Barbershop’s Cautionary Tale for Academic Music Theory: A Response to Stephen Lett

Boyd, Clifton

doi:10.1093/mts/mtac016

Music Theory Spectrum

2023

DOI: 10.1093/mts/mtac016

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Barbershop’s Cautionary Tale for Academic Music Theory: A Response to Stephen Lett

Clifton Boyd¹

Abstract: This response to Stephen Lett’s article draws parallels between the institutional histories of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS). While both societies have struggled with racial diversity and inclusion, the structural racism that has pervaded the BHS since the civil rights era offers a potent and eerily familiar example of how seemingly innocuous, apolitical institutions can be sites of exclusion and inequity that plague the United States at large. Echoing Lett’s senti… Show more

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Cited by 2 publications

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Lett¹

2023

Music Theory Spectrum

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In this rejoinder, I elaborate on the uncomfortable and foundational call of “Making a Home of the Society for Music Theory, Inc.”: the necessity of abolition as at once the destruction of our colonial/capitalist worlding and the building of a life-affirming world otherwise. Bringing to the fore a couple of backgrounds to my writing—early career transience and building community with unhoused residents of Norman, Oklahoma—I clarify that my call is not for inclusion (and enclosure) within this colonial/capitalist worlding, but our collective liberation from it. Ultimately, I hope this response might inspire readers to build life-affirming, abolitionist worlds wherever they find themselves.

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Lett¹

2023

Music Theory Spectrum

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Review of Philip Ewell, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023)

Boyd,

Conlee

2023

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It has been a long four years in music theory. From Philip Ewell's 2019 Society for Music Theory (SMT) plenary talk to the publication of this review essay, our small-yet-scrappy field has somehow ended up more ba ered and bruised by recent discourses on race and racism than most other academic disciplines. (1) As Sumanth Gopinath (2023) wrote in response to Stephen Le 's (2023) piercing critique of the SMT, "It is not a good time to be a music theorist" (125; italics in the original). But maybe that is about to change: in Ewell's much-anticipated monograph, On Music Theory, the field has finally received a comprehensive guide on how to dismantle its white-male frame-or at least that is what many readers will likely hope for in this text. The book's subtitle, "Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone," certainly gestures toward this goal. Yet given Ewell's reputation as a polemical thought leader in the field, the subtitle strikes us as unexpectedly optimistic. Less charitable readers might even accuse Ewell of hewing dangerously close to the "Kumbaya" rhetoric that he argues is used too often in conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In the opening pages of On Music Theory, however, Ewell clarifies that his focus is not DEI, which "leaves white structures intact and in control," but rather antiracism, which "focuses on the anti-BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] activities undertaken by white structures that kept whiteness in power" (3). In this vein, the monograph's conclusion acknowledges what might have been a more accurate subtitle for the book: "How the Many Mythologies of the Western White-Male Musical Canon Have Created Hostile Environments for Those Who Do Not Identify as White Cisgender Men" (278). To be sure, such an unvarnished subtitle would have come with its own host of problems, but for our purposes it offers a pithy summary of the thesis that Ewell puts forward in On Music Theory, a book more focused on reframing the discipline's past than envisioning its future.[2] The monograph is structured according to these priorities: after introducing the major themes and goals of the book (Intro) and discussing the state of race and race scholarship in music theory (Chapter 1), Ewell broadens his scope to examine the roots of whiteness in myths about Western civilization (Chapter 2). Ewell then demonstrates the danger of white mythologies through the case

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Barbershop’s Cautionary Tale for Academic Music Theory: A Response to Stephen Lett

Cited by 2 publications

References 9 publications

Take Care

Take Care

Review of Philip Ewell, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023)

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