Embattled music professor calls out CUNY for anti-semitism
NewsProfessor Timothy Jackson of UNT, locked in a battle over the reputation of the Viennese-Jewish analyst Heinrich Schenker, is now claiming that the poison stems from the City University of New York, where ‘radical’ opinions run riot.
Jackson writes:
I myself am a graduate of the Department of Music of the CUNY. My grandmother came to the United States by herself at age 19 to escape antisemitism, and, although poor, she devoted herself to financing my university education at CUNY. Most of her family perished in the Holocaust. My grandfather, Yakov Zelechin, changed his name to “Jack Jackson” in 1936 in order to avoid antisemitism.
In 2019, Hunter College professor Philip A. Ewell shocked the music world when he indicted the important music theorist Heinrich Schenker, a Viennese Jew who died in 1935, as a “virulent racist,” “white supremacist” and Nazi sympathizer. He also accused generations of Schenkerian scholars of trying to “whitewash” the theorist’s racism and prevent Blacks from succeeding in music theory.
Then, in July 2020, faculty and graduates of the CUNY doctoral program in music organized a national censure resolution condemning Schenker and all those who defended him as “racists.” But Ewell was just the tip of a much larger spear, its shaft being a group of enablers, including department heads, school administrators and music faculty at CUNY and throughout the U.S. This censure resolution provides a clear example of the harassment of Jewish scholars for objecting to antisemitic conspiracy theories….
Read on here.
Jackson’s comments are a ridiculously distorted caricature of Philip Ewell’s talk and articles. For a good summary of the issues and the arguments from both sides, I suggest this article from _Inside Higher Ed_ which is an interesting read:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/08/07/music-theory-journal-criticized-symposium-supposed-white-supremacist-theorist
Agreed. Moreover, he thinks a lyre is a harp!
Ewell, you mean this guy?
https://musictheoryswhiteracialframe.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/beethoven-was-an-above-average-composer-lets-leave-it-at-that/
Philip Ewell:
‘In music theory “masterwork” is generally applied to compositions by white males. But Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is no more a masterwork than Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells. To state that Beethoven was any more than, say, above average as a composer is to state that you know all music written on planet earth 200 years ago when Beethoven was active as a composer, which no one does.’
https://musictheoryswhiteracialframe.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/beethoven-was-an-above-average-composer-lets-leave-it-at-that/
Beethoven is arguably the greatest composer That We Know of in his time. In Western Classical music he is a giant because he pushed the art into new directions and broke conventions in a profound way that influenced many composers and still has a powerful effect on modern listeners. That is not to say that he was the most musically gifted person of his time. Amongst formal musically educated male Europeans he was the greatest but there were whole continents of men, not to mention women, who if given similar opportunities may have exceeded Beethoven. Other musical forms tend to have more limitations upon them. Less variety of instruments, a lack of musical notation, the ritulization and rigid ceremony of serious music (as serious European music was controlled by the tastes of the Church for hundreds of years), less exposure of other musical forms outside thier own, music not intended for entertainment… As for Spalding’s 12 little spells, to compare it to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is disengenus. It is an interesting work but arguably without giants of the past like Beethoven music of this nature would not exist. Is Spalding as musically talented as Beethoven? Who knows. Unless you were to transport Spalding to late 1700s Germany and make her a man there is no way to know. Time and Place and Culture limit what any individual can do. The most naturally gifted tennis players may have been born 10 000 years before tennis was ever invented. The potentially most talented playwright born before theatre, the most intelligent human to have ever lived could have been born on a tropical island hunter gatherer society with no exposure to reading, writing, science, architecture, painting or television production.
It’s hard to imagine using a superlative for anything when hypotheticals (some even surpassing extreme fantasy) play such a strong role in one’s argument. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
P.E. seems to have focused a considerable amount of energy on Russia (according to his website). How is his voice relevant in defending/advocating for the music he himself doesn’t seem to have studied? Can he share some of the works that were as influential as Beethoven’s 9th?
I am no musicologist but the argument that you have to know all of a type of literature or art before you can pass judgment on any one example of it is not really an argument at all, merely a self satisfying “off button.”
If you can’t cut the mustard, it’s usually not the mustard’s fault. Or its problem.
Without denying the importance of Beethoven for Western classical music, I believe the argument may be, more subtly, that canonization of a few carefully selected ‘great’ composers, and the relegation of the rest to second-rate status and often oblivion, not only distorts our understanding of that particular musical tradition, but also perpetuates a nineteenth-century philosophical view of ‘men of genius’ that can lead to sinister racist beliefs (and certainly does in the case of Schenker).
The City University of New York has a problem with systemic anti-SemitismA New York City Council meeting revealed denial, ignorance, duplicity and indifference to anti-Semitism among CUNY administrators
https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-city-university-of-new-york-has-a-problem-with-systemic-anti-semitism/?utm_source=The+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=c1a7958904-Daily+Syndicate+07-10-22+%28copy+1%29_COPY_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8583953730-c1a7958904-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&ct=t%28Daily+Syndicate+07-10-22+%28copy+1%29_COPY_03%29
What has happened to Jackson and to his pet academic journal are both justified by Jackson’s own editorial mishandling. Even if Ewell personally gassed and incinerated Schenker, that wouldn’t confer license to Jackson to just publish WTFever he happens to feel like publishing. Schenkerism is anti-scientific and faith-based. That should be reason enough for UNT to divest from it, racism totally aside.
“Schenkerism is anti-scientific and faith-based.” Without any indication of what you mean by “scientific,” this statement is meaningless.
https://www.jns.org/federal-complaint-against-jew-hatred-at-cuny-documents-decade-of-anti-semitism/?utm_source=The+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=e832d5e0dd-Daily+Syndicate+07-24-22+%28copy+2%29_COPY_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8583953730-e832d5e0dd-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&ct=t%28Daily+Syndicate+07-24-22+%28copy+2%29_COPY_06%29