A Critic at Large

September 21, 2020 Issue

Master Pieces
Black Scholars Confront White
Supremacy in Classical Music
The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while
also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners.
By Alex Ross
September 14, 2020

Major orchestras are finally playing such Black composers as Florence Price. Illustration
by Anuj Shrestha

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Martin Luther King, Jr., in his book “Stride Toward Freedom,” wrote,
“On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from
Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. . . . The Metropolitan Opera
was on the radio with a performance of one of my favorite operas—
Donizetti’s ‘Lucia di Lammermoor.’ So with the beauty of the
countryside, the inspiration of Donizetti’s inimitable music, and the
splendor of the skies, the usual monotony that accompanies a relatively
long drive—especially when one is alone—was dispelled in pleasant
diversions.”

What does it mean, if anything, that King was listening to bel-canto

opera as he made his historic journey to preach his first sermon at the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church? One response would be to find
something curious, or even contradictory, in the image of King enjoying
Donizetti behind the wheel of his car. He was poised to become a titan in
the civil-rights movement; classical music is a world in which Black
people have seldom been allowed to play a leading role. Much the same
question could be asked about W. E. B. Du Bois, who admired the music
of Richard Wagner to such an extent that he attended the Bayreuth
Festival, in 1936. Even though Wagner was notoriously racist, Du Bois
said, “The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it,
and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he
would know life.”

Several scholars have conjectured that King was sending a cultural

signal when he inserted Donizetti into “Stride Toward Freedom.”
Jonathan Rieder says that the story demonstrates “King’s desire to cast
himself as a man of sensibility and distinction.” Godfrey Hodgson writes
that such references were intended to “reassure northern intellectuals
that he was on the same wavelength as they were.” Du Bois’s
cosmopolitan tastes have elicited similar commentary. It is questionable,
though, to assume that these two formidable personalities were simply
trying to assimilate themselves to a perceived white aesthetic. Rather,
they were taking possession of the European inheritance and pulling it
into their own sphere. More elementally, they loved the music, and had
no need to justify their taste.

It is equally questionable to assume that King’s and Du Bois’s fondness

for classical music lends it some kind of universal, anti-racist virtue. In
that sense, my attraction to these anecdotes of fandom is suspect. I am a
white American who grew up with the classics, and I am troubled by the
presumption that they are stamped with whiteness—and are even aligned
with white supremacy, as some scholars have lately argued. I cannot
counter that suggestion simply by gesturing toward important Black
figures who cherished this same tradition, or by reeling off the names of
Black singers and composers. The exceptions remain exceptions. This
world is blindingly white, both in its history and its present.

Since nationwide protests over police violence erupted, in May and

June, American culture has been engaged in an examination, however
nominal, of its relationship with racism. Such an examination is sorely
needed in classical music, because of its extreme dependence on a
problematic past. The undertaking is complex; the field must
acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also honoring the
individual experiences of Black composers, musicians, and listeners.
Black people have long been marginalized, but they have never been
outsiders.

This spring, the journal Music Theory Online published “Music Theory

and the White Racial Frame,” an article by Philip Ewell, who teaches at
Hunter College. It begins with the sentence “Music theory is white,” and
goes on to argue that the whiteness of the discipline is manifest not only
in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated
ideology of white supremacy, one that insidiously affects how music is
analyzed and taught. The main target of Ewell’s critique is the early-
twentieth-century Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), who
parsed musical structures in terms of foreground, middle-ground, and
background levels, teasing out the tonal formulas that underpin large-
scale movements. Schenker held racist views, particularly with regard to
Black people, and according to Ewell those views seeped into the
seemingly abstract principles of his theoretical work.

Schenker was Jewish, but his adherence to doctrines of Germanic

superiority blinkered him to such an extent that, in 1933, he praised
Hitler, adding, “If only a man were born to music, who would finally
exterminate the musical Marxists.” Schenker’s advocates have long been
aware of his disturbing views but have insisted that his bigoted rhetoric
has nothing to do with his theoretical writing. Ewell argued that
Schenker’s system is, in fact, founded on national and racial hierarchies.
Reverence for the kind of supreme talent who can assemble monumental
musical structures shades into biological definitions of genius, and the
biology of genius spills over into the biology of race. Ewell concluded,
“There can be no question that for Schenker, the concept of ‘genius’ was
associated with whiteness to some degree.”

Shortly after Ewell’s article was published, a skirmish broke out in the
music-theory community, incited not by the article itself but by a
twenty-minute condensed version of the material that Ewell had
presented at a conference seven months earlier. The Journal of
Schenkerian Studies, which is based at the University of North Texas,
chose to devote ninety pages to responses to that brief talk. Some were
supportive, others dismissive; one accused Ewell, who is African-
American, of exhibiting “Black anti-Semitism,” even though Ewell had
not mentioned Schenker’s Jewishness. On social media, Ewell’s
colleagues came to his defense and questioned the journal’s
methodology. The historian Kira Thurman wrote, “Did the Journal of
Schenkerian Studies really publish a response to Professor Ewell’s
scholarship that was ‘anonymous’? Yes.” National Review and Fox
News somehow stumbled on the episode and cast it as so-called cancel
culture run amok; it was claimed that Ewell was trying to ban
Beethoven, although nothing of the sort had been suggested.

At first glance, the Schenker debate looks to be of limited relevance to

the wider classical-music world, not to mention the general population.
Although his theories have been taught in American universities for
generations, they are by no means universally accepted. German-
speaking musicologists, for example, have never taken him as seriously.
Even in the U.S., conservatory students can often undergo a thorough
training without encountering his work. Yet the case of Schenker
illustrates an implicit prejudice that is endemic in the teaching, playing,
and interpretation of classical music. His method is far from unique in
elevating the European tradition while concealing its cultural bias behind
eternal, abstract principles. What Ewell calls “the white racial frame”—
he takes the term from the sociologist Joe Feagin—has the special power
of being invisible. Thurman, in her paper “Performing Lieder, Hearing
Race,” makes a similar point: “Classical music, like whiteness itself, is
frequently racially unmarked and presented as universal—until people of
color start performing it.”

The hysterical complaints that Ewell was proposing to “cancel” the

classical canon stemmed mainly from a blog post in which he called
Beethoven an “above-average composer” who has been “propped up by
the white-male frame, both consciously and subconsciously, with
descriptors such as genius, master, and masterwork.” This is a
provocation, though it is hardly the first to have been lobbed at the great
man: Debussy wrote that Beethoven’s sonatas were badly written for the
piano, and Ned Rorem memorably dinged the Ninth Symphony as “the
first piece of junk in the grand style.” Ewell provokes with a higher
purpose: he is goading a classical culture that awards the vast majority
of performances to a tight circle of superstars, shutting out female and
nonwhite composers who, until the mid-twentieth century, had little
chance of making a career. In some ways, that Valhalla mentality is as
entrenched as ever.
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The whiteness of classical music is, above all, an American problem.
The racial and ethnic makeup of the canon is hardly surprising, given
European demographics before the twentieth century. But, when that
tradition was transplanted to the multicultural United States, it blended
into the racial hierarchy that had governed the country from its founding.
The white majority tended to adopt European music as a badge of its
supremacy. The classical-music institutions that emerged in the mid- and
late nineteenth century—the New York Philharmonic, the Boston
Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and the like—became temples to
European gods, as Lawrence Levine argued in his 1988 book,
“Highbrow/Lowbrow.” Little effort was made to cultivate American
composers; it seemed more important to manufacture a fantasy of
Beethovenian grandeur.

Immigrant populations supplied much of the workforce for those

ensembles: Germans gravitated toward the orchestras, Italians toward
the opera. Such activity exemplifies the process of assimilation and
ascent that Nell Irvin Painter describes in her 2010 book, “The History
of White People”: the expansion of the category of “whiteness” to
encompass new groups. A large wave of German immigrants arrived in
the period of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, which sent thousands of
leftists and liberals into exile. The Germania Musical Society, which
was founded in 1848 and toured America widely, offered itself as a
model of democracy in action—“one for all and all for one.” Members
of the group exercised a decisive influence on the development of the
New York Philharmonic and other ensembles.

The wealthy white Americans who underwrote the country’s élite

orchestras tended to see their institutions as vehicles of uplift that
allowed the lower classes to better themselves through exposure to the
sublime airs of the masters. The contradictions of such paternalism are
evident in the case of Henry Lee Higginson, who founded the Boston
Symphony, in 1881. In his youth, Higginson opposed slavery, and after
the Civil War he briefly ran a plantation in Georgia, aiming to provide
employment and education to formerly enslaved African-Americans.
When the project proved more difficult than he anticipated, he tended to
blame his Black workers. In his later years, he adopted strident anti-
immigrant rhetoric. By the time of his death, in 1919, he had become a
leading member of the Immigration Restriction League.

Although a few well-dressed African-Americans would not have been

unwelcome in the Boston Symphony audience, a Black musician had no
hope of joining the orchestra. As Aaron Flagg recently
recounted in Symphony magazine, the professionalization of the
musician class in the late nineteenth century led directly to the
segregation of musicians’ unions—a system that lingered into the
nineteen-seventies. Black musicians had to establish their own unions
and form their own ensembles. Not until the forties and fifties did Black
players begin joining upper-echelon orchestras: Jack Bradley in Denver,
Henry Lewis in Los Angeles, Donald White in Cleveland, and, in 1957,
the double-bassist Ortiz Walton in Boston.

Black composers had entered the edges of the limelight somewhat

earlier. In 1893, the young singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh
befriended Antonín Dvořák, who had come to New York to serve as the
director of the progressive-minded National Conservatory. Stirred by
Burleigh’s singing of spirituals, Dvořák declared that Black melodies
should be the foundation of future American music. A couple of
generations later, the work of a few African-American composers—
William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price—began to
appear on orchestral programs. Black opera singers gradually made
headway in the same period, culminating in Marian Anderson’s
breakthrough appearance at the Metropolitan Opera, in 1955. The Met
has yet to present an opera by a Black composer, though a production of
Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” is planned for a future
season.
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In the long view, the marginalization of Black composers and musicians
was not only a moral wrong but also a self-inflicted wound. Classical
institutions succeeded in denying themselves a huge reservoir of native-
born talent. Dvořák’s acknowledgment that African-Americans were in
possession of a singular body of musical material—one that broke open
European conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm—went largely
unheeded. Instead, much of that talent found a place in jazz and other
popular genres. Will Marion Cook, Fletcher Henderson, Billy Strayhorn,
and Nina Simone, among many others, had initially devoted themselves
to classical-music studies. That jazz came to be called “America’s
classical music” was an indirect commentary on the whiteness of the
concert world, although it had the unfortunate effect of consigning Black
classical composers to a double nonexistence.

Of course, racism was endemic in the pop sphere as well, as a host of

scholarly studies have made clear. In an essay titled “Race, Blacksound,
and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse,” Matthew Morrison
marshals a formidable array of research and theory to argue that the
American pop-music industry is inextricably rooted in the racist routines
of nineteenth-century blackface culture. Some historians and critics have
tried to find redeeming features in a practice that pervasively ridiculed
African-American voices and bodies; Eric Lott, in his classic 1993 book,
“Love and Theft,” argues that working-class blackface performers
demonstrated a “profound white investment in black culture” even as
they carried out appalling acts of exploitation. For Morrison, these
“counterfeit and imagined performances of blackness” are better
understood as affirmations of white identity, with racial mockery
integral to the act. (Mockery of “élite” European art was part of the
formula as well.) Black performers eventually took up careers on the
minstrelsy circuit, but only at the cost of playing along with white
fantasies.

That dismal history may help to explain why such Black leaders as Du
Bois and King found sustenance in European music. White as the canon
was, it appeared to stand outside of America’s racial horror. Du Bois’s
veneration of German culture—cultivated during his student years in
Berlin, in the eighteen-nineties—partly blinded him to the depravity of
German racism, which led not only to the Holocaust but also to the
genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in what is now Namibia.
Slavery was a European undertaking before it was an American one, and
it left its marks on the repertory. A few years ago, the scholar David
Hunter made the disturbing discovery that George Frideric Handel was
an investor in the Royal African Company, which transported more than
two hundred thousand enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the
Americas.

The racism embedded in classical and popular music alike is the

necessary background to understanding the hard-won achievement of
Florence Price, who is the subject of a new biography, “The Heart of a
Woman,” by the late musicologist Rae Linda Brown. Price was born in
Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, to middle-class parents, and won
admittance to the New England Conservatory, which had a history of
accepting Black students. She initially made a living by teaching and by
composing parlor songs and other short popular pieces. But in her
forties, having escaped an abusive marriage, she broadened her
ambitions and turned to symphonic composition. She won some high-
profile performances but found herself isolated. Her bonds with Black
communities weakened; the white world treated her as an interesting
oddity. The resistance that she faced as a female composer made her
progress all the more arduous.
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Nevertheless, she stuck to her path, and her Third Symphony, which
premièred in 1940, is increasingly recognized as a landmark in
American music. Variously majestic, sinuous, brooding, and playful, it
gestures toward African-American spirituals and dance styles yet seems
to enclose them in quotation marks, as if to acknowledge their
ambiguous status in a white marketplace. Brown analyzes Price’s work
in terms of “double consciousness”—Du Bois’s concept of the “warring
ideals” inherent in Black and American identities—and then enlarges
that tension to include Black traditions and European forms. Brown
writes, “A transformation of these forms takes place when the dominant
elements in a composition transcend European influence.” The tradition
will not survive without such moments of disruption and transcendence.

Classical-music institutions have just begun to work through the racist

past. Scores of opera houses, orchestras, chamber-music societies, and
early-music ensembles have declared solidarity with Black Lives Matter,
in sometimes awkward prose. Because of COVID-19, most performance
schedules that had been announced for the 2020-21 season have been
jettisoned, and the drastically reduced programs that have emerged in
their place contain a noticeable uptick in Black names. When the virus
hit, we were in the midst of the so-called Beethoven Year—a
gratuitously excessive celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth
birthday of a composer who hardly needs any extra publicity. It remains
to be seen whether this modest shift toward Black composers will endure
beyond the chaotic year 2020.

In the same vein, mainstream organizations are giving more attention to

a Black classical repertory: the elegantly virtuosic eighteenth-century
scores of Joseph Bologne; the folkloric symphonies of Price, Still, and
Dawson; the African-inflected operas of Harry Lawrence Freeman and
Shirley Graham Du Bois. Yet such activity goes only so far in
challenging an obsessive worship of the past. These works remain
largely within the boundaries of the Western European tradition: if
Schenker could have overcome his biases, he would have had an easy
time analyzing Price’s music according to his method. Furthermore, this
programming leaves intact the assumption that musical greatness resides
in a bygone golden age. White Europeans remain in the majority, with
Beethoven retaining pride of place in the lightly renovated, diversified
pantheon.

Classical music can overcome the shadows of its past only if it commits
itself more strongly to the present. Black composers of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries have staged a much more radical
confrontation with the white European inheritance. A pivotal figure is
Julius Eastman, who died in near-total obscurity, in 1990, but has found
cult fame in recent years. Eastman’s improvisatory structures, his
subversive political themes, and his openness about his homosexuality
give him a revolutionary aspect, yet he also had a nostalgic flair for the
grand Romantic manner; his 1979 piece “Gay Guerrilla,” for two pianos,
makes overpowering use of the Lutheran hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is
Our God.”

With a vibrant roster of younger talents moving to the fore—Tyshawn

Sorey, Jessie Montgomery, Nathalie Joachim, Courtney Bryan, Tomeka
Reid, and Matana Roberts, among others—the perennial solitude of the
Black composer seems less marked than before. Still, Black faces
remain rare in the rank and file of orchestras, in administrative offices,
and, most conspicuously, in audiences. Price once described how strange
it was to see an all-white crowd vigorously applauding her Black-
influenced music. That experience remains all too common.

A deeper reckoning would require wholesale changes in how orchestras

canvass talent, conservatories recruit students, institutions hire
executives, and marketers approach audiences. A Black singer like
Morris Robinson should not have to live in a world where—as
he recently reported at an online panel discussion—he has never worked
with a Black conductor, stage director, or chief executive at an American
opera house. At the same time, institutions must recognize that the
Black-white divide is not the only line of tension in the social fabric.
Asian musicians have often complained that blanket descriptions of
classical music as an all-white field efface their existence. They are well
represented in the ranks of orchestras, but they have little voice in the
upper echelons, and routinely encounter the racism of disdain.

At bottom, the entire music-education system rests upon the Schenkerian

assumption that the Western tonality, with its major-minor harmony and
its equal-tempered scale, is the master language. Vast tracts of the
world’s music, from West African talking drums to Indonesian gamelan,
fall outside that system, and African-American traditions have played in
its interstices. This is a reality that the music department at Harvard,
once stiflingly conservative, has recognized. The jazz-based artist Vijay
Iyer now leads a cross-disciplinary graduate program that cultivates the
rich terrain between composition and improvisation. The Harvard
musicologist Anne Shreffler has said of the new undergraduate music
curriculum, “We relied on students showing up on our doorstep having
had piano lessons since the age of six.” Given the systemic inequality
into which many people of color are born, this “class-based implicit
requirement,” as Shreffler calls it, becomes a covert form of racial
exclusion.

The sacralized canon will evolve as the musical world evolves around it.
Because of the peculiarly invasive nature of sound, old scores always
seem to be happening to us anew. A painting gazes at us unchanging
from its frame; a book speaks to us in its fixed language. But when
modern people play a Beethoven quartet it, too, becomes modern, even
if certain of its listeners wish to go backward in time. The act of
performance has enormous transformative potential—an aspect that
musicologists, so accustomed to analyzing notation on a page, have yet
to address in full. Naomi André, in her 2018 book, “Black Opera:
History, Power, Engagement,” evokes the dimensions of meaning that
opened up when Leontyne Price sang the title role of “Aida” in the
nineteen-sixties and seventies. Of the passage “O patria . . . quanto mi
costi!”—“Oh, my country . . . how much you have cost me!”—André
writes, “The drama onstage and the reality offstage crash together. . . .
This voice comes out of a body that lived through the end of Jim Crow
and segregation.” The music of a white European had become part of
Black experience—become, to a degree, Black itself.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, the musicologist and semiotician, has described

two dominant ways in which we construct musical meaning: the
“poietic,” which reads a score in light of its creator’s intentions,
methods, and cultural context; and the “esthesic,” which takes into
account the perceptions of an audience. We live in a determinedly
poietic age: we give great stress to what artists do and say, particularly
when they stray from contemporary moral norms. That project of
demystification is often useful, given the rampant idealization and
idolatry of prior eras. But listeners need not be captive to the surface
meaning of the scores, or to the biographies of their creators, or to the
histories that accompany them. We can yoke the music to our own ends,
as W. E. B. Du Bois did when he improbably reinvented Wagner as a
model for a mythic Black art.

The poietic and the esthesic should have equal weight when we pick up
the pieces of the past. On the one hand, we can be aware that Handel
invested in the business of slavery; on the other, we can see a measure of
justice when Morris Robinson sings his music in concert. We can be
conscious of the racism of Mozart’s portrayal of Monostatos in “The
Magic Flute,” or of the misogyny of “Così Fan Tutte,” yet contemporary
stagings can put Mozart’s stereotypes in a radical new light. There is no
need to reach a final verdict—to judge each artist innocent or guilty.
Living with history means living with history’s complexities,
contradictions, and failings.

The ultimate mistake is to look to music—or to any art form—as a zone

of moral improvement, a refuge of sweetness and light. Attempts to
cleanse the canon of disreputable figures end up replicating the great-
man theory in a negative register, with arch-villains taking the place of
geniuses. Because all art is the product of our grandiose, predatory
species, it reveals the worst in our natures as well as the best. Like every
beautiful thing we have created, music can become a weapon of division
and destruction. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in a
characteristically pitiless mood, wrote, “Every work of art is an
uncommitted crime.” ♦