Philip Ewell
On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone
(University of Michigan Press, 2023)

Philip Ewell is a professor of music theory at Hunter College who in 2019 presented a talk to the Society for Music Theory titled “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame” which caused enough stir to produce coverage from NPR, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Ewell’s core idea is a critical look at his own field, which he describes as founded on and controlled by the framing of white scholars who have not only been incapable (due to their racial and social backgrounds) of seeing the assumptions on which their scholarly values are built, but have made the field an expression of white supremacy, in part by crowding out other scholars and subjects. Ewell identifies the person responsible for this as Heinrich Schenker, a music theorist who died in 1935 and who has been influential enough in music studies that there is a critical journal named after him. Schenker is “arguably the most important figure in the history of American music theory, “ he writes, and “It would be hard to name anyone who has had a greater impact on what we do than Schenker.” Ewell claims that Schenker is at the foundation of the textbooks students use when they enter the field.

So, this is an academic book on an academic subject. It is not written in common academic language. On the contrary, the prose is smooth: Ewell can communicate to any interested reader, and he shares plenty of his personality and passion, giving this far more flavor than one will find in most academic books. There is a mass of citations, which often turn the direction away from the other. But this is mainly an original work, and Ewell seems caught (perhaps unknowingly) in the conventions of academia even as he criticizes them; inside the book, this has the odd effect of a feeling of apology for having such a strong, individual idea, but from the perspective of the reader outside of academia, this frames the problems that Ewell illuminates in an even larger, and more problematic context that itself should be deeply, passionately, and constantly questioned, which is the state of music theory altogether, which may be entering the same stage of solipsistic decadence and irrelevance as musicology.

The key word in this book—which is only very little about music and mostly about how ideologies analyze specifically Western classical music and how they control and limit what is taught, published, etc—is “hierarchy.” Ewell works from the ground up, starting with how music theory, as taught, posits structural hierarchies within pieces, which then ripple out in circles to what and who gets studied, and how music and musicians are valued.

His identification of how music theory values hierarchical structures is invaluable in no small part because this is so much in plain sight that it’s never remarked on. The fundamental feature of harmony is a single pitch that defines the existence and importance of the remaining pitches. Harmony is hierarchical, and music theory is almost entirely the study of harmony. Hierarchies matter in Ewell’s argument because he reads Schenker as a white supremacist, and the goal of the book is to break down “the barrier that, over many decades, was erected by music theory’s white racial frame between Schenker’s racial hierarchies … and his musical hierarchies.”

Ewell sees Schenker and Schenkerian analysis as responsible for the canon of Western classical music, especially the elevation of a coterie of “white cisgender men” as geniuses, leaving out other composers because of their race and sexual/gender identities. The canon is indeed a problem within academia and by extension the concert world that is available to listeners. The good news is that on the public end the canon is far less important than it used to be, that it’s common to find Clara Schumann and Florence Price, Sarah Hennies and inti figgis-vizueta, on mainstream and new music programs, and the most prominent American compositional voices are currently Carlos Simon, Valerie Coleman, and Adolphus Hailstork.

In this book, Ewell is not wrong but he’s also not right; that is, he uncovers some vital and valid issues while digging into what is something of an obsession with Schenker. His claim that Schenker had racist views of non-white people (and by extension non-white music), is based on translations of Schenker’s writings from German that other scholars have argued show that Schenker was criticizing racist thinking. Also essential is that music theory is not science but an interpretive view, a means to understand how a piece of music works, and the drive to understand that comes from the effect the music has on a listener.

For Schenker, that was Beethoven’s harmonies, which generally have a profound emotional effect, and one which differs with each listener. Schenker’s analytical methods, based on harmonic structures, appeal to those who share similar taste with him. And since there’s more than one way to hear music, there are other ways to analyze it. Working out of the same Germanic (the specificity is integral to Schenker) tradition, Schoenberg had a very different means to analyze music. Schenkerian analysis is only viable—again if one chooses it—for tonal music, and not even all of that. He felt Bruckner, one of the greatest harmonists, was incompetent, and it produces nonsense results with the likes of Debussy, Stravinsky, Takemitsu, and others. And of course, it is worthless for music outside of (what is a narrow range) of classical music. It is also a niche within the niche of a music theory; my own experience studying music theory at the graduate level at a conservatory never involved Schenker in any way; we never read him nor used any Schenkerian textbooks. Ewell’s personal experience is not even universal to the field.

But despite all this, what Ewell points out correctly is that music theory has been built with an inherently white racial frame—which is probably less about Schenker and more about American society, who gets to be exposed to these ideas and who gets to spend their life studying them—and that goes beyond the social backgrounds of music theorists. As he says, this represents “a white racially framed view of racial music and musical race … they represent … white music-theoretical points of view on nonwhite musical matters.” This matters because the monoculture of music theory misses the value in the larger world of music (jazz, blues, African music, Gamelan music, Romani music, etc.) and any music that is based in oral traditions, which is an enormous and essential part of world historical music making.

To go back to hierarchies, music theory limits itself by valuing harmony more than any other element. As an academic discipline, it has never adequately addressed rhythm—doing so would force beyond the world of Western classical music and out into the world of human music making—and it essentially ignores melody, which is bizarre and a real intellectual failing, not only because melody is obviously important, but that in practice it is much, much easier to assemble good harmonies than it is to craft a good melody. It has a wary relationship with ethnomusicology and has historically been reluctant to accept the importance of any music outside its scope, whether that’s Florence Price or Gnawa music. There is value in studying the hierarchy of harmony, but harmony does not have a hierarchical value greater than other elements of music.