Bass-baritone LaMarcus Miller – also black – worked in Vaughn’s Opera Workshop and Opera Lab on the Manhattan School of Music within the early 2010s. She was a ‘pillar of integrity’ and the ‘epitome of a mentor’, he said. ‘I’ve only seen her be tremendously inclusive, while holding students accountable for his or her actions.’

Days after the firing, the anonymous petition instigator posted a follow-up:

‘Victory! Dona D Vaughn has been faraway from her position at MSM. Thanks to everyone who supported this petition. The work isn’t over and I hope you all feel strengthened by this victory.’

The ‘hope’ is well-founded; on to the following takedown. As for Vaughn, she was in shock. ‘I shouldn’t have words to explain it. It’s guilt by allegation’, she said on the time.

Musicology within the dock

Lately, one other academic has also been fighting back against a similarly false allegation of racism. Timothy Jackson is a music theory professor on the University of North Texas. He specialises within the work of Twentieth-century Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker, who developed an influential system of study that identifies a very powerful elements of a musical phrase with the intention to explain the phrase’s emotional impact and its role inside a piece’s thematic development. Jackson can be the previous head of the Centre for Schenkerian Studies and the previous editor of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies.

In November 2019, Hunter College musicologist Philip Ewell gave a keynote address on the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, titled ‘Music Theory’s White Racial Frame’. Ewell argued that Schenker’s rating of notes and harmonies inside a composition is merely a stand-in for a white supremacist rating of the races. The ‘white racial frame’ of Schenkerian evaluation has kept blacks from becoming music theorists, Ewell maintained.

Jackson responded by putting out a call to members of the Society for Music Theory (including to Ewell) to contribute to a symposium within the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The vast majority of the essays, published in July 2020, were critical, although some were supportive. But few stated the apparent: that to equate Schenker’s rating of notes and harmonies with racial hierarchies is lunacy.

A hierarchy of keys and of harmonies inside those keys is constitutive of Western tonal music. It has nothing to do with alleged racial hierarchy. Ewell’s position implies that tonal music is itself racist. Every composer writing in a tonal idiom, including composers of color, could be engaged in a racist enterprise. So could be anyone in any field of activity that recognises dominant and subdominant elements – whether art evaluation, chemistry or engineering. Distinctions between gravitational, nuclear and electromagnetic forces would render our very universe a site of cosmic racism. After all, the rhetorical slippery slope holds no fear for Ewell. There can never be too many examples of white supremacy.

Jackson’s response focussed on Ewell’s denunciations of Schenker as a proto-Nazi. Ewell had didn’t mention Schenker’s outsider status as an Austrian Jew or his widow’s death in a concentration camp. Ewell’s silence on these matters, Jackson wrote, could also be related to black anti-Semitism. Ewell has called for more rap repertoire in music curricula. Before acceding to that demand, Jackson advised, music departments should grapple with rap’s anti-Semitism and misogyny. The underrepresentation of blacks in music theory is resulting from the undeniable fact that few blacks ‘grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued’, Jackson concluded, before issuing a call to demolish ‘institutionalised racist barriers’.

The manager board of the Society for Music Theory responded to Jackson’s defence by accusing him of ‘replicating a culture of whiteness’. Jackson’s colleagues on the University of North Texas blasted him for publishing a symposium ‘replete with racial stereotyping and tropes’. Graduate students said that Jackson should be fired for his history of ‘particularly racist and unacceptable’ actions.

If Jackson made a mistake, it was to refute Ewell’s thesis on irrelevant biographical grounds and to deploy Ewell’s own ad hominem method against Ewell himself. As a substitute, he must have focussed on the absurdity of the harmony-race analogy itself.

Jackson was then faraway from his editorship of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The chair of Jackson’s department informed him that the University of North Texas could be ceasing its financial and institutional support for the journal and for the Centre for Schenkerian Studies, essentially cancelling each institutions. Jackson is within the strategy of suing the university and the university’s regents for violating his First Amendment rights. Regardless of the legal end result, he’ll remain a pariah amongst colleagues and students.

Promoting mediocrity

The largest victim within the racial attack on classical music is the music itself. Once the poison of identity politics is injected right into a field, it may well never get well its prelapsarian innocence. Each time an industry insider or critic disparages our biggest composers for being too white and too male, he gives neophytes, especially young people, one more reason to shut their ears to this legacy.

Searching for to make classical music politically acceptable, orchestras and conservatories are resurrecting lesser-known black composers from the past. (Other black composers, akin to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and William Grant Still, have been played on radio stations for many years now, and rightly so.) This enterprise would ordinarily call for celebration. The canon is performed to death. The more previously unfamiliar music we all know, the greater our understanding of what it has meant to be human, since music traces the movement and yearnings of its composer’s soul. Rediscovering black contributions to classical music is especially meaningful.

However the stated rationale for this resuscitation destroys its value. Every past composer now being presented on radio stations and in concert halls is alleged to have disappeared from public attention due to racism. That claim is, in most instances, fanciful.

Perhaps 98 per cent of all composers within the classical tradition usually are not listened to and even recognised today. Those forgotten artists were just about all white males. It’s the sad fate of most composers to recede into obscurity, in the event that they were even lucky enough to have had their music performed during their lifetimes. To charge history with racism for having allowed black composers to have also fallen into obscurity requires proof of overwhelming merit, strong enough to beat the same old oblivion meted out to everyone else. That top burden of proof is never met.

The composers having fun with the best prominence for the time being are Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) and Florence Price (1887-1953). The hyperbole surrounding their works is astonishing.

Bologne was the son of a Guadeloupe plantation owner and a slave; he spent most of his life in Parisian court society. Throughout his twenties, Bologne enjoyed an annuity from his father’s estate, but he has not been cancelled for having profited from slave labour.

Bologne is usually referred to today because the ‘black Mozart’. That comparison is laughable enough in its own right. Bologne is fluent within the classical style, with a delightful capability for forward momentum. His works are recognisable on the radio for his or her easy construction. But they possess not one of the melodic gift and emotional depths which have led the world’s biggest composers to bow down before Mozart in dazed gratitude.

For some, even the ‘black Mozart’ label is insufficiently hagiographic. It’s Mozart who ought to be called the ‘White Chevalier’, says Bill Barclay, a playwright-composer. That is preposterous. If Bologne were white, his oeuvre would remain marginal. Other contemporaries of Mozart, akin to Antonio Rosetti, Joseph Martin Kraus and Josef Mysliveček, deserve revival before Bologne. It was not Bologne’s mixed-race status that consigned him to the identical fate as nearly all his white colleagues, but his banality.

Florence Price has a serious advantage over Bologne: she is of mixed ancestry and feminine, and thus intersectional. Price is most ceaselessly compared with Antonín Dvořák. This, too, is overblown, though her American-vernacular style drew inspiration from the Czech composer, especially in its use of black spirituals. The Symphony No3 in C minor (from 1940), considered her masterwork, starts promisingly, with eerie, shifting chords emanating from the brass. There are moments of boisterous exaltation – above all, in one in all her signature African ‘juba’ dances within the third movement – that incorporate early jazz harmonies. However the work is thematically inert and repetitive; its melodies, truncated. Frequent climaxes are generated artificially through cymbal clashes. Indeed, Price’s cymbal scoring makes Tchaikovsky’s fondness for the instrument look ascetic.

An influential pedagogue I actually have spoken to calls Price’s harmony, rhythm and materials ‘fourth-rate’. Long before the present Price boom, a outstanding conductor looked for a bit of hers that he could, in good conscience, programme. He couldn’t find one, though he has happily conducted the works of other black composers, akin to William Grant Still, Ulysses Kay and Alvin Singleton.

Sometimes the challenge proves an excessive amount of even for essentially the most willing boosters. The Financial Times, reviewing a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert from November 2020, admitted that Price’s String Quartet in G was ‘slight’. Not to fret, said the paper, it’s ‘none the more severe for that’.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered Price’s First Symphony in 1933; it was favourably reviewed within the Chicago Day by day News as ‘worthy of a spot within the regular symphonic repertory’. The WPA Orchestra of Detroit and a number of other women’s orchestras played her compositions. If her works failed to search out that lasting place within the repertory, it was not due to a racial lockout.

Mockingly, the critics who champion Price now are ordinarily fierce advocates of the avant-garde. In Price, nevertheless, they elevate an aesthetically conservative style that may hold little interest for them if practised by a white male.

The hype being ladled on to recently revived black composers isn’t innocuous. The inflation is within the service of accusation and resentment. By blurring real distinctions in musical value, the racial boosters make it harder for brand spanking new listeners to learn what makes this tradition monumental. Someone blind to classical music shouldn’t be told that there is no such thing as a difference between Dvořák and Florence Price. A newcomer should start with the peaks, not the shallows. The wild applause that breaks out after a Price performance is resulting from its current political significance, to not its musical merits. Her works and people of other lesser-known composers deserve a grateful hearing. However the rapturous praise is condescending. Within the meantime, works of more likely interest, akin to operas by William Grant Still, remain a tantalising mystery.

Because the lies about classical music accumulate, not one conductor, soloist or concertmaster has rebutted them. These influential performers know that Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and quartets usually are not about race, but about pushing beyond abnormal human experience into an unexplored universe of unsettling silences and space. They know that Schubert’s song cycles usually are not about race, but about craving, disappointment and fleeting joy. They know that the Saint Matthew Passion isn’t about race, but about crushing sorrow that cries out in pain before finally finding consolation. To scale back every thing in human experience to the ever more tedious theme of alleged racial oppression is narcissism. This music isn’t about you or me. It’s about something grander than our narrow, petty selves. But narcissism, the signal characteristic of our time, is shrinking our cultural inheritance to a nullity.

These conductors and soloists are silent, though their knowledge has led them deep into that biggest of all human dramas: the evolution of expressive style. They’ll trace how the erotic languor of Chopin’s nocturnes and concerti became much more dangerously seductive in Brahms’s and Rachmaninoff’s piano works. They know that even one composer on this kaleidoscopic tradition incorporates more expressive depth than any individual can possibly fathom in a lifetime. These successful musicians have felt the terrifying anticipation – a moment without parallel within the repertoire – as a pianist sits quietly in front of the orchestral beast initially of one in all the nice romantic piano concerti as waves of sound pour over him, or as he issues his own challenge first, whether a thunderclap or a whisper, and is answered in turn. The leaders have experienced this and yet they are saying nothing.

Classical music’s insider critics now throw in a class-bias count for good measure; these pseudo-Marxist accusations are as specious because the racism charge. To make sure, many Seventeenth- and 18th-century composers had court patrons – and we should always thank those nobles for underwriting such musical treasures. Pre-revolutionary opera seria legitimated absolute rule while also attempting to nudge its royal attendees closer to Enlightenment ideals of tolerance and justice. The 18th-century Classical style is infused with nobility and grandeur; the French Baroque with the formality of Versailles. So what? With the arguable exception of opera seria, music written for wealthy patrons – whether Telemann’s Tafelmusik or Haydn’s symphonies – isn’t about class but concerning the abstract logic of musical expression. Western classical music has at times emerged from or elicited political passions. But those passions were normally related to nationalist movements against monarchical regimes, exemplified by the frenzy that broke out in Pest in response to Berlioz’s orchestration of the anti-Habsburg ‘Rákóczi March’ within the mid-Nineteenth century. Most canonical composers were at odds, quietly or vociferously, with their respective governments.

The current-day scourges impugn concert protocols as a classist technique of excluding a ‘diverse’ audience. However it was the bearers of inherited privilege through the ancien régime who treated music as a backdrop to be gambled and flirted through. It was the non-aristocratic classes who began attending to music with silent devotion, because it became more complex and demanding within the Nineteenth century. As Timothy Jackson wrote in his article for the Schenker symposium, his maternal and paternal grandparents, impoverished refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, bought his mother and his father an affordable violin and a dilapidated piano through the Great Depression and scraped together enough money to pay for lessons. His working-class parents had done hard menial labour all their lives, but they heard classical music as a ‘call from one other world, divine, mysteriously exalted, pointing to a better plane of existence’.

Today’s warriors against ‘classism’ would presumably accuse José Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan socialist economist, of being an unwitting tool of white ‘patriarchal power’, to make use of the BBC Music Magazine’s term for the canon. Abreu founded El Sistema, a programme of free classical-music training for barrio children in Caracas, in the idea that playing Bach, Schubert and Brahms would help deliver them from poverty and crime right into a higher world. El Sistema, Abreu said in 2008, was meant to ‘divulge to our youngsters the great thing about music [so that] music shall divulge to our youngsters the great thing about life’. Philip Ewell can sneer at Beethoven as, at best, ‘above average’. The BBC Music Magazine can snark that ‘greatness’ is a ‘manufactured quality’ designed to ‘sell scores of “greatness” to as many individuals as possible’. The graduates of El Sistema know higher. Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and El Sistema’s most famous product, said in 2011 that Beethoven is ‘not only the reference point of classical music; he’s the master of us all.’ Beethoven’s Seventh is ‘happiness. It’s the one word that I find perfect for this music.’

A cultural betrayal

Though the keepers of our tradition surely know that classical music is a priceless inheritance, having devoted their lives to it, fear paralyses them as that legacy goes down. I actually have reached out to conductors, composers and company managers, but they’ve all decided to maintain silent.

Perhaps they think that the racial assault on classical music isn’t value taking seriously. Emanuel Ax, who did go on the record, laughed good-naturedly when told of Ewell’s Beethoven evaluation. ‘That is an excellent quote’, he said. ‘This movement isn’t a danger to anyone.’ Ax is fallacious. One need only take a look at the syllabi in literature departments today which, compared with those from 40 years ago, show the devastation that the unopposed march of identity politics wreaks on the transmission of greatness.

Other music professionals understand the danger. One educator warns: ‘If conservatories start admitting by race and ethnicity, close them down. As soon as standards are modified, the sport is over. Mediocrity is like carbon monoxide: you possibly can’t see it or smell it, but someday, you’re dead.’ Woke music administrators are relativising excellence as a white Western concept. Mention ‘quality’ in a gathering of performing-arts managers and it’s possible you’ll be accused of ‘sending the fallacious message’.

Some Juilliard professors have taken early retirement slightly than risk conflict with the identity-obsessed mob. The striving for excellence is now secondary, Juilliard violin professor Earl Carlyss told me. ‘It’s terrifying when politics takes precedence over quality.’

Conventions of scholarship are under attack as well. The distinguishing feature of Western classical music, which allowed an unparalleled transformation of favor over seven centuries, is that it’s written down, unlike most other world music. Notation allows us, miraculously, to listen to what people were playing within the fifteenth century. But music departments are under pressure to eliminate the requirement that students can read scores, since such a requirement is purportedly exclusionary. Anti-racist musicologists are jettisoning one other basic norm: source documentation. Latest York University musicologist Matthew Morrison scoffs at ‘Western (colonial) notions of “documentation”’. as he put it in a November 2020 tweet. He said that he doesn’t ‘put every thing on paper. Some stuff is supposed to be kept and transferred orally (and ritually).’ In other words, ask Morrison for his written sources and it’s possible you’ll be accused of racism. It’s a ‘colonial impulse’ to ‘desire to… have access to every thing’, Morrison warns fellow academics and potential fact-checkers.

Morrison is not any fringe character. He has held fellowships at Harvard, King’s College London, the American Musicological Society, the Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress and the Tanglewood Music Centre. He has served as editor-in-chief of Current Musicology. And he represents the longer term.

The betrayal of the music guardians isn’t unique. Other individuals entrusted with preserving Western civilisation are abdicating their responsibility, too, either actively colluding with the forces of hate or passively allowing those forces to beat their field.

The National Archives and Records Administration, founded to preserve the US’s historical records, declared itself guilty of systemic racism in April 2021. The Archivist’s Task Force on Racism, which produced the report, denounced the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC for lauding the ‘wealthy white men’ who participated within the nation’s founding, while ‘marginalising BIPOC, women and other communities’. Task force members included the administrators of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

Every humanities subject is being hollowed out with similar charges. Under the logic of the present moment, any tradition that comes out of Europe is racist because its contributors can have been overwhelmingly white. It matters not that the demographics of Europe until the past 50 years made that racial composition inevitable. Balinese gamelan music, the Chinese opera, Indian classical music and the Nigerian talking drum have been as racially monolithic, without falling afoul of the variety monitors. Only Western civilisation is under attack for its traditional racial homogeneity.

The poisoning of classical music is heartbreaking enough. But unless more people fight back and defend our inheritance, we’re going to cancel a complete culture.

Heather Mac Donald is a Latest York Times bestselling creator and Thomas W Smith fellow on the Manhattan Institute.

The above is an edited extract from Heather’s recent book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty and Threatens Lives, published by DW Books. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK).)