Ensuring a Just Musical Future Requires Confronting Past Musical Injustice

Dr. Philip Ewell

Hunter College, CUNY    

Hmm, how can we advance diversity, inclusion, belonging, and equality among music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists?

Well, music theory doesn’t concern itself with historical aspects of music. We theorists concern ourselves with masterwork scores, the notes on the page, that ineffable element of music that history can’t catch. We theorists, as opposed to our (ethno)musicologist brethren, show how and why great music is great, and we don’t rely on historical or cultural considerations, which can cloud our judgment regarding what exactly makes this music great. In this fashion, we theorists are scientists, simply discovering and conveying musical facts irrespective of history or of racial and gender identities, putting forth the best possible music for ourselves, our students, and our posterity.

Now, to be clear, that which I wrote in the preceding paragraph is absolute nonsense. Utter hogwash. Yet this hogwash is, in fact, what we music theorists were all taught in the twentieth century. (Hell, to a large extent we still teach it today.) And we believed it. Not only did we believe it, we were able to convince large swaths of our music academies of music theory’s timelessness, its ineffability, and its paramount importance to music education, from Ancient Greek theorists like Pythagoras and Aristoxenus (but certainly not Ptolemais of Cyrene, who was a woman), to those we call founders of contemporary American music theory like Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte (but certainly not George Russell, who was Black). We theorists have successfully insulated ourselves from legitimate criticism and convinced ourselves of our own greatness and the greatness of “canonic” composers in what can only be called now, in 2024, an astonishing act of musical hubris. When I look back at my own musical beliefs in, say, the 1980s and 90s, I cringe. How could I have been so wrong?

Music theory is presently in a state of crisis. I’ve likened this crisis to a simple English-language grammatical shift in thinking, from the definite article “the” to the indefinite, “a.” So, are harmony, counterpoint, and voice leading “the” foundation for American music theory, or are they simply “a” foundation? Are Bach Chorales “the” foundation for proper chord progressions and part writing, or “a” foundation”? Or is five-line staff notation “the” foundation for notational practice, or “a” foundation? Like it or not, we are, collectively, moving away from “the” to “a,” and this simple grammatical shift has caused conniptions among conservative forces in music theory, and in music education, the likes of which we’ve not seen in recent memory. Now, to be fair to music theory, this crisis only reflects the wider convulsions now taking place in our country writ large. And, to be fairer still, musicology and ethnomusicology are certainly not without their own current similar crises. But music theory, which still likes to fashion itself as the brains of the music-educational outfit, represents a special case of isolationism that needs to be confronted head on.

And herein lies the difficulty when asking ourselves how we can work together to establish alliance, reciprocity, and solidarity to foster academic activism. That is, music theory still considers itself, to a large extent, as separate from musicology and ethnomusicology and, therefore, music theorists are much less likely to enact changes that may result in what they consider to be a diluting or diminishing of the field. From high school Advanced Placement classes to graduate qualifying exams, music theory still prefers to separate itself from historical considerations, musical social injustices be damned. And until we are able not only to confront this simple fact but to first acknowledge its very existence, I see no hope for the future.

To yet again be fair to my chosen field—a field I very much love I hasten to add—I acknowledge that music theory has taken many positive and significant turns over these past, say, ten years or so. Hardly a week goes by without the emergence of a new source—article, book, conference, journal, podcast, presentation, textbook, website, or YouTube video, among others—that beckons us to look at music theory anew, to interrogate past injustices, and to consider a more relevant and compelling future. These exciting new paths are being forged, to a large degree, by younger generations, by junior scholars, which puts a wide smile on my fifty-eight-year-old face. I happily acknowledge music theory’s new turns, and I commend all those folks, young and old alike, who have pushed us and are pushing us in new directions. And I acknowledge the countless elder and past BIPOC and women scholars who have done similar work for many decades, often from outside the mainstream simply because of who they were and are.

With respect to addressing some of these problems, nothing can be done without acknowledgement. I’ve often said that music theory should launch a truth-and-reconciliation commission in order to better understand the problems we currently face. Perhaps our three fields, music theory along with musicology and ethnomusicology, could come together to issue some kind of joint statement acknowledging, forthrightly, past injustices owing to American music education’s deep historic roots in white supremacy and patriarchy, the twin ideologies born of the twin mythological concepts of whiteness and maleness along with the many narratives of greatness and exceptionalism that have accompanied those concepts since our country’s founding nearly 250 years ago. 

I’ll end this short essay with a quotation from my recent “Tonality, Racism, and White Indifference,” a response to Jason Yust’s “Tonality and Racism” that appeared recently in the Journal of Music Theory. After citing a quotation, “The essence of American racism is disrespect,”[1] from journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, I wrote:

[I]n the final analysis, American music theory has been and, to a large and largely unacknowledged extent, continues to be disrespectful of all musical peoples who are deemed not to be white. The sooner we can accept this simple truth and engage with musicians who were not white on equal terms with those who were, the sooner we can all come together to reimagine a racially integrated twenty-first-century American music academy that will be respectful, inclusive, and truly representative of our great country.[2]

Klisala Harrison, Ph.D., Docent

Associate Professor, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University

When working with inequalities and crises that form growing foci of research and practice in our field, we increasingly encounter if not investigate people worlding toxicity through musicking. Toxicity is elusive to define but, in one meaning, refers to the “effects of inorganic chemicals, metals, or gasses on organisms” (Nading 2020, 210). This applies, for example, to my environmentally-oriented work on music of global heating in Greenland, where nuclear waste deposited by the U.S. military is melting out from the Greenland Ice Sheet, as well as Jessica Schwartz’s work on listening to effects of radioactivity in the Marshall Islands (Schwartz 2022). I take inspiration from medical and environmental anthropologist Alex Nading’s efforts to understand how “living in a toxic world entails ethical, technical, and aesthetic efforts to understand toxicity as a contingent encounter” in which “responses to toxic disaster and occupational exposure, as well as acts of familial, state, or corporate care” constitute modes of “toxic worlding” (Nading 2020, 209). One side effect of studying toxic worlding of music, for ethnomusicologists, may be our occupational exposure to toxicity in the form of environmental pollutants. At the same time, toxicity can demand worlding otherwise, for example through law, policy, and procedure. These demands are made and alternatives worlded through musicking, among other means (see Hamill 2021). 

One can discuss toxicity in another meaning, as in toxic (i.e., harmful or unpleasant) relationships. Relational toxicity features in war, conflict, and violence; colonialism and neocolonialism; poverty (Harrison 2020); and forced displacement among other leading topics of research and practice of what Rice called “ethnomusicology in times of trouble” (Rice 2014). Such work centers on contentious relationships, on which scholars and collaborators typically take stances. Indigenous, Brown, Black, impoverished, and otherwise marginalized groups disproportionately experience such inequities and crises with which ethnomusicologists increasingly work (extending Nading 2020, 215). 

In one view, such ethnomusicological work enacts cultural, social/societal, and environmental care and seeks a world otherwise. “Otherwise: something or anything else; something to the contrary” (King, Navarro, and Smith 2020, 8). The care responds to slow violence that gradually, invisibly harms (Nixon 2011) and/or more immediate structural and cultural violences (O’Lear 2021, 2-3). There are racial, ethnic, gendered, and classed overtones of entanglements of care and toxicity that have been the subject of many important ethnomusicological studies;[4] however, I would like to focus on the ethnomusicologist and something we do not discuss enough: ethnomusicologists may well be harmed by working on these topics, for instance through exposure to traumatic events, first- or second-hand; acts of horizontal or lateral violence; and environmental toxins.

A central tenet of ethnomusicology ethics, of course, is “do no harm.” This article makes the following provocation: Is it time to world otherwise by extending the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ethics Statement’s edict “do no harm” (SEM 2018) from the research subject also to the ethnomusicologist? Elsewhere, I detailed how ethics of music-academic societies do not take into account harm or care of the researcher/practitioner, and that one powerful impetus for doing so comes from the increasing number of music academics who experience primary and secondary trauma as a result of their work (Harrison 2023, 242). Ethnomusicologists’ exposure to social toxicity is a compelling reason for including social harm to ethnomusicologists in our disciplinary ethics. The SEM Ethics Statement already extends “do no harm” to “natural flora, fauna, and human relationships to these” (SEM 2018) but it usefully could also include environmental harm to the ethnomusicologist. Complementary suggestions have been to develop resources that could preempt self-harm of our colleagues and students due to working on “trouble,” for example self-care toolkits that perhaps draw on fields taking researcher and practitioner care more seriously, such as disaster studies, psychology, nursing (Harrison 2022, 2023), and to a growing extent, music therapy.

Care and self-care of the ethnomusicologist undoubtably must be central considerations when doing work related to environmental and social toxicities. I felt very happy to see mindfulness practice integrated into the 69th (2024) Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, which is a step towards minding ourselves in the Society for Ethnomusicology. But at the same time, I was reading a book that explores mindfulness used for capitalist purposes: sociologist Carolyn Chen’s book Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley studies what happens in society when Bay Area corporations provide, for free, pastoral and spiritual care—specifically, mindfulness and Buddhist teachings—in order to make workers more productive and more focused (Chen 2022, 2-3); in other words, “to produce more, and to produce better” (Chen 2022, 176). Mindfulness promotes psychological detachment from stressful thoughts and experiences (Mellner, Osika, and Niemi 2022). What is rarely questioned is whether and how self-care practices related to the workplace enable the very meso- and macrosocial systems that cause harm for which the self-care is required in the first place—often exploitative forms of capitalism. 

In the current world, it seems that we ethnomusicologists can hardly avoid working in crisis situations or contexts of trouble. This leads me in several directions. Regarding harms that an ethnomusicologist can face, SEM’s Ethics Statement should include the statement “do not harm yourself.” As professionals, we should also prepare our students for situations of harm—with the goal of preventing it—for example by including in curricula the brainstorming of protective measures, and the teaching of self-care strategies and health and well-being awareness. Students can press for such curricula. As a field, we would greatly benefit from the curation and dissemination of resources for (self-)care of the ethnomusicologist; we also need health and safety-promotion resources for students and professionals. We ourselves should be more active in developing our support networks (perhaps through our academic societies). When it comes to ethnomusicological work on inequality/inequity and crises, probably the aspiration to “do no harm” to ourselves is not always realistic, but it is realistic to collectively work towards minimizing harm to the (student) ethnomusicologist and harm’s repercussions where it is possible or unpreventable, in our disciplinary ethics and communities. Last, and most important in the longer term, we should more actively challenge the structural, cultural, and slow violences impacting our discipline and our people.

REFERENCES

Bishop, Sarah J. 2024. “‘The War Songs Continue ’til They Find Peace’: Music and the Politics of Death on the Ethio-South Sudanese Border.” Ethnomusicology 68(1): 52-74.

Chana, Nadia. 2023. “Ugly Publics.” Ethnomusicology 67(3): 406-429.

Chen, Carolyn. 2022. Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Hamill, Chad S./čnaq'ymi. 2021. “Coyote Made the Rivers: Indigenous Ecology and the Sacred Continuum in the Interior Northwest.” In Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, edited by Aaron S. Allen and Jeff Todd Titon, 133-152. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harrison, Klisala. 2020. Music Downtown Eastside: Human Rights and Capability Development through Music in Urban Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press.

_______________. 2022. “The Need for Self-Care in Music Scholarship.” Position statement in the roundtable Thinking Through and Beyond Medical Ethnomusicology: Foundational Concepts and Shifting Paradigms, Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference, New Orleans.

_______________. 2023. “Rethinking (Self-)Care in Music Scholarship.” In The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology, ed. Christopher Dromey, 237-246. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

King, Tiffany Lethabo, Jenell Navarro and Andrea Smith. 2020. “INTRODUCTION. Beyond Incommensurability: Towards an Otherwise Stance on Indigenous and Black Relationality.” In Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, eds. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, 1-23. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mellner, Christin, Walter Osika and Marie Niemi. 2022. “Mindfulness Practice Improves Managers’ Job Demands-Resources, Psychological Detachment, Work-Nonwork Boundary Control, and Work-Life Balance–A Randomized Controlled Trial.” International Journal of Workplace Health Management 15(4): 493-514.

Nading, Alex M. 2022. “Living in a Toxic World.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 209-224.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

O’Lear, Shannon. 2021. “Geographies of Slow Violence: An Introduction.” In A Research Agenda for Geographies of Slow Violence, ed. Shannon O’Lear, 1-20. Glos, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Ethnomusicology in Times of War

David McDonald

Indiana University, and

Eloy Neira de la Cadena

University of California, Riverside

I am a Peruvian ethnomusicology PhD candidate, and my research focuses on the relationship between power and music/sound. Although I pay attention to broad postcolonial struggles in Peru, I also consider recent violent episodes in the Peruvian context, such as the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 90s, which left a death toll of over seventy thousand people. More than seventy percent were Quechua Indigenous people. I believe that music/sound is a space where violence is metabolized and questioned, and therefore, as ethnomusicologists, it is part of our ethical duty to highlight those efforts and defend those brave enough to share their experiences with us.

This past year, the upsurge of violence in Palestine, and my commitments as a scholar who pays attention to the intersection of power-violence and music/sound, made me question my ethics as an educator and ethnomusicologist. I wondered how aligned my ethnomusicological, theoretical, and political discourse and actions are, how my fears and aspirations are trapping me, and how to undo these self-imposed constrictions. As this self-questioning was happening, university students and professors were demonstrating across the country against violence in Gaza. It was known to us that among those professors was David McDonald, an ethnomusicologist who I knew through his writings and through the news reporting of his arrest.   

I felt compelled to ask Professor David McDonald for an interview in such a shocking context. We discussed the coherence of our ethnomusicological discourse and personal praxis and how to use our privilege to address global injustice. Finally, I asked him about the possible routes for ethnomusicology to keep its legitimacy and relevance. Afterwards Dr. McDonald and I worked together to select excerpts from the conversation, which are shared below.

E: Thank you for agreeing to talk. I have learned about you and your work through your articles and my professors, and lately, through social media and the internet. I’ve been following the news and want to thank you for defending your ideals, students, and friends. I know what is happening in Gaza, but I have also heard about it from friends. For example, I have a friend who just graduated as a musicologist and used to be a guitar instructor in Gaza. Every time he receives phone calls from Palestine, he receives terrible news about his former students. 

D: You are talking about one of the most important issues that concerns ethnomusicology today. Throughout its history, our field has wavered back and forth between the idea of engagement and objective disengagement. However, I’ve never found that argument useful. Rather, we should be asking, what is our role, or way of relating to the world? We must work towards ethical relationships, and undo the colonial dynamics that distance researchers from their interlocutors. We need to rethink the ethnographic encounter and eliminate the barriers between us. If we are not willing to do that work, we should not be doing ethnomusicology at all. 

For example, Danielle Brown, Dylan Robinson, and many others have addressed these issues, and there is an ongoing conversation on issues of racism, colonialism, ableism…Where I land is that we need to act ethically in our work and similarly in our lives to arrive at coherence…We must practice decolonialism in our work and in our lives. So, it was shocking to me that these ongoing conversations about race and colonialism didn’t translate when the violence in Gaza erupted.— I believe settler colonialism is settler colonialism no matter where…and we cannot confront one settler colonialism and not another, one genocide and not another. We must practice anti-oppression no matter where it occurs. Gaza has demonstrated that ethnomusicologists still have a long way to go on this.

E: How do you react to this situation? 

D: I need to acknowledge that I am a white privileged tenured professor, cisgender, heteronormative male, who has worked in Palestine for the last 20 years, and I am part of that ethnomusicological discussion. However, being not willing to abandon my ethics and my interlocutors has also put me in a vulnerable position. I was arrested, I was banned from campus, my job is threatened… just for articulating the idea that oppression is wrong, all oppressions, not just some oppressions. I believe that doing all of this is part of being an ethnomusicologist. The ethics we apply to our work should also apply to our lives.

E: How do we include this in an ethnomusicology curriculum? How do you articulate these ideas for the students? 

D: I focus on how to create an ethnomusicology that is critical and social justice-oriented, activist-oriented. For example, I teach a seminar called “Activist Ethnography.” Here I focus on what our responsibilities are, and how to respond to specific power dynamics in the field, but also in academia in general. And then how to mobilize our work for the public good. Much of this involves supporting my students when they begin to ask critical questions. 

E: Why is it so crucial to this kind of work with the students?

D: Taking the time to think about these issues [social justice activism] is critical to saving the legitimacy of our discipline [ethnomusicology]. In my case, my colleagues and department have always supported this kind of class seminar. However, my university is beginning to review and censor syllabi, course materials, and contents, particularly about Palestine, and that has had a chilling effect on discussion about Palestine, especially among younger, more vulnerable professors. There is now a great deal of fear among non-tenured faculty that discussion of Palestine in the classroom will threaten job security, tenure, and promotion. Just this year the Indiana legislature passed SEA 202, a new law that negates tenure protections and exposes faculty to potential consequences for teaching political topics.

E: What would be some advice to deal with the power relationships within academia, protect the people you talk about, the musicians that I’m sure are your friends in Palestine?

D: I can only speak for myself, but we need to spend some time carving out where we stand on these issues. In my case, if I were to abandon the communities where I work [Palestine], if I remained silent at a time of ongoing US-supported genocide, it would mean that the work I did was worthless; it would also mean that I am reinforcing the colonial encounter between Western societies and Palestinians. I am in a position where I simply can’t walk away from my interlocutors…Usually, this is never an issue, and I don’t know what will happen. I have been teaching topics around Palestine for sixteen years, and it has never been an issue, but now I don’t know what will happen. After my arrest, Indiana University has perpetually threatened my employment. But I simply cannot neglect the lives of the musicians who trusted me with their knowledge and experience; that would be colonial extractivism. 

E: What about the dichotomic discourses about war? 

D: There is a discourse that says, ‘in order for Jews to be safe, Palestinians must die.’ It is an either-or discourse. And I don’t believe in either/or discourses, and you could put any people in that equation, and I wouldn’t follow you. I don’t believe in an either/or situation where one group needs to die for another to be safe, and that is a discourse at the root for the support of Israel and its actions, that they are doing this to somehow make Jews safe. When, in fact, ongoing genocide only renders them less safe. More importantly, if you are justifying the idea that somebody needs to die for somebody else to be safe, you are justifying genocide. 

Today, there is a great deal of fear of being accused of antisemitism. As we have seen recently, antisemitism is often used as a weapon to stifle discussion about Palestinian life and Palestinian safety. That is why antisemitism is used as a weapon, because it is very effective for silencing dissent and critique of Israel and the US. To me, this fear of being accused of antisemitism is the most important issue in the academic study of Palestine, and the more general discussion of Palestinian life and safety. Rather, we must decouple these ideas and further unpack what we mean by antisemitism and anti-zionism. We must talk about antisemitism because it is real and needs to be addressed, but saying that Palestineans should live is not antisemitism; saying genocide is wrong is not antisemitism. For example, to say Black lives matter, is not saying that white lives do not. Rather, it is calling for the end of anti-black racism. 

E: What is the role of music in these issues, considering music as an aesthetic-political space where other discourses can sound?

D: Music is probably one of the most important platforms for having these discussions. All of the work I have done is to engage with Palestinian experiences and cultural development within settings of settler colonial occupation. More recently, this [colonial relationship] has been exacerbated to the point where there is an ongoing genocide right in front of our eyes. Everybody knows it and sees it, but has seemingly made their peace with it. Music is one of the more important cultural spheres where these positions are established, naturalized, and sustained. I believe that my role is to listen, understand, and amplify often silenced Palestinian experiences through music/sound.

E:  What are your hopes regarding SEM (Society for Ethnomusicology), your colleagues, and student members? 

D: As Co-Chairs of the Society for Arab Music Research, Anne Elise Thomas, Andrea Shaheen Espinosa, and myself, have been working closely with SEM this past year, trying to convince the Board to issue a statement that condemns the destruction of Palestinian heritage and cultural institutions—all of which is clearly listed as part of SEM’s mission statement. SEM proclaims its support for the cultural institutions and heritage of communities around the world. Based on that promise, we requested [SEM] to take a stance against the destruction of those exact things in Palestine. SEM doesn’t need to take a side, per se, doesn’t need to condemn one side or the other, but we believe that SEM must at the very least condemn the destruction of the artistic infrastructure of Palestinian life. And even that was a near-impossible task. Half the board was on our side, and wondered why we hadn’t done this already. However, the other half argued that if SEM were to get involved here [war in Gaza], SEM would have to get involved in other places, and that just means a lot of work; still others were concerned about potentially angering senior Jewish colleagues or creating animosity within SEM. These conversations got so deadlocked that one Board member publicly resigned in protest, leaving the Board with an insufficient number of votes to pass our statement. In an effort to put something forward, SEM President Melvin Butler issued a personal statement, loosely based on the resolution we proposed. And it took us months to get this far. We were left incredibly frustrated to encounter such intransigence from a Board that boasts long-standing commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Moreover, these conversations were never transparently shared with SEM membership. Nor were any Board members’ positions on our proposal publicly revealed. As an elected body, it would seem appropriate for SEM membership to receive more clarity about how the Board operates. In this instance, I believe that the Board failed in its duties to follow through on the SEM mission and vision, and in particular, on its very public commitments denouncing settler colonialism and protecting Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists.

E: What can we imitate or learn if we compare our society’s attitude to others, such as AAA,  AFS, or LASA?  Are conversations happening at another level?

D: True, AAA has already passed a BDS resolution. The Middle Eastern Studies Association and many other societies have passed BDS resolutions. Others haven’t gone that far but still have taken important steps. SEM has been reluctant to do any of these things. And while there are conversations around these issues, attempting to move SEM towards a more justice-minded position has been very difficult. And to me it makes little sense to proudly tout SEM’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, while struggling to pass a basic statement that the near total destruction of Palestinian cultural heritage in Gaza is wrong. There are many options available, but SEM leadership has prevented these conversations from taking place.

E:" For younger scholars/students, thinking about my generation, what would you tell us? Also, what would you tell us about those who just started jobs but still face precarity? 

D: I think you need to nurture networks of support from all levels; you need to be careful with the way you approach your work. And then draw on your networks of support and care. But at the same time, acting ethically is not the result of privilege—you can’t wait until you are tenured before you develop a conscience. Either you are doing it, or you are not, either you see it, or you don't, and then, what that means is that you do the work in the way you feel it best aligns with your politics, and you work within spaces of support and protection. But most importantly, you live the way you work. You cannot practice decolonial ethics in your research, while abandoning these ethics in your daily life. And these ethics should apply not only to your interlocutors in the field, but to all similarly vulnerable populations. None of this will end until we take the radical, yet essential, step towards ending all oppression against all people anywhere in the world. I believe that the very credibility and legitimacy of our discipline is at stake.

E: Thank you.