zeitgeist, and to its legibility as a cultural, institutional and political barometer. Instead, I'm mainly going to expatiate in a pedantic, logic-choppy way about such things as inferences and argument forms. I will not attempt to defend (or excuse or rehabilitate or sympathetically portray or offer pleas in mitigation of the moral noxiousness of) Heinrich Schenker the man. This one will be a piece of cake: I've always found that dude to be a nasty piece of work – a low-down, belligerent, jingoistic grouch like unto no other – in spite of my long-standing fascination with his truly monumental and awe-inspiring philosophy of music. (Perhaps only Martin Heidegger and Gottlob Frege bear any comparison to Schenker as thinkers who tendered to posterity such a disconcerting heap of moral rags and philosophical riches.) I will not comment on Ewell's reports of and conjectures about the ill intentions and white-supremacist attitudes of living individuals, either to dispute them or to corroborate them.2 I will not take issue with any of Ewell's imputations to Schenker of specifically biologically racist beliefs and attitudes. For the sake of argument, I will take on board sans phrase the view that Schenker is exactly as toxic as Ewell says he is, that he is toxic in exactly the way Ewell says he is and that he is that toxic in that way for exactly the reasons Ewell says he is.3 (The question will then be: allowing that Schenker is something close to the apogee of biological-racist toxicity, what follows, especially for Schenkerian analysis as actually or potentially practiced?) I will not substantively reflect on the instrumental or intrinsic desirability, de jure permissibility, or de facto practicability of Ewell's favoured programme for transforming the college-level study of music (see especially pp. 268–77), except to say up front that (a) much of that programme seems sensible and salutary to me,4 and (b) some of it seems as though its gauntlet-throwing radicalness gets slightly soft-pedalled in the presentation. Several of Ewell's schemes look to me as though they push, with more force than he is quite prepared to acknowledge, in the direction of music theory's effective self-abolishment. The full implementation of Ewell's proposed reforms would, I reckon, spell the liquidation of music theory as an autonomous and self-siloed area of inquiry, that is, as a fringe intellectual sect of hardcore hyperformalistic aesthetes who understand themselves as remote and aloof – in their arcane practices, occult rituals, guildlike methods, defining object of esoteric inquiry and mystical reverence (the musical work) and gathering values (roughly: Werktreu) – from the scholarly 'metropoles' of musicology and cultural studies.5 And abolishment is a direction in which I'm basically content to be pushed. (Thereby hangs a tale, but a tale for another time.) That's a long list of Sprachverboten! What's left to discuss? The answer is: something rather narrow and parochial. I will spend most of my time and effort assessing what I have elsewhere called 'the infection thesis' (Parkhurst 2023, p. 311), the claim that 'Schenker's racist views "infected" his music-theoretical "arguments"' (Ewell 2023, p. 93).6 Ewell might be peeved at this self-imposed blinkering, and justifiably so, for he has bigger fish than Schenker to fry. He has the whole field, and really the whole academy – and really the whole racially 'enframed' life world – in his crosshairs. I will preemptively defend my intentional myopia by saying that, first, as I mentioned, I can't comment on everything, or most things, in Ewell's jam-packed monograph, and the parts about Schenker's theory are the parts I am most competent to register an opinion about and most equipped to educe wider lessons from; second, the challenges I raise are to a certain extent generalisable and may therefore give readers of On Music Theory food for thought as they consider other issues that Ewell stews over; and third, even if Ewell does have bigger fish than Schenker to fry, music theorists will almost certainly come away from his book with the feeling that Ewell has served up Schenkerism as one of the main courses in a polemical banquet, since no other music-analytical approach gets so thoroughly roasted on a spit. On Music Theory is not a book about Schenker, but it's not not a book about Schenker, either. One moral I will draw out by working through the infection thesis is this: even though one would have to be seriously out of touch to have failed to notice by now that der Fall Ewell has drastically, irreversibly transformed the tone and tenor of academic music studies – owing in no small part to the smashing success with which Ewell launched the notion of the white racial frame into the field's conceptual orbit – nevertheless, in some ways everything feels even more the same than it ever did (if you'll permit the expression). This is the case specifically as concerns the characteristic patterns of hermeneutic reasoning our peculiar vocation still sees fit to ratify and reward. You'll see what I mean later on. 'Schenker's racism seeped into his musical theories' (p. 108). 'His repulsive thoughts on various peoples … penetrate Schenker's music theory' (p. 108). 'Schenker's racism pervaded his music theories' (p. 34, quoting Ewell 2021, p. 4). 'When reading Schenker's music-theoretical works anew from a critical-race perspective, it is actually quite easy to see his racism in his music theories' (p. 34, quoting Ewell 2021, p. 4). 'Schenker's racism permeates his music theories' (p. 165). 'His views on race are part of his views on music' (p. 111). 'Race, racism, and white supremacy are, in fact, significant parts of Schenker's music theory' (p. 111). 'His racial theories and musical theories were part of his unified view of the world' (p. 165). 'Given his postulate of racial inequality, racism is not fundamentally alien to the hierarchical structure of Schenker's worldview' (p. 107, quoting Martin Eybl). 'Schenker's racism is reflected in his music theories' (p. 149). 'Schenker's views on race align with his views on music' (p. 108). 'His views on people and his views on music "belonged together"' (p. 111). 'His thinking about racial inequality manifests itself in his musical theories' (p. 109). 'Schenker's hierarchical beliefs on race are so intimately connected with his hierarchical views on music that one wonders which motivated which … One could argue that his views on music drove, reified, and even inspired his views on race. But without question, the two belong together – they are inseparable' (p. 111). 'Schenker's views on people affected his music theory, and … Schenker intended them to be considered as one' (p. 105). 'Relating Schenker's music theories to his racism makes perfect sense' (p. 111). 'His views on race and music are to be considered together in his overall view of the world' (p. 90). 'Schenker's views on people can be linked to his views on musical structure' (p. 92). 'I wish to recouple this severed link between Schenker's hierarchical beliefs about music and his hierarchical beliefs about people' (p. 104). 'It is no longer possible to cleave Schenker's racism from his music theories and simply say, as was so often said in the twentieth century, that Schenker's musical theories have nothing to do with race' (p. 116). To the best of my knowledge, that list is exhaustive. It includes all the pertinent statements I could track down in On Music Theory that tell us how to conceive of the affiliation between Schenker's theory of music and Schenker's racism – that is, how to cash out in more literal terms the metaphor of infection. As the list makes evident, there are actually multiple criss-crossing infection theses. The formulations above articulate at least five distinguishable, meaningfully dissimilar views. (Some of the formulations articulate more than one of these views, or are ambiguous between two or more of them.) I'll call these the cargo-ship view (most obvious in quotes 1–5), the iceberg view (most obvious in quotes 6–8), the concord view (most obvious in quotes 9–12), the causal-nexus view (most obvious in quotes 13–15) and the free-association view (most obvious in quotes 16–20). The cargo-ship view holds that Schenker's musical theory carries racist freight. Schenker's racism is contained within and delivered by his theory, which is to be understood as, above all else, a vehicle of ideological conveyance. To endorse or make use of Schenker's music theory is to facilitate the delivery of its anti-Black ideological merchandise. Those who do Schenkerian analysis therefore cooperate (as either knaves or dupes) in the transmission of theoretical and perspectival cargo which is, in fact and by design, chock-full of racism. The iceberg view holds that Schenker's music theory is but the protruding tip of an iceberg: a much larger, mostly hidden and distinctively racist worldview. The iceberg view is a bit like the cargo-ship view in reverse. The cargo-ship view says that racist commitments are part of the music theory, and the iceberg view says that music-theoretical commitments are part of the racist worldview. In either case, the guiding intuition is that the music theory isn't independently available and appropriable apart from the racism: the cargo ship can't throw its racist freight overboard, and the tip can't be severed from the rest of the iceberg. Note that the cargo-ship view and the iceberg view can both be true: there could be racist claims within a musical theory that is itself a component part of a worldview whose defining characteristic is racial hatred. The concord view holds that there is a detectable goodness of fit or pre-established harmony or elective affinity or family resemblance between Schenker's racist views and his music theory. The music theory can be seen to align with, belong together with, be consonant with, resonate with, be cut from the same cloth as or be 'not fundamentally alien to' the racism, and in such a way that the theory can be interpreted as thereby reflecting, manifesting, expressing, evincing, translating, broadcasting or mirroring the racism. Otherwise put, there is a palpable topical congruence or thematic compatibility between Schenker's racism and his music theory by virtue of which the latter somehow overtly telegraphs or covertly intimates the former. The causal-nexus view holds that Schenker's racism shaped (impacted, impinged upon, determined, influenced and/or made a causal difference to) his music theory and/or vice versa. This view is concordant with the concord view, since for Schenker's music theory to count as reflecting, manifesting (etc.) his racism, the racism presumably needs to bear some causal responsibility for (the existence or features of) the music theory, the way an illness such as chicken pox bears causal responsibility for the symptomatic rash that manifests it. The free-association view holds that it is possible to associatively relate or conceptually coordinate Schenker's racism and his music theory. The free-association view is a very weak view, since bare associability is a very minimal criterion to satisfy. And the free-association view subsumes the other views, in a way, since containment (of racism by the music theory or of the music theory by the racist worldview), concord and causation can all be the basis for associatively linking Schenker's racism and his music theory. However, that's trivial, since anything can be the basis for making subjective associations between anything and anything else, including adventitious correspondences such as the fact that the term 'Schenkerian theory' contains the letters r, a, c, i, s and t. I follow the express admonition of Schenker himself, who argued explicitly that his views on race and music were to be considered together in his overall view of the world. (p. 90) I know someone else who … who would vociferously disapprove of the decoupling of Schenker's racism from the basic tenets of his music theory, someone for whom Schenker's racist beliefs were anything but 'peripheral ramblings', and that person is Heinrich Schenker himself. In numerous writings, he insisted that his views on racial and national hierarchies were key to his beliefs on life and on music (p. 104). I do not know which 'express admonition of Schenker himself' or which of Schenker's 'numerous writings' Ewell has in mind, because he does not quote Schenker directly or refer us to any primary sources.8 In fact, Ewell does not end up talking about the ipsissima verba of Schenker at all, but instead about the interpretative verdicts of William Drabkin, Martin Eybl, John Rothgeb and Carl Schachter (see pp. 105–17). They all think that Schenker thought that everything he wrote formed an organic unity, and they all note (in support of assigning that self-referential belief to Schenker) that there are many rhymes and resonances between the hierarchical setup of Schenker's music-analytical system and the various non-musical hierarchies he endorses, among which are racial hierarchies. As with the inequality of races, Schenker believed in the inequality of tones. Compare the following two passages, one concerning people, the other music: But let the German mind also gather the courage to report: it is not true that all men are equal, since it is, rather, out of the question that the incapable ever become able; that which applies to individuals surely must apply to nations and peoples as well. It is therefore a contradiction to maintain, for example, that all scale tones between 'C' and 'c' have real independence or, to use a current but certainly musically unsuitable expression, 'equal rights'. This is a clear example of how Schenker's thinking about the inequality of human races can relate to the inequality of musical tones, and how his thinking about racial inequality manifests itself in his musical theories. In short, neither racial classes nor pitch classes are equal in Schenker's theories, and he uses the same language to express these beliefs. (p. 109, quoting Schenker 1956, p. xxv) When Schenker writes, in disbelief, 'Even negroes proclaim that they want to govern themselves because they, too, can achieve it', he is clearly stating that he does not believe that blacks are capable of self-governance. In other words, blacks must be governed and, inasmuch as he wrote this in 1922, when virtually all of Africa was under white colonial rule, what Schenker is implying is that blacks must be governed by whites. In his music-theoretical work, Schenker makes analogous points. He says, when writing of the fundamental line (Urlinie, represented by 'diatony'): 'In accord with its origin, it diatony simultaneously governs the whole contrapuntal structure, including the bass arpeggiation and the passing tones'. About the scale degrees of the fundamental structure, Schenker writes, 'The scale-degrees of the fundamental structure have decisive control over the middleground and foreground'. About how the fundamental structure (Ursatz) controls everything, Schenker says, 'We must remember that all growth (every continuation, direction, or improvement) finds its fulfillment only through the control of the fundamental structure and its transformations'. Schenker believed that the fundamental structure must 'govern' and 'control' the middle-ground and foreground elements of the music composition. Similarly, Schenker believed that blacks must be governed and controlled by whites. Indeed, Schenker's hierarchical beliefs on race are so intimately connected with his hierarchical views on music that one wonders which motivated which. Insofar as many of his reprehensible statements on race occurred after the publication of Harmonielehre in 1906 and Kontrapunkt in 1910 and 1922, one could argue that his views on music drove, reified, and even inspired his views on race. But without question, the two belong together – they are inseparable. (pp. 110–11) In sum, the infection thesis rests on two planks: one states that Schenker (according to Drabkin, Eybl, Rothgeb and Schachter) believed, of his own theories, (something like) the infection thesis; and the other states that Schenker's inegalitarian views about tones are closely akin and tellingly comparable to non-musical inegalitarian views of his. Keep in mind, too, that the hierarchy-based kinship and comparability between the racism and the music theory – the second plank – is itself the rationale that Drabkin, Eybl, Rothgeb and Schachter posit for crediting the first plank, the one that says that Schenker held a self-referential belief about his own achievement of global theoretical unity. So, really, once some intertwined assertions get disentangled, we see that there is one single fundamental proposal (Ursatz?) whose merits we need to weigh and whose upshots (Auskomponierungen?) we need to follow out: the proposal that Schenker's hierarchical racism and his hierarchical music theory, just insofar as they are both hierarchical, are indisseverably confederated and undecomposably consubstantiated, such that the music theory is per se racist. 'My … claim is that race, racism, and white supremacy are, in fact, significant parts of Schenker's music theories, and parts that we should consider in how we approach the man and his ideas' (p. 111). It is both a factual and a moral error to maintain that 'Schenkerian theory and analysis is available to everyone, in assimilationist fashion, and that there is nothing in the musical theory itself, per se, that is racist or white supremacist or to maintain that Schenkerian theory is race neutral' (p. 165). If one fails to privately regard, or declines to publicly announce, Schenker's racism as an absolutely central component his music theory, one is complicit in an oppressive regime wherein and whereby 'our white racial frame has "shoved aside, ignored, or treated as incidental" Schenker's racism in order to keep in place racialized systems that benefit whites and whiteness' (p. 104, quoting Feagin 2009, p. 22). Courses about Schenkerian theory and analysis should be optional, not degree requirements, since 'Schenkerian theory and analysis, a racialized and gendered structure of music theory's white-male frame, benefits white men while disadvantaging all others' (p. 270). And 'no student, at any level, should ever be required to study Schenkerian theory; rather, … it should continue to be offered as an option to those students who wish to engage with Schenker and Schenkerism' (p. 113). Classes in Schenkerian analysis should not be 'rebranded as "linear", "prolongational", or, most common, "tonal" analysis'. That is because such euphemistic rechristening 'amounts to white-male framing sleight of hand, an obfuscation tactic', and 'such obfuscation tactics have one primary goal: to keep in place the existing racist and sexist structure so that whiteness and maleness can continue to enjoy the privileges to which they feel entitled' (p. 270). But it is okay if scholars continue to 'support Schenkerian analysis, in the field or in the classroom', as Ewell himself says he still does. The reason this is okay is that 'such work allows for deeper conversations about difficult topics' (p. 113). Of course Schenker had a hierarchical cast of mind, and of course it is no giant stretch to speculate that such a mentalité might have conditioned all his literary outpourings, whether about musical tones or about human races. This is just to say that the hypothesis of a common underlying psychological (or psychiatric) cause of the hierarchical tonal theory and the hierarchical racism is not ruled out from the get-go. (But it is also not true a priori; our level of confidence should be a function of the amount and quality of the evidence we have for the hypothesis.) Similarly, of course it might have been the case that Schenker's racism bore some causal responsibility for (the existence or character or content of) his tonal theory, or that his tonal theory bore some causal responsibility for (the existence or character or content of) his racism. Or both. (Again, though, only evidence can vindicate a causal hypothesis or boost its credibility.) Of course Schenker's views on race, and the matter of their connection (of whatever sort) to his other views, are fair game for scholarly inquiry. Of course using Schenker or Schenkerian analysis as a way of kick-starting 'conversations about difficult topics' is a legitimate pedagogical tack to take (provided that the tack is taken with all due historiographic and interpretative conscientiousness). Of course it would be bad, not least because it would be rankly dishonest, knowingly to misrepresent or suppress evidence of Schenker's racial bigotries and other moral enormities. Of course it would be especially cynical (and cultish) to engage in such a cover-up for fear that full disclosure would thwart one's evangelical efforts to spread the Schenkerian gospel. And of course it would be monstrous – really sick and twisted – to perpetrate the cover-up out of some unholy devotion to a racist crusade whose endgame is to 'keep in place racialized systems that benefit whites and whiteness' (p. 104). Before we take the measure of the infection thesis, the proffered grounds for it or its alleged normative consequences, I would like for us first to prime some of our intuitions about issues of interpretative warrant and exegetical methodology by perusing three argumentative vignettes. The first is a report about a real dispute, given in my own voice. The second two I made up and are given in the voices of two fictional critic-personae. Thomas suggested that Indiana might have a 'compelling interest' in 'preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics'. As evidence, he pointed to the way in which the history of abortion was at times wrapped up with the eugenics movement. For instance, Margaret Sanger, the founder of … Planned Parenthood, advocated the use of birth control in order to reduce 'ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all', and a later president of Planned Parenthood, Alan Guttmacher, specifically 'endorsed the use of abortion for eugenic reasons'. Justice Thomas went on to show the way in which the eugenics movement was embraced by the Nazis and more generally reflected an ideology of white supremacy. (Barzun 2019, p. 430) The pro-choice commentariat roundly objected to Thomas's arguments by accusing him of engaging in specious 'guilt-by-association' mud-slinging: Thomas, his adversaries said, was illicitly treating morally objectionable characteristics of the originators or earlier advocates of an idea (or practice or institution or value, etc.) as though those features were dispositive reasons to morally reject the idea itself. But of course – so the objections to Thomas went – we don't condemn vegetarianism just because Hitler didn't eat meat. Guilt-by-association reasoning is a relative of the so-called genetic fallacy, a label Thomas's opponents also invoked. Those who stand accused of committing the genetic fallacy are sometimes said to have conflated the 'context of formation' of an idea with its 'context of justification'.9 This conflation occurs when someone illegitimately derives conclusions about the idea's truth or accuracy, its essential meaning or purport or its fundamental normative character exclusively from – or, perhaps, merely with undue and distorting emphasis laid upon – tangential or extraneous facts about the idea's unsavory historical origins or ethically disquieting history.10 To paraphrase those who, along those lines, challenged Thomas on logical rather than factua