Conference Agenda

Over the decades, many politically-charged music academics have challenged some of the dominant orientations that have dogged our fields. From New Musicological critiques of the misogyny and heteronormativity that have characterized disciplinary perspectives since the nineteenth century, to recent work seeking to reveal the ways institutionalized music studies are entangled with white supremacy, music scholarship has struggled to outline productive agendas for politically transforming both music and its study. In particular, Marxist analytical methods remain largely absent from this discourse; to paraphrase Timothy Taylor, music scholars have tended to document the ideological symptoms of capitalism without seriously attending to the thing itself. We hold that academic music studies’ “Marx problem” remains wedded to a fundamentally idealist way of seeing, knowing, and analyzing that has shaped “Western” thought for centuries. Ultimately, we each suggest that the currently-dominant ways in which music scholars tend to understand music and scholarship are too narrowly confined within what Marx called the “mystical shell” of idealism—meaning, in part, too fixated on the contingent subjectivities, interior lives, and ascriptive identities of individuals—to allow music studies to productively pursue the kinds of radical social transformations many of us say we want.

We attempt to reapproach music theory and music history from a historically-materialist perspective. On this panel, two musicologists and a music theorist perform critical, material analyses of canonical subjects within classical music and/or its academic study. Our first presenter responds to recent critiques of Schenkerian analysis through the lens of the Black radical tradition, and asks whether the “rational kernel” of Schenker’s thought can be at once preserved and overcome through radical political reappropriation. Our second critiques music’s supposed ability to “change the world” by examining the economic relations that enmesh U.S. classical music institutions. And our third paper considers the real condition of classical musical labor as foundational to the genre’s class politics. Guided by Marx’s famous formulation that while correctly “interpreting” the world is necessary “the point, however, is to change it,” we employ tools from Marxist theory to show how musicology and music theory can usefully engage the capitalist present.

The answer is: yes and no; or, it depends. In this talk, I would like to think through the vexed and vexing issue of what to do with Schenker in 2023 (and beyond)—post mortem, as it were, or perhaps post parricidam. To that end, I propose to do what it seems historians of music theory always do when there is philosophical (political, etc.) puzzlement surrounding Schenker and his ideas: compare him to Immanuel Kant, another famous German racist. However, my intention is not to elucidate Schenker’s texts with the assistance of Kant’s texts. Instead, I will examine an instance of recent Kant reception and ask it to teach us some lessons about the prospects for future Schenker reception and about the prospective trajectory of music theory itself. I am referring to Afro-Carribean-American philosopher Charles Mills’s “black radical” appropriation and reconstruction of Kantian normative ethical theory, as set out most notably in Mills’s article “Black Radical Kantianism.” In developing a critical-transformative, antiracist reading of Kant, Mills draws sustenance from the revolutionary black Marxist tradition, which likewise found a place within its philosophical and political program, and within its moral self-conception, for Kant’s most central ideas. I am concerned to assess how well Mills’s exegetical strategies will work if we apply them, mutatis mutandis, to Schenker and his theories. I shall argue that, indeed, many of Mills’s characteristically Marxian interpretive maneuvers can be profitably exploited by music theorists who see themselves as tasked with changing the world as well as interpreting it, but who also wish to approach Schenker’s writings in an manner that is morally serious without being moralistic, that is unflinchingly inquisitive without being inquisitorial, and that is deeply invested in the material and political exigencies of the present moment without being ahistorical. And I shall argue that the quite significant ways in which Mills’s strategies do not work when applied to Schenker serve to raise, and to help us to begin answering, a number of timely, foundational questions about what music theory is (or can be), as a concrete, but also geistig, social practice.

In 2020, the Louisville Orchestra offered a musical tribute to Breonna Taylor, who Louisville police had murdered six months earlier. This “Concert for Healing” was widely celebrated for “doing something” about racism in Louisville. In this paper, I accept the Orchestra’s invitation to think about the connections between orchestral classical music, racism, and social change. In doing so, I tell a very different story than the optimistic one reiterated in proclamations about music’s transformative social power. This other story is about the material role that major symphony orchestras like Louisville’s have played in racist urban development since the nineteenth century. I trace this history in an attempt to construct a materialist account of U.S. “classical music” very different from the liberal-idealistic one that circulates in this musical culture.

For idealists, thoughts and feelings are conflated with actions, such that privileged individuals believe they have “done something” about racism when they have only felt or thought something about racism. But racism is not merely a belief, it is a fundamental aspect of how the real world is constructed. In the wake of Taylor’s murder, for example, activist researchers connected her death to the city’s ramped-up policing of poor and Black neighborhoods at the behest of real estate developers who want to gentrify those areas. Historical-material analysis of “anti-racist” projects like the Orchestra’s Concert for Healing thus reveals a contradiction: many of the developers implicated in Taylor’s murder also donate to the Orchestra at the highest levels, and have representatives on the Orchestra’s board. In other words, many of the same people are responsible for shaping both Louisville’s racist urban development and the “anti-racist” projects the Orchestra undertakes to supposedly “heal” the community from the effects of that (ongoing) development.

Drawing from Musicology, Black and Indigenous Studies, and interventions from outside the academy, I examine some ways the elite institution of classical music claims to address racism while also serving—historically and currently—as a weapon in its city’s war against the poor. I argue that this contradiction constitutes a profound political problem that is omnipresent in social justice initiatives throughout the world of classical music.

This presentation theorizes class for classical musicians. Following research from the Marxist tradition, it places labor at the center of class theory. Centering labor in this way separates my work from other research on classical music undertaken by musicologists such as Nettl, Cottrell, and Kingsbury. Recent scholars such as Moore, Ritchey, Robin, and Pippen have critically interrogated capitalism and classical music, however, they have not strongly deployed theories of labor and class. While some have employed Bourdieu to describe working relations, they have not located classical musicians within capitalist class structures. Contradictions that shape professional classical music—its precarity, workplace creativity, and notions of autonomy—thus remain under-theorized.

I argue that middle classes, including many classical musicians, should be understood as a qualified type of working class. I draw on Erik Olin Wright’s theorization of the middle classes as occupying “contradictory locations within class relations.” They may enjoy advantages such as creative expression and autonomy at work, but, like the working classes, middle classes must sell their labor power to earn money to live. This frame better accounts for classical musicians’—indeed many musicians’—locations within capitalist class structures. While sociologists like Yoshihara have applied some of Wright’s ideas to classical music, they have not properly accounted for the contradictions of middle class work nor for the contradictory relations found in classical music work. Musicians are engaged in various labor relations, be they capitalist (recording music for a film, perhaps), artisanal (private studio work), or patronage-based (symphony orchestra work). Classical musicians are also highly educated, often self-employed, can receive considerable familial support, and enjoy close relations with wealthy funders. Labor relations, especially between board members and music workers, emerge as crucial to classical music’s class politics. Wright’s theoretical frame remains critical of the concept of middle class, underscoring that it remains beholden to the vicissitudes of capitalism in general. It can thus account for the confluence of relations associated with classical musicians. My argument provides a bridge between the musicological literature on classical music, especially more recent studies, and a more robust theorization of classical musicians’ locations with the class structures of capitalism.