Wendelin Bitzan

There seems to be no common sense of what it means to promote oneself as a classical musician. Music universities largely fail to offer valuable advice on how graduates can generate meaningful outreach as entrepreneurs, and so they apparently cannot help but resort to the mechanisms they experience in the world of commercial music business. That means: Visual appearance is what counts and is given the greatest attention. Legions of performers of classical music pretend to make the world a better place through their music, but what they essentially do is trying to look good in their latest concert announcement, home video, or photo session.

Dear fellow musicians, what about using your social media coverage to support those many colleagues who struggle to make a living from freelance musicianship? Why would you strive for physical beauty, given that so many of the people in the business fail to get paid properly? I’d suggest you reach out to your followers in order to develop a consciousness of professional representation, and focus your efforts to achieve political awareness of the desolate state of musicianship itself. If you could imagine directing your attention to these elementary issues instead of your looks, people would even more happily support your career. Do not compete for superficial compliments but for professional recognition. Ditch your glamorous Instagram profile today, join and engage in a professional body instead, and become an ambassador of your occupation’s welfare. Your help is much appreciated.

North American music theory currently faces a veritable scandal. At the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, the African American scholar Philip Ewell presented a plenary talk on the white racial frame in music theory, elaborating on the structural and institutionalised discrimination of non-white people in academia, and examining how Schenkerian analysis is affected by Heinrich Schenker‘s racism and ideas of white supremacy. An extended written version of this piece recently appeared in Music Theory Online—but even before it was published, a group of male white scholars penned a series of reactions which they assembled in a new issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, repudiating Ewell’s criticism in a most unscholarly way, not giving him a chance to respond, and dispensing with their own peer-reviewing routines. I am severely shocked at some of these reactions (some of which are cited in this blogpost), at the harsh ad hominem attacks directed towards Ewell and, to some extent, the overtly anti-Black bias uttered by some distinguished proponents of the discipline. In their defense of established views and practices, and in the obvious goal of denigrating their opponent, the contributors involuntarily proved some of the points of racial framing previously addressed by Ewell. The whole affair is, in my humble opinion, an absolute disgrace.