Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

I'm having a serious "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" moment on this one:

I don't think that representation of the Ewell paper is quite accurate, though admittedly it's been over a year since I read it.

Despite being Jewish (would have had different significance later than during his time!) Schenker was a proud german nationalist and in his own words considered his method one of the ways german people could assert their superiority over other cultures.

The Ewell paper is actually pretty clear that schenkerian analysis is technically valid and quite valuable for many purposes. But also that its origins were in an explicitly racist project, and that applying it without understanding that frame could get you racist results even if you didn't intend them.

It's easy to go after this paper because it sincerely uses "critical race theory" vocabulary, but it's a solid contribution to answering the question "why are some fields so incredibly white even if no one intends them to be that way?"

The essay both-sides it, but Ewell's paper is researched and professional even with its flaws, while in context Jackson's response was fairly nasty and defensive, basically just accusing Ewell of black antisemitism.

I've been following this particular one for years (grew up on schenkerian analysis, in a musical family) and I am definitely not neutral on it. Ewell's moral rigidity on this is unpalatable sometimes and I think you could fairly call him a hothead. But the author's description of the conflict is a lot more "balanced" than the conflict itself really deserves. This is essentially an academic raising a painful point within a field that he clearly loves, and others trying to shut it down because of the embarrassment they feel it exposes them all to.

Seeing how the author misrepresents this issue to make their point makes me not really trust the rest of it. I just happen to be somewhat informed on this one.

Kipnis clearly doesn't think much of the Ewell paper, but I don't think her point centers on its contents; it's more that someone collected and published scholarly responses to the paper, and the social media pushback against these responses led to a grad student narcing on his professor and the professor losing funding, the journal, etc. That, to me, is not a healthy dynamic for a university to run on.

edit: Actually let me go a step further and agree with you a bit - I think Kipnis's point would be more clearly made if she didn't make her own perspective on the merits of the Ewell paper such a big part of that section of the article.

AIUI, a lot of the pushback on those responses was due to how they were collected and published. The call for responses was mostly circulated privately among pro-Schenkerian scholars, and the broader profession only got to know about it at the last minute. And the author of the original paper was given no opportunity to provide a rejoinder.

I'm not even sure that the actual written paper had even been published at that time: the basic arguments of the paper were first summarized in a conference presentation, and of course it is terrible form to publish a purported critique of something that hasn't even been fully presented in full detail! The whole thing has really reflected pretty badly on the authors of these 'critiques', for very good reasons overall.

Schenker was a music critic/journalist of his day who routinely used exaggerated rhetoric to inflate his claims towards his largely non-professional audience. The basics of his analysis method are genuinely remarkably well-founded in historical practice (far more so than the "harmony" practice that's taught in music-theory introductory courses nowadays), but they are also much better described and contextualized by fully considering historical sources, as opposed to a narrow focus on Schenker himself. For instance, melodic reduction (undoing diminution and teasing out long-range prolongational relations) was integral already to the Italian Solfeggio of the 18th century, as recently discovered by music scholar Nicholas Baragwanath https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-solfeggio-tradit... . Schenker is getting a lot of bad rhetoric thrown at him these days, but he started that game in the first place.

Thanks for telling us. Do you know if Kipnis characterization of the backlash Jackson suffered is correct? "All hell broke loose on social media. ... The university swiftly announced that an ad hoc committee would be convened to investigate. Its members found Jackson guilty of bullying the grad-student editor into publishing views he disagreed with, and the journal guilty of editorial mismanagement (although, Jackson said, the editorial practices followed were the same as they’d always been). Jackson was removed from the journal, and its funding was cut." Some writers have a way of magnifying things. 3-4 people complaining is enough for "all hell broke loose" according to some.

Do you view anything hierarchical as racist via associated Whiteness? I'm confused how the origins were an "explicitly racist project". Was Schenker promoting a race that he didn't even belong to? Is it possible to think American culture is superior over other cultures, without thinking that white people are superior to black people?

It's probably because German Nationalism (especially of that time) was "Ethnic" Nationalism ? Which I have gotten the impression has been distinctly racist even long before the Nazis ?

It's not like the Germans had any monopoly on casual racism back then - consider the Dreyfus Affair, which occurred at the peak of La Belle Époque France. Of course Germany was where these attitudes had been festering for a long time due to a generally authoritarian social environment (which went hand-in-hand with opposition to bourgeois modernity), and where they were taken to extremes.

My point was that it's probably not a coincidence that the worst abuses happen in countries that followed "Ethnic" Nationalism rather than Civic (aka Liberal) Nationalism.

So first off I'm familiar with schenkerian analysis but I am not an expert on schenker the person, though I did at one point read some of his writings in translation to verify Ewell's claims. Nor am I trying to argue, right now, that his works are inherently racist. If you're looking for those things you should just read Ewell, who is a Schenker expert, and is making that argument.

> Was Schenker promoting a race that he didn't even belong to?

I think this is an error, trying to map our understanding of race onto the past like this. I don't know what race Schenker thought of himself as. He was Jewish, and he consistently asserted the natural superiority of german people and culture. That doesn't cleanly reconcile with any conception of race that I've come across, which indicates to me that those conceptions are not a useful lens here.

My goal wasn't to start up the is-schenkerian-analysis-racist-or-not quagmire here. It was to point out that I believe the author of this essay has misunderstood or misrepresented a more nuanced conflict for their own purposes.

> I think this is an error, trying to map our understanding of race onto the past like this.

Isn't that what Ewell is doing, by declaring that a 19th-century Jew born in modern-day Ukraine is actually a white German?

And Ewell isn't a Schenker expert - he focuses on Russian and modern music. He does self describe as: "I am an activist for racial, gender, and social justice in the field of music theory."

And he writes stuff like:

> Beethoven occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years, and we have been told by whiteness and maleness that his greatness has nothing to do with whiteness and maleness, in race-neutral and gender-neutral fashion. Thus music theory’s white-male frame obfuscates race and gender, one of its main goals….

Has there ever been a worthy white/male composer, or have they all been problematic racists because of their demographic information?

This guy is, basically, a clown. He, like many social-justice minded people, epitomizes Maslow's hammer. Writing in an academic style or in journals doesn't mean you have anything interesting to say. I did not agree with the author of the original article one bit, but I don't think they did any kind of disservice in their brief take on Ewell's paper(they even linked to it, which is at least a sign of good faith in my opinion).

Schenkerian analysis is literally the idea of taking out all the "hierarchically inferior" black notes from a piece of music and showing only a handful of hierarchically dominant, big, important "white notes". Of course this basic idea has nothing to do with modern notions of race, but it turns out that the visual contrast of "colors" describes the idea quite precisely. So I'm quite OK with conceding that one point to Ewell.

(It's worth noting the flip side of that argument, too - we literally have historical sources telling us "when you see a composition made of big, white notes, that will sound a lot better if the performer improvises on them melodically on the spot, keeping the overall meter of the white note" (Lorenzo Penna, Li primi albori musicali). And of course, on-the-spot improvisation has been mastered to an unprecedented degree in the modern day by the "black" tradition of Jazz!)

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