Musicologist: Beethoven and Mozart’s music is ‘not bad, it’s decent’
NewsThe racial-theory New York musicologist Philip Ewell is on the prowl again. He has just been given a glowing report in Yale News.
Read this:
His father, a Black intellectual who attended Morehouse University with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1948, was “committed to excellence” for himself and his children. In the mid-20th century, Ewell explained over Zoom, the conceptions of excellence by which he was surrounded were deeply intertwined with ideals of whiteness and maleness.
One was not supposed to admit such a notion aloud; instead, it was safer to put forth “that Mozart and Beethoven were simply the best composers on the planet,” Ewell stated. He does not believe his father ever blatantly made those connections; they had ingrained themselves into his notions of what classical music ought to be.
“That this is the best music on the planet is nonsense!” Ewell exclaimed, becoming more animated as he began to explain the bases of his own scholarship. “It’s not bad, it’s decent … but there’s a mythology, a fallacy around their indomitability.”
Ewell received the Wilbur Cross Award by “making the whiteness of music theory a topic of conversation” as part of a growing effort “to remake a conservative field into one that welcomes those traditionally excluded,” GSAA Chair Dr. Jia Chen GRD ’00 told the News.
In his most well-known work to date, “Music Theory’s Racial Frame,” Ewell argued for the existence of a structural and institutional white racial frame to the practice of music theory as a whole, and put forth the possibility of reframing the practice in a non-supremacist manner….
Read on here.
Who on earth is even funding this garbage?
Sadly, foundations with deep pockets, like the Ford Foundation, have gone all-in on wokeness.
Hunter College, the Society for Music Theory.
Department at Hunter College is absolute garbage. Unfortunately, I know from experience.
You know the old saying: rubbish in, rubbish out.
If Mozart and Beethoven are only “decent” composers, who are the excellent ones according to Dr Ewell? The answer to this question is not provided in the interview, which looks very redacted and somewhat confusing, mixing unclear statements about Dr Ewells “black father’s white supremacy”, “concentric circles of white supremacy,” white supremacy as “the nation’s oldest pyramid scheme” where “everyone’s waiting for their bite of the apple”, and so on. This is another sensation-seeking stunt by Dr Ewell, and there are surely more to come.
‘who are the excellent ones’
He doesn’t need to provide details. It’s not about identifying excellent composers, it’s about belittling the respected white ones.
Racism, in fact.
Probably Kanye…
By reporting this, you are playing into his hands. Attention is clearly his oxygen. It is a toxic symbiotic relationship. Mr. Ewell needs attention, and, it seems, this site needs to gin up outrage.
There’s truth to what you say. Do listen to what Drs. Loury and McWhorter (Brown and Columbia respectively) have to say about racial activism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLAfIswP4Nk
Ewell’s comments about music come from a position of ignorance in a toxic mix with ideological capture.
Ewell has gaslighted Society for Music Theory members through distorted quotes and the fear of being labelled a racist. He needs to be exposed.
Ewell is a sad bitter man, who is a failed (classical, but not only) cellist, who desperately wanted to succeed in classical music but talent was not his ally, who is now pissing in his own soup out of spite.
Agreed. He’s like ‘ooh look at me look at me! I’m writing about black people. What, you’re not interested? In that case, you’re racist’.
Can’t win, can you.
Who cares about a musicologist‘s opinion about excellence? That‘s not in the competence spectrum of musicologists.
C’mon, EVERYONE knows that while Beethoven and Mozart are decent enough, they cower in the shadows of the true greats of classical music, Elliott Carter and John Cage.
Giants, both of them! And they lived in our lifetimes!
Gosh, having sat through so many Elliott Carter works (masterpieces?) at the BSO during the tenure of James Levine, I wonder how anyone can possibly not see the forest through the trees?
P.S. – Everyone can have their own opinion, including Professor Ewell. But why does anyone care what he has to say? And why is it even being paid attention to on Slippedisc?
Wrong. Ewell does not think Elliott carter and John cage are ‘true greats’….because they’re not black.
Your first five words would have been sufficent!!!
That’s seriously unfair and totally
ignorant. Why would you bring Carter and Cage, two other white men, into this discussion, to compare against Mozart and Beethoven? It’s such an absurd relation. Don’t you think the comparison is more appropriate in terms of, say, Mozart/Beethoven against Florence Price and William Grant Still?
Think of it as a shrewd career move. Ewell won’t be at Hunter College much longer; he’s bound for the Ivies.
Just saw a job opening at UCLA that seems clearly written for Ewell. You heard it here first.
If everybody is somebody, then nobody is anybody.
Exactly. And on the same continuum as “a belief in everything is a belief in nothing”.
Another “academic” nitwit navel gazing…
Blah, blah, blah. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
He’s going to ride this horse all the way to a MacArthur.
He fights “racism and white superiority.” Who can criticize him?
Oh, I just wish Beethoven was still here!! Remember what he said about the Emperor to Goethe?? Absolutely priceless.
Beethoven could kick serious butt!
We can’t promote the music of non-whites simply by torpedoing white composers and their historical reputations. Plus, there are arguments our there about Beethoven’s moorish background so this gentleman – forgot his name already – may be shooting himself on the foot.
What our market needs is “inclusion”, where everyone is “in”. We can live without dividers, racists and discriminators who use this oneupmanship to degrade the work of others who don’t share their particular skin color. And “inclusion” requires respect for others and good share of humility and generosity, none of them to be found on…who’s he again?
Best to be thought a fool and remain silent than open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Mr. Ewell is the very definition of the above statement.
Reminds me to never leave a thin dime to any organization run by unelected boards with huge endowments to readily waste on deconstructionist grifters. People like him never create anything of any value for the world. They only tear down and take.
He wouldn’t have explained anything over Zoom in the mid 20th Century? Don’t people fact check?
Ewell breaks the twat-o-meter. Again.
I read have all Dr. Ewell’s articles and interviews online as I could find them when I noticed him a year or two ago, though I didn’t bother with the video interview linked above.
His ideas are interesting and obviously relevant to the psychology of musicians who identify themselves racially and, more specifically, as non-white. But ultimately I think we are passing through a period in western history where so-called racial issues are being over-emphasized and expanded beyond their usefulness as a concept of understanding history, art, society, etc.
Due to America’s “original sin” of slavery and the segregationist aftermath and the lingering effects still today (with comparable international analogs in Europe’s legacy of colonialism and imperialism), I think these are necessary conversations, but I also think it is difficult to get a proper and most constructive perspective while these conversations (and arguments) are so hot.
I yearn for the future when people will calm down and realize that not everything in the social and cultural and historic realms are about so-called “race” or power. Eventually we will accept we are all just people, and all with limited experience and understanding, and that’s still good enough, no all-encompassing ideologies needed to trick us into thinking we understand everything perfectly.
The problem with most musicologists is that they over-intellectualize music to such a degree that they never find access to the musical experience as such. I would even venture to say that many of them do not have the slightest idea what music actually is. To really understand Beethoven, Mozart, or any other composer, you need to actually experience their works, either by listening to them or by performing them — and not just once, but through repeated readings out of which a real musical understanding will eventually emerge. You can read all you want about musical context, history; theorize ad nauseam about any given work — but none of this will ever give you any sort of genuine access to the music as such. This is why so few musicologists are actually decent performers, let alone good ones — and also why the greatest performers rarely have much interest in musicology, and if they do, it still doesn’t inform their interpretations, and if it does, only to a very minor degree. Likewise, most composers would find this dry theorizing a useless waste of time. You’re always going to find somebody able to come up with a sophisticated thesis about why Debussy wrote his preludes, yet none of that knowledge would ever be capable of producing a single bar of music worthy of Debussy’s output, nor will it give a performer a single clue as to how to approach Debussy’s music, nor will it even help an experienced listener to understand their works. In the same vein, in order to be appreciated, Beethoven and Mozart actually need to be experienced — which few musicologists actually do, because most of them fail to have developed a genuine musical ear. It ultimately is really more of a sense than a rational or intellectual enterprise. But, it does make for great material for academic symposia where people who have no ears often congregate. I feel sorry for any music student pursuing such vacuous efforts.
Performers can benefit from musicology: from scholarly editions, from the findings of performance practice studies, among other things. Furtwangler was into Schenker. So is Perahia. Fischer-Dieskau is on record about having been influenced by writings of Carl Dahlhaus.
Oh the other hand, I’ll wholeheartedly agree that performers will not benefit from many other kinds of writings on music, including those that consistently capture SlippedDisc’s attention.
Well put. it’s obvious that all Mr Ewell possess is a tin ear, alongside the massive chip on his shoulder.
Perhaps he’s secreted in some gloomy garret, still writing his ‘Symphony for Chip and Tin’??!! Sadly, it won’t be original by the time it’s finished; just derivative.
The beauty and richness of classical music experiences are available for all and all are welcome. The business of belittling and labeling it as “white” or “classist” or any other toxic label and those who sling this mud around are not welcome, IMO. If you don’t like these composers, fine, go listen and write about what you like and make your case that way.
The poor man
That’s as bad as Wagner’s comments about Mendelssohn never being any good because he was a Jew. Racism of any kind toward anyone or group is still racism. If not Beethoven and Mozart, who?
And let us not forget the block heads who condemn Wagner’s music because of his vile antisemitism. Blind is blind.
Snoop Dogg.
(No idea of what he sings, but the name is great!)
Does it count that Beethoven’s favourite eating haunt in Vienna was “The Black Camel”??
“You are a sad, strange little man. And you have my pity!”
– Buzz Lightyear
Hopefully Ewell will find a way to forgive his father for listening to Beethoven…
His Dad was just “acting white”.
I saw a sign on the back window of a Pickup yesterday: “I identify as a glass table”!!
If Philip Ewell starts a career as a comic actor, I hire him. Immediately.
Another poisonous, entitled jumped-up pseudo-intellectual desperate for attention. He’s utterly pathetic.
It’s funny when y’all do the white supremacist thing out loud.
Its funny when you do the “I’m an arsole (English spelling) in writing!
You mean the ‚enlightened reason‘ thing? Yeah, to hell with it!
The one reasonable comment in a sea of white supremacism and anti-intellectualism.
You would have to step out of the Western cultural tradition in order to make the kind of judgements that are implied here. That in itself is problematic since not all cultures have the kind of traditions than produce compositions attributable to named composers.
India has its own Classical tradition that is equally valid but is rarely found in Western conservatories. You go to India to study it. You could go to Berkeley to study the jazz tradition with its non-White roots
How silly. This guy is back again. Western music was built, fed and watered by the church and later by secular white male composers, many who wrote works for their monarchs so they could survive. And if the composers mentioned were just decent, then their works would have attritioned out naturally. Kind of bizarre to go back in time and put a racial spin on western classical music. Maybe he’s just gaslighting for his next grant. I wish I could make a living reconstructing history in my silo.
OK, I’ll bite. I am tired of the endless arguments in classical music and opera about who or what is “best”. Best at or for what? What role does music play in culture? The Western classical tradition is someone plays, and a crowd listens. It’s music as entertainment. Great.
But in other cultures music is used to foster communal participation, to comment immediately on what is going on to or within a group , to document a history, cultivate unity, to foment revolution, to accompany dancing (and that dancing plays different roles in different cultures).
Tchaikovsky may be the “best” composer of classical ballet music but his music is not best if you want music that gets a crowd up on their feet to dance.
And if you want to rally people to the defense of their country, Red Kalyna is “better” and more powerful than any of the classics. There are all sorts of greatness, and musicology should make room for that without predetermining that one particular category of music is “best”.
In the Orwellian world that is modern American academia, pseudo scholars like Ewell are adulated as thought leaders and the only repositories of the wisdom needed to overthrow the evil western civilization. Sort of like Lysenko was to Russian science under Stalin.
Ukrainian pseudoscientist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko fell in disgrace in the end.
He attacked his own father as a white supremacist for liking Classical music!!!
And, he said this:
Tenure, Ewell drew out, is “the citizenship of the music academia world.” Tenured professors do not want their studies and positions potentially undermined by a reframing of the discipline.
“They want to believe it’s the KKK and that’s it,” Ewell noted with heavy sincerity.
Finally, Timothy Jackson and Barry Wiener have demonstrated that Ewell distorted quotes to make Schenker look like a biological racist. Ewell had to “lie” to support his argument.
Ewell had to “lie” to support his argument? If that’s what he wants to do, he’d be better off going into politics. I could never trust a politician who doesn’t tell lies, because if he doesn’t then he is not doing his job.
Ewell for president. He could make America great again.
Freud, as well as that greek guy, can explain that.
I am sure that tens of millions of music lovers throughout the world will be heaving signs of relief that Ewell’s dad approved of Mozart and Beethoven. All of a sudden, it’s OK to listen to their music.
If this crank didn’t really exist (and I suppose that he does), someone would have had to invent him.
Well, not a lot of people spend time after graduation engaging with the practice of music theory, which is distinct from practicing, performing and listening to music; nor was it, when I studied it, music theory’s business or main concern to judge whether a given piece or composer is/was great, decent, middling or deplorable. The field is probably a difficult one in which to differentiate oneself, and people will do whatever they need to in order to get noticed.
When I read the “not bad, it’s decent” line I thought — I have heard this before, but where? When? Then it hit me: 9th grade English class! And my teacher, Miss Pittleman (forgive the “Miss” but that was what we called her in 1965), who would play the Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner “2000 Year Old Man” comedy records when there were spare minutes at the end of class. Very few in that class found them as funny as she and I did. And even I was not that keen about the Flanders & Swann songs that she also played us.
I am relying on my memory here. Too lazy to seek it out on YouTube.
So the 2000 Year Old Man (Mel Brooks) is being asked what was the greatest invention of all time in his 2000 years on earth and he answers without hesitation, and in his best lower east side accent “Liquid Prell!” Carl Reiner, incredulous: “Liquid Prell?” “Liquid Prell” insisted the 2000 Year Old Man. “You can drop a pearl into it!” Reiner “Well … what about the heart/lung machine?” 2000 Year old Man: “That was good, that was nice. But if you drop it in the shower it’s gonna break. Liquid Prell you can drop in the shower!”
To read that Mozart and Beethoven are “not bad, it’s decent” is as funny now as “That was good, that was nice” as stated by Mel Brooks about the heart lung machine was back in 1965. It is a pity that the era of the comedy album is over, or all but over. Mr. Ewell could have won a comedy LP Grammy back in the ’60s. Miss Pittleman would have bought it for sure.
You had me in stitches with that story, David!
I think Miss Pittleman would have enjoyed it as well.
What a load of racist codswallop. Tell that to Wynton Marsalis.
A middle-aged academic runs out of ideas. He can no longer mine his dissertation for yet another article that no one will read. He looks for the next thing. Rather than take on an intellectually demanding field, he finds something easy like Critical Race Theory, which can be mastered to the level Ewell has done by reading a few books and putting on the requisite airs. He goes from a middling academic toiling in obscurity to a rock star overnight, buoyed by the professional mediocrities who run organizations like the Society for Music Theory. Responsible scholars like Timothy Jackson and Barry Wiener show Ewell’s incompetence in one of his chosen areas (it turns out he’s no better at Critical Race Theory than he was at music), but it doesn’t matter. That tells you what you need to know about the current state of affairs in academic music theory. Anti-intellectualism, performative outrage, cynical careerism, and all the other trappings of a dying discipline. Meanwhile the next generation is rewriting their dissertation proposals to keep up with the “latest trends,” and to look good on the diversity statements they’ll be writing in a few years.
I suggest that we draw a line and henceforth ignore this fool.
This gentleman is a one note “johnny” whose claim to fame is defaming great artists such as Mozart and Beethoven. Music should not be a venue for such arguments. There is room for composers such as this gentleman as well as Beethoven, et al. Work hard, create beautiful music, and don’t worry about Mozart and Beethoven being the greatest. They will be, no matter what anybody has to say about it.
I agree with you, but it’s this kind of anti-white, racist nonsense that is promoting mediocrities like Florence Price as victims. On the other hand, I’m very glad to have the music of George Walker brought to my attention – what I’ve heard of it is really superb.
It’s not even about race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexuality, etc, per se. It comes down more to just how woke a person, notion, concept or entity is or isn’t.
If a person, notion, concept or entity is woke enough, he/she/them/it can be as racist, bigoted, homophobic, Islamophobic, transgenderphobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, etc, as all get-go, but he/she/them/it will tend to get a pass.
Why do people even listen to woke pseudo-intelectuals like this? A guy who probably never composed a single note in his entire life thinks his opinion about Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music is relevant to the world…
What a nonsense!
But what about J. S. Bach? Do tell!
I wouldn’t be surprise if someone says something like this: “J.S. Bach? A really dangerous, nazi-fasci prototype. Not enough with producing white supremacist music with religious (re-li-gi-ous!) [eyes rolling] undertones, he fathered 21 white people!”
I think the narrative is set on “he stole his wife’s tunes”: https://www.classicfm.com/composers/bach/news/magdalena-cello-suites-goldberg-variations/
Philip Ewell’s writing is not decent, it’s bad.
Who needs a trump rally when you have the comment section here on SD! It’s like Twitter but with even less moderation.
If Beethoven and Mozart are merely decent where does that leave the likes of Hummel , Spohr and Diabelli?! A tin eared evaluation.
Perhaps Dr Ewell is committing a cultural appropriation of the mannerisms of British English, and our wont for understatement and modesty with a certain hint of irony, as in “Mozart was a rather good composer”…
The dogs bark….and the caravan keeps on moving …Who cares what this nobody has to say…