Threads of Influence

A commentator responded to my Friday Miscellanea with a complaint that I was ignoring the supposed fact that Oxford's new submission policy:

Oxford University Press is committed to promoting and maintaining a culture of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and acting upon issues of diversity and inclusion is vitally important to fulfilling our mission. We recognize that many groups are currently under-represented in our music catalogue, and we are committed to changing and rapidly   improving this through future publishing. As part of this commitment, we are currently accepting submissions from composers who:

• live with a disability; and/or

• are women; and/or

• identify on the broader spectrum of gender; and/or 

• are from under-represented ethnic groups; and/or

• are from a lower socio-economic group

We encourage composers from these groups to submit their music for review.

...was still only making a minor change: "Oxford's library of published music has gone from 99% white and male to 97% white and male." Never mind whether these numbers are entirely made up, as I suspect they are, the real point, as I suggested, is that why would anyone who was NOT a member of these groups think they would get a fair shake at Oxford? Another commentator said "Any policy that prioritises satisfying quotas over actual merit is decidedly suspect to me." We could go back and forth on this for days, but what interests me more is why is it that there is such uniformity in the political policies of all of our elite institutions? Whether it is climate change, economic policy, educational methods or, in this instance, cultural policy, there seems to be a monoculture that prevails worldwide.

Glenn Reynolds at Substack has addressed this:

Our modern ruling class is peculiar.  One of its many peculiarities is its penchant for fads, and what can only be called mass hysteria.  Repeatedly, we see waves in which something that nobody much cared about suddenly comes to dominate ruling class discourse.  Almost in synchrony, a wide range of institutions begin to talk about it, and to be preoccupied by it, even as every leading figure virtue-signals regarding this subject which, only a month or two previously, hardly any of them even knew about, much less cared about.

There are several factors behind this, but one of the most important, I think, is that our ruling class is a monoculture.

He quotes a revealing essay by Angelo Codevilla:

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

Personally, I find that I am not part of this whole cultural universe so I remain skeptical about all of the trends and narratives that emerge. Why is this? I think it is because of what I am thinking of as the "threads of influence" that I find most important in my life. I was born in a remote area in the north of Canada, so right away it was unlikely that I was going to be absorbed into the usual channels. Government and other cultural institutions were very thin on the ground! About all I had as an influence or model was a tiny municipal library. I just read whatever looked interesting from cowboy stories to quantum mechanics. I guess my father was a big early influence though I don't recall the details. What I do know is that by the time I attended first grade I was already a perfectly competent reader. No kindergarten up there.

As we moved to Vancouver Island in my middle teens, the public library continued to be my main channel of influence. The public school system was, to be frank, not very stimulating. My interests extended to history, Asian (especially Japanese) art and culture, and ultimately classical music. I found some books on 20th century music in the library. Attending university was a huge influence, of course. My music courses were practical in nature. The professor who taught music history, a somewhat acerbic bassoonist named Christine Mather, was so focussed on early music that we barely made it to Monteverdi by Christmas and had to cover Stravinsky and Bartók in an extra supplementary class at the end of term!

I was unhappy with my options as a guitarist at that university so, on the advice of a Dutch guitarist, I went to Spain for most of a year and studied with José Tomás, a greatly renowned disciple of Segovia. This was an enormous influence because, without even being really aware of it, I absorbed a European cultural stance regarding things like repertoire and expression.

I could go on and on, but it should be clear already that at no point did I ever really become drawn into the overarching narrative of the ruling gentry of North America. While I did work in a government job for a year and a half, I left it as soon as I could. I never received government cultural grants--never even applied for them in most cases. My professors, from that musicologist to an English literature professor to a philosophy professor made no attempts to inculcate what I perceived as an ideology, though you could certainly argue about the details: was the fact that the focus was always on the European cultural heritage a kind of ideological statement? Well, whether it was or not, I compensated for that by making my own study of non-Western music, art and literature.

I tend to take a contrarian approach to just about everything and on the whole I think it has been effective for me. Ironically, in my younger years I tended to regard everything published with the characteristic deep blue cover of Oxford University Press as being particularly authoritative in its balanced, objective approach. Nowadays, it seems, it cannot be trusted. 

So that is my apologia for why, from time to time, I critique what I see as extreme or morally questionably cultural policies as they affect the world of music.