This Schenkerian Creep is one of the things that nettles Prof. Ewell, and perhaps the signatories of the open letter, too. Instead of four semesters of Schenker, couldn’t we have two of him and two of something else? (An example of the ostensibly democratic, protean thinking that seems to be dominant on the academic arts scene. Learn a bit of this; now try some of that. A way of acquiring the highly valorized quality of “versatility,” while ensuring that no one gets to be really good at anything.) Can’t we make room for other kinds of theory? But certainly there are such, and in practice. Is there a ban on their employment? Once again, this plea is something that sounds good, sounds invitational and inclusive. But would it truly be in addition, or in place of? And what other kinds? Are they non-linear, un-hierarchical? Non-narrative? Schenker derived his method from a standing body of work that is, to employ the cliché in its proper usage, one of the glories of Western civilization—all the more so if we open the Pantheon at least a crack to admit Handel, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Dvorák, Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Elgar and Vaughn Williams, et al., not to mention all the operatic geniuses. The theory could not have arisen without the body of work, which is self-evidently European and, therefore, white—no apology needed for that, I trust. Schenker’s analytic tool may not be the one for all these, or for others outside the European tradition. But where is the body of comparable work from which other, more ethnically or Postmodernly acceptable theories might be extracted? From out here on the fringe, I can’t make it out. Perhaps the signatories can bring it forth.

The substantive debate within the discipline of music theory is one thing. The assembling of villagers with torches and pitchforks, accompanied by calls from Twitterers, other social media chirpers, students, and teachers (tagging along after their pupils) to oust Timothy Jackson from his positions and to suppress the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, is another, and is what has made the quarrel into the latest in a very long line of potential cancelation incidents. From what I can gather Jackson, no doubt feeling his life’s work under direct attack on racial grounds, may have handled the affair rather loosely. In his eagerness to solicit responses and get them into print, he seems to have not followed the strictest scholarly protocols—the articles were not peer-reviewed, and one was anonymous. I’m not privy to all the intramural tensions at play, and it has been suggested that Jackson might have been better advised to make the call for responses an online event. So far as I can determine, whether or not one finds racist or “anti-black” content in the responses depends on whether or not one accepts the premise that whiteness equals racism. Accept or reject—the arguments talk past each other.

Whatever Jackson’s procedural transgressions may have been, this has every appearance of being yet another instance of self-righteous Cause-devoted activists, many of them feeling heavy peer pressure, calling for the head of someone who’s piped up with an objection or two. Fortunately, a couple of organizations dedicated to free speech have come to Jackson’s legal defense. He may retain his post(s); the JSS may continue to publish; the whole affair will probably simmer down. But this seems to me not much above the level of vandalizing statues or proposing that negotiation begin with a confession of racism and a public shaming. Can’t distinguished scholars find a better way?

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Opera 1: Marian Anderson’s Met Debut: A Racist Event? The African-American contralto Marian Anderson was one of the great classical singers and artists of the 1930s and ’40s. In her prime, she had a voice of long range, uncommon beauty, and satisfying amplitude. Her technique cleared all the standard bars of measurement (legato guidance, registral balance, centered intonation, vowel clarity, etc.) with ease, with some reservation with respect to consistency of vibrato in the low- and midrange, traceable to her habit of carrying head-dominant registration well below the passaggio and shading it darkly, even though she had plenty of true chest register at her beckoning. As a singer of Lieder (principally Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms—Schenker would have approved) she ranked with Lotte Lehmann and Elena Gerhardt, though closer to the former in terms of her unusual ability to evoke the emotional heart of a song, to find its personal voice and color its mood. (Try the Frauenliebe und Leben, or, in Schubert, Liebesbotschaft or Der Tod und das Mädchen, among many possible examples. She had wonderful piano collaborators, too, usually Franz Rupp in the U. S., but earlier on Kosti Vehanen as well.) The other genre in which she excelled was that of the Negro spiritual (always then so called), to which she brought an easy grace and depth of expression, and a voice rivaled only by Paul Robeson’s on the male side. Late in her professional life, her signature spiritual was He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands—but try to hear some of the recordings from earlier, like Hall Johnson’s setting of A City Called Heaven (“I Am a Poor Pilgrim”). Some of these songs are as deep, as moving, as any written by the great Lieder composers, when sung as Marian Anderson could sing them.