Before getting to the cheerless main subject of today’s post, a brief update—also less than uplifting—on one aspect of my essay The Racial Moment and Opera (9/11/20). This is the controversy engendered by the debate over the claimed white supremacist content of the work of Heinrich Schenker, founder of an important system of analysis in the field of music theory. As you may recall, this arose from a paper delivered by Phillip A. Ewell, an African-American theorist, and responses to it published in a special issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which in turn occasioned a storm of outrage on social media from other scholars, students, and faculty at the University of North Texas (where the Journal is based), calling for the removal of Timothy Jackson (founder of the Journal) from its editorship and from his tenured faculty position at UNT. UNT duly launched an “ad hoc” internal investigation, as a result of which Jackson was indeed removed as editor (though not as professor), and the future of the Journal was thrown into doubt.

Now, Jackson has filed a lawsuit against UNT and seventeen of his erstwhile colleagues, alleging defamation and First Amendment retaliation for “expression of views out-of-step with the prevailing campus orthodoxy.” His lawyer, Michael Thad Allen, claims that the investigation “made up the procedural rules as it went along” and may itself have been unconstitutional, and that Jackson’s “only sin was to defend classical music from spurious charges of ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy.'” I don’t know how this legal proceeding will turn out, or should turn out (this imbroglio is entangled in such matters as “black anti-Semitism,” the implications of Critical Race Theory, etc.), but this way of going about things, with its spirit of personal vengefulness, is deplorable, and does seem to be poisoning the air on some campuses. There are several accounts of these developments online, which you can locate at The Fire (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education); The College Fix; the National Association of Scholars (NAS); Inside Higher Ed; and the Denton Record. At least a couple of these are coming from the political right, as was the breakout story in the National Review, but the issues being raised are real, and if no attention is being paid by more moderate or liberal sites, that is not to their credit. On to today’s topic . . .

 I chose the title for this post in acknowledgement of the listen-to-the-science fact, complete with supporting evidence, that very few people (opera people, that is) want to read about it. The evidence is of the comparative-statistics sort, the stats consisting of the page views of the subject on these posts, supplemented by the number of mentions in reviews and reader responses of the section of Opera as Opera devoted to the matter; and the comparison being the number of page views given to every other subject I’ve addressed, both here and in the book. So, with thanks to those who stick with me here, and an understanding, if sorrowful, wave of the hand to everyone else, I once again attempt to call to your attention the very shaky prospects for the financial health (read: “survival”) of our artform. I will also offer a proposal about public funding that I am sure many will see as so radical as to be frivolous, but which I have come to believe at least merits serious consideration.^(I)