When I was a young person at university I used to find especially worthwhile those blue books with the gold lettering from O.U.P., the Oxford University Press. One I especially prized was A History of Greece to 322 B.C. by N. G. L. Hammond (partly because a friend got it autographed for me when he gave a lecture at our university). Why 322 B. C.? That was when Alexander died, of course.
But in these sad, distracted times I see this headline at the Daily Mail: University of Oxford considers scrapping sheet music for being 'too colonial' after staff raise concerns about music curriculums' 'complicity in white supremacy' after Black Lives Matter movement.
The University of Oxford is considering scrapping sheet music for being 'too colonial' after staff raised concerns about the 'complicity in white supremacy' in music curriculums.
Professors are set to reform their music courses to move away from the classic repertoire, which includes the likes of Beethoven and Mozart, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
University staff have argued that the current curriculum focuses on 'white European music from the slave period'.
Oxford University has had a pretty good run since being founded in 1096 A.D. But it seems to be coming to an ignominious end. Mind you, it might not be quite as bad as it sounds. If they are just talking about courses for non-music majors, then this is no big deal. I used to teach a very large section of what was basically music appreciation and there was no requirement to learn music notation. But if Oxford still has actual music majors then I presume they are still using notation.
Or, perhaps Oxford is going to focus more on the music of contemporary society. I notice on the same page of the Daily Mail an article on one of those artists, Cardi B, who is showing off her back tattoo. Presumably the students will be "reading" things like this instead of music notation.
31 comments:
They came for the stave and we said nothing because modern composers have shown that one can write pictures instead and anyway 4'33".
Then they came for John Cage and his colonialist appropriation of the sounds around us and we said nothing.
So much for the orchestra, audio equipment, electric guitars, synthesizers, audio equipment, printed fonts, anesthetics, vaccinations, computers and many other things developed in a period of colonialism and ethnic strife.
I'm clinging to my quarter-notes until they pry them from my cold, dead, fingers.
The standards for intellectual rigor and scholarship in this blog are so admirably high everywhere except when it comes to issues like this. Instead, here you're uncritically quoting a biased and low-quality news source. As usual with hysterical articles about cancel culture in the right-wing media, the actual story is more nuanced and complex. Oxford isn't ceasing or even reducing the teaching of music notation; it's recognizing that music notation is of limited utility in some contexts, that it does not cover the entire scope of Western musicality, and that a truly excellent music education needs to also encompass aural/oral learning.
Where are the voices of Reason?
Is it possible that the delirium that produces a concept such as "music notation that is unacceptably colonial" is a side effect of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, largely used in the UK? An investigation is in order.
Banning sheet music as indicated in the story seems to me to be the musical equivalent of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
If the news had surfaced a few days later, it would quickly be dismissed as an April Fool's headline.
Thanks, Ethan, for the compliment and for the criticism. But let me hasten to say, that I thought the Daily Mail was pretty much a middle-of-the-road newspaper, by English standards. And I did question whether this was such a big deal after all saying that if Oxford still has music majors as I assume they do, then they are still studying music notation.
Makes a great headline though...
This is why it's important to dig below clickbait headlines. Why assume anything? It's easy enough to substantiate these kinds of claims. Start with Oxford University's own web site, which prominently features medieval music notation right there on the landing page: https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/
Meanwhile, your other commenters take the claim at face value. This guy David is quoting the phrase "music notation that is unacceptably colonial" as if anyone outside of partisan propaganda outlets had ever made such a statement in the first place.
I'm in the final stages of producing a book with Oxford University Press, and even though we're writing about the teaching of all kinds of lowbrow garbage like techno and rap, their editorial process is the most rigorous I've ever experienced. They had 1,211 corrections on a single chapter, out of sixteen chapters. Just because they have expanded their area of interest, does not mean they have lost the habits that have made them the gold standard of academic excellence.
It's also a bit of a weird non sequitur to post a photo of Cardi B, as if she's the first creative artist to have a sexual life, or extensive tattoos for that matter.
I think the "unacceptably colonial" remark was a quote from wherever the Daily Mail got their information from. I would be very curious to know the details.
Yes, I'm sure you noticed that I started my post with praise of Oxford University Press and I'm glad to hear that their standards are still high. If I were Oxford, I would have a beef with the Daily Mail, don't you think?
As for the Cardi B photo, I put that there because it comes from the same page on the Daily Mail website.
I do these posts because no-one ever comments on my Bach posts!
Apparently Mr Hein does the exact thing that he criticizes others for, namely not even reading the article where most of his comments would have been negated. I also think that "nuanced and complex" is a kind of code word language meaning - go away little people while we do stuff in the backroom.
Since Mr Hein seems quite familiar with Oxford U perhaps he can clarify what the professors are advocating in their nuanced complex way with respect to the curriculum and what to teach. And non notated music can be recorded and notated after the fact if one so chooses.
And just for the record I have repeatedly stated my support here for enlarging the curriculum to include more popular music forms as long as it is done in an analytical and critical way.
I suppose techno is harmless enough, but Ethan, I wonder how you negotiate the whole "drugs/weapons/crime/promiscuity/N-word ad nauseum/Hoes/etc" aspect of rap when you're teaching it to children in school? Or maybe you don't teach young children.
In the classroom, I negotiate the objectionable content of rap lyrics the same way people handle all the murder and crude sexual humor in Shakespeare, or the brother-sister incest in the Ring Cycle. With my own young children, I honestly have an easier time with the violent content of rap than I do with the violent content of ordinary kids' media (e.g. the constant murder in Star Wars.) We live in New York City, where the realities of crime, drugs, poverty and racism are ever-present, and it is much more difficult to talk about real life with my kids than its portrayal in rap songs.
Ethan, I see now where the Voices of Reason are (or were). They (you) were composing your original comment of March 30 (posted at 11:28). Meanwhile, I was lamenting the apparent short-sightedness of a modern day institution of higher education and posting my comment at 11:33.
Clearly a case of bad timing. And a lesson in the risks of making a tongue-in-cheek comment. I am almost certain that the proponents of the Oxford initiative are not suffering a hitherto undiagnosed side-effect of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, as I suggested in my original comment.
Thanks to your more extensive research and comments, I have gone on to read the original news media story on the subject which was published in the Telegraph. I have also read the Associated Press fact checking piece which states:
"Stephen Rouse, head of university communications at Oxford, told The Associated Press that while the music faculty is planning to expand its music curriculum to broaden offerings, cutting sheet music is not part of the plan.
He added that many of the views the Telegraph article attributed to “professors” came from a single individual.
Rouse shared a statement from the university’s music faculty, outlining that the program has been planning changes to its curriculum “for the past couple of years” to be published in the summer.
“While retaining (and in no way diminishing) our traditional excellence in the critical analysis, history and performance of the broad range of western art music, we are exploring ways to enhance our students’ opportunities to study a wider range of non-western and popular music from across the world than is currently on offer, as well as music composition, the psychology and sociology of music, music education, conducting, and much more,” the statement read.
The music faculty said claims that the university is considering removing sheet music from its curriculumU are “completely incorrect.”
Now that sounds more like the Oxford University I thought I knew. The one that is the source of Bryan's O.U.P. History of Greece. I would have avoided my acceptance of the Daily Mail reportage at face value if Oxford had made its statements to either of the Telegraph or the Daily Mail when contacted for comment.
I won't take your "this guy" reference the wrong way. You are correct, I am male gendered.
Pace
Bryan, I value your Bach WTC posts. They have encouraged me to listen to several recordings of the work, including those by Glenn Gould, Angela Hewitt and Robert Levin (on keyboards other than piano).
It is only my complete lack of facility or understanding of music notation that prevents me from commenting on your erudite posts. I will say though that the kernels of insight you offer make my auditioning of the music more fulfilling.
SDG
David, thanks so much for filling in the details. Yes, so often the popular press gets things completely wrong and I'm grateful that you corrected the misimpression. In the past I have sometimes been the one saying that the musical academy still preserves the important knowledge and expertise one would expect.
Ethan and Wenatchee, thanks to you as well for important contributions.
And finally, David, thanks for saying something about my Bach posts!
I think the issue really is whether reasonable people are going to push back on the more radical views that are expressed from both sides of the spectrum. Too often the radical views are met by silence or denial from people on the same side and they are allowed to grow and then provide fodder to the opposing side.
It seems pretty clear that there are members of the Oxford Music Dept who have the views represented by the UK press here. It's just that they don't (yet ) control the department. So I don't think this is an example of press fabrication but rather misrepresenting still minority views as the majority.
At this point we really don't know on the outside what proportion of faculty members do agree with these anti notation views. But I think contra Mr Hein this is a time to discuss such views openly rather than trying to paper them over as too complex to discuss. And I say this again as someone in favor of including more popular music study in the curriculum.
Nobody objects to discussing these things openly and frankly. I just want to discuss them honestly and accurately. The hysteria over cancel culture in academia is ideologically motivated and often advanced in bad faith. The efforts of Oxford and other universities to expand the scope of their curricula is an attempt to correct for a century of systematic neglect of broad swaths of Western musical practice and repertoire. It's demoralizing for me to work in music departments where no one is learning how to improvise or play by ear, where people don't have basic knowledge of blues or jazz, where they've never studied or performed any music that wasn't written by a white man.
To get a better informed picture of the state of music education, read this study:
Wang, J.-C., & Humphreys, J. T. (2009). Multicultural and popular music content in an American music teacher education program. International Journal of Music Education, 27(1), 19–36.
They examine the curriculum of one of the biggest music teacher training programs in the US, and find that 93% of course time is spent on the Western art music tradition, about 6% is spent on musical theater and jazz, and about 1.5% of the time is spent on all forms of popular and "world" music. Similar percentages obtain nationwide, including at the supposedly "woke" NYU where I teach. If we were to increase the amount of pop music in the curriculum by a factor of ten, it would still be a tenth of material! The canon is not remotely under any kind of threat, and the only people pretending otherwise are arguing in bad faith.
To piggyback on what Ethan was writing, Oxford University Press published Mark Burford's magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field a few years ago, a spectacular and even daunting book on half a century's worth of history of how Jackson emerged within the Gospel communities of the US and what the significance of that became during the Cold War era. Stephen Crist's monograph through OUP on the Dave Brubeck Quartet's album Time Out was published in 2019 and mentions in the preface that literally no one had done an academic monograph on the album despite the fact that it was hugely popular and also influential. Dana Gooley's monograph on improvisation in classical music during the 19th century is another relatively recent publication (2018) that highlights the history of how classical music went from having high profile and respected improvisers like Hummel and Mendelssohn and even Liszt to the post-Robert Schumann don't-improvise standard. Unsurprisingly (to me, at least, as a sometime volunteer church musician) Gooley pointed out that while improvisation was discouraged and disappeared from concert life traditions of improvised music in the West have never stopped within liturgical music (Messiaen and other French organist composers kept on improvising preludes). Robert Gjerdingen's recent OUP monograph got into how improvising over stock bass lines was part of Neapolitan music education in the 18th and even 19th centuries.
Having never decided that I have to choose between pop and classical I think that since in the US popular styles are where improv can happen that letting pop and classical synergistically exchange ideas is a positive path we can take in music theory, education and practice. I'm not a big fan of rap as such but I love blues, jazz, country, ragtime and rock. I like that Oxford has been moving more in the direction of publishing monographs across styles and genres. For those of us who want to encourage what we hope can be a synergistic exchange of ideas this is the best possible path for Oxford to be taking. It makes sense for Gjerdingen's book to be full of musical excerpts just as it made sense for Burford to have not a single musical extract in his monograph on Mahalia Jackson and to explain the significance of her work without recourse to musical jargon. Jackson never got much formal training in music or singing and wanted that but made a legendary career for herself working with Thomas Dorsey and others who had the more conservatory-based musical literacy she lacked. It doesn't mean she wasn't one of the greatest Gospel singers to ever record.
Ethan, I have to quibble with a few things in your last comment. The very fact that cancel culture does exist seems to indicate that there are indeed people who object to discussing certain things. I'm sure I don't have to provide examples? But if such are required the cancellation of the Journal of Shenkerian Studies and its founder/editor would be a good current example. That is before the court right now.
The motivation of cancel culture seems to be ideological. Is resistance to being canceled also ideological? You change the subject to places like Oxford expanding their curricula and I for one am all in favor of that. But cancel culture is attempting to do just the opposite is it not?
You cite a 2009 study where the core curricula of music teacher training is 93% devoted to the traditional curricula, but I suspect that the problem has only become evident in the last few years. Twelve years ago was a quite different situation.
Finally, PLEASE don't describe anyone who disagrees with you as arguing in "bad faith." That is absolutely classic bad faith arguing!
The Journal of Shenkerian Studies wasn't "canceled," it still exists. Its editor was widely and deservedly censured for publishing a bunch of un-scholarly ad hominem attacks, one of which was anonymous, one of which cited Wikipedia, etc. Schenkerian analysis continues to be taught and published everywhere, and when it meets basic standards for scholarship, it's hardly uncontroversial. Timothy Jackson isn't in trouble for being a Schenkerian, he's in trouble for behaving in an unprofessional and loatish manner, and he's facing the appropriate social and professional consequences for it.
The results of the 2009 study still apply. Change has been happening, but it has been slow, incremental, marginal, and met across the board with extreme resistance. When schools do introduce more pop music material, they do it on top of existing requirements, not in place of them. I'm not trying to conceal more recent data to provide my point; good-quality large-scale studies of music education happen infrequently. Music education is an extremely small-c conservative field, and there has not been significant change in accreditation requirements or curriculum standards in the past fifty years, so sadly that 2009 study will continue to be a valid picture of the field for a long time to come.
I don't believe that most people who disagree with me on most things are arguing in bad faith. But the yawning disparity between right-wing media's obsession with cancel culture in the music academy and my lived experience makes it very difficult to take this stuff seriously. For example, the idea that Oxford is "scrapping" sheet music is so risible and inaccurate. The only two explanations are journalistic ineptitude or bad faith.
As the Timothy Jackson case is before the court, let's just wait and see what the outcome is before we decide whether he was deservedly or undeservedly censured.
As for the only two explanations fo the Oxford story being inaccurate, which I freely grant you, isn't the most likely explanation actually a third possibility? That a very progressive faculty member gave out an account of what they hoped was the situation or would in the future be? After all, it had to come from somewhere and I suspect there are people out there who think that music notation is "colonial."
There's no need to wait for the court case. Go read that issue of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies for yourself! It's a publication, that's what it's for. Note that only part of the issue is given over to the hit job, I mean "symposium," on Ewell's conference talk. It also contains several ordinary papers on Schenkerian analysis. None of those have been a subject of controversy, because they're perfectly fine. And not all the responses to Ewell have been controversial. The ones that refrain from ad hominem attacks and racist non sequiturs, that are properly sourced and attributed and so on, have also been the subject of zero controversy. Timothy Jackson is being censured for publishing a couple of papers (including his own) that I wouldn't even accept from high school students, much less in a peer-reviewed journal article.
I think music notation in its educational applications often is colonial, and there's an amply documented history of its use as part of systemic cultural suppression in the European colonies. My classes on music technology and popular music de-emphasize notation. I'm the hardest-line woke activist in my department. And not even I would straight up lie to a reporter or deliberately obfuscate the difference between my wishes and reality. I'd lose my job the next morning! When I talk about exercising critical thinking around news reports on hot-button issues, this is what I'm talking about. Academics are the most timid, risk-averse people in the world. Including me! We make sure to have our sources lined up. Right-wing think tanks and media outlets are under no such constraints. This is where the hysterical statements about cancel culture originate.
I didn't actually read the Daily Mail piece until today, out of morbid curiosity. It's best to skip it altogether and if you want to keep up with variations on "notationgate" in the UK in the wake of the Guardian piece, read Ian Pace instead if you want to read someone who is firm on the necessity of UK music education to retain traditional Western notation. He's more high modernist/new complexity than I could be but he's worth reading for a traditionalist (and openly Adorno/left take, paradoxically) take on music education and skill sets. Daily Mail? Pass.
Frankly, the news and journalism in general nowadays are terrible nowadays regardless of whether they're left or right. It's reached the point where you'd probably learn more from decoding a schizophrenic's ramblings than taking a newspaper or news channel at face value.
More and more I'm inclined to agree.
Here in the US, it is simply untrue that the liberal and conservative media are equally biased and unprofessional. Whatever the excesses and shortcomings of Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, MSNBC and so on, they pale in comparison to the horrors of Fox News, OANN, Newsmax and Breitbart.
Ethan, your comment is the most outrageously biased one I think we have ever seen from you. Let me acquaint you with a simple rule: if you insist on making extremely partisan claims like this, you have to support them with evidence. And I'm very much afraid the evidence goes the other way.
I actually read Slate pretty regularly a decade ago, though they've tilted more toward Salon, which I really do dislike intensely as they resemble Alternet in some ways. I felt obliged to take a week to chronicle the factual errors in a Salon republished piece from AlterNet that got something wrong in every single paragraph on a piece the author wrote about Mars Hill Church here in Seattle. My experience has been that egregiously inaccurate and partisan reporting spans the spectrum. I was actually at the defunct megachurch for years and knew the Salon/Alternet piece was wildly inaccurate, though the author mentioned that the many mistakes would get corrected. The Stranger, by contrast, was reliably pretty accurate reporting on Mars Hill as it was their local scene to cover. So I don't think partisanship in and of itself necessarily means a person or a group is going to do intrinsically biased or bad journalism.
That said, I also skip Fox, Newsmax and Breitbart.
Let's see, which news outlets gave credence to the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the coronovirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab, that there's a nefarious Deep State conspiring against real America, that the Bilderburgs are causing wildfires with orbiting space lasers, that climate change is a hoax, that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim...
The point I was trying to make in my last comment is that partisanship, in and of itself, doesn't preclude good journalism. It often does but it doesn't have to.
Space lasers?
rumors and claims the U.S. has lasers and particle beam weapons and high energy projectile weapons have been a thing since the Strategic Defense Initiative. How that plays out in ground level conspiracy theories seems to vary regionally. In the PNW the right leaning rumors are that antifa started all the fires in the PNW in 2020, which imputes to antifamore competency and effectiveness than I think would ever be merited for them in the last few decades.
Yes, that is the problem I usually have with conspiracy theories: they assume a level of operational security and managerial competence we rarely encounter in the real world!
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