It happens that linear thinking and hierarchical thinking are, in and of themselves, mental habits proclaimed oppressive and racist by some activists of color, scholarly or not. In this, these activists have something in common with French and German philosophes (to the best of my knowledge, all white) of Postmodern inclination, among whom the pursuit of “freedom” from the prisons of linearity and hierarchical invention, and the elimination of narrative, is an ongoing project. One will not venture far nowadays into contested cultural territory before encountering a line of argument (and I’m not attributing all this to Prof. Ewell; I don’t know what he thinks) that declares linearity and hierarchy to be inherent in whiteness, and thus—since linearity and hierarchy are themselves held to be organically oppressive and racist—that to be white is to be an oppressor and a racist. “Assume you are a racist,” reads the sign pointing the way to Station One on your Via Dolorosa, lugging the cross of “Euro-descendent” art on your back. Indeed, the word “racist” is to be redefined so as to mean inborn white supremacy and privilege. You don’t have to do or say anything to be declared racist. Being white is quite enough, and since to be black is to be oppressed, it’s impossible for blacks to be racist—”prejudiced, yes, but not racist,” explains one explainer. A neat trick: to win your point, just invent new meanings for the terms. But that’s just what it is, a trick. There is no way around this set of assumptions; the thinking goes in a circle. One must simply accept or reject, with consequences to follow either way.

Apart from his reading of internal evidence, Ewell has at his disposal the stated sociopoliticial beliefs of Schenker. Those give him plenty of ammunition, for Schenker was a devout believer in the artistic and intellectual superiority of German culture, and the implied inferiority of all others. His personal Pantheon of composers worth pondering, numbering twelve, comprised the Haydn-through-Brahms AustroGerman lineage, two Bachs (J. S. and C. P. E.), and two foreigners, Alessandro Scarlatti and Chopin, in whom he was pleased to discover a predominant vein of Germanness. (His analytic methods were trained solely on tonal music, as a matter of conviction.) At times in Schenker’s prose oeuvre there is language that is hard to dissociate from Nazi Master Race assertions, and not always avant la lettre. Furthermore, Schenker himself insisted on an indissoluble connection between his sociopolitical beliefs and his musical ones. So if one is looking for biographical evidence in support of theoretical argumentation, it’s not hard to find.^(I)