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.
as I've gotten older I've thought about my Dad's take on the American Civil War, which was that the white racists in the North fought the white racists in the South over the issue of how to treat black people and then when it was over they all agreed that the best thing to do next was to kill more Indians and take their land. I had, almost needless to say, not heard anyone present a case that there were no good guy teams in that war based on schooling curricula. But as I got older and learned that Dad was part of a tribe that was in Washington territory and that Washington didn't even get ratified as a sate in the U.S until the 1890s it began to make more sense how and why Dad had his particularly jaded take on the Civil War, one I appreciate more as I get older. Alexandra Harmon has written books on PNW tribes and their relations with white traders and settlers whether English and Russian merchants or U.S. citizens who migrated from the mid-West.
ReplyDeleteOxford University Press still publishes a lot of books on music theory I regard as immensely helpful. But I do have reservations about them from time to time. While they published Crawford Gribben's book on Christian reconstructionists and survivalists in the Pacific Northwest that was pretty good they recently published a book by an SPU prof on Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll that I find frustrating because, well, regular readers know I used to attend there; met the three co-founding pastors and was friends with one who died recently; and spent the better part of a decade chronicling events and people I regarded as being overlooked by both mainstream and independent journalism. So far the OUP book on Mars Hill is not as good as an earlier book by Duke University Press on Mars Hill written by an anthropologist who attended MH for two years and interviewed many, many people.
I will probably end up writing about the book when I get done reading it but there's nothing like having spent decades in Seattle and witnessing the rise and fall of a megachurch to find out that academics and journalists who have not literally lived here in the Puget Sound area miss more than they observe about a community.
That said, I stand by my observation that OUP is still publishing really good books on music theory but my interests have been in working toward developing a synergistic relationship between "classical" and "pop". On that front OUP has been publishing the most promising materials I've seen in the last twenty years, whether it's Caplin or Hepokoski, Darcy or others. Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms is pretty good, for instance. Matthew Riley's book on minor-key symphonies in the era of Haydn and Mozart's Vienna is great.
Given how many white guys have submitted chorale and organ works to Oxford since centuries I am not so sure it's damagingly "woke" that they want to diversify on that front. I may be indifferent because I'm a lifelong hobbyist rather than a professional.
I agree, Wenatchee, I have a number of OUP books on my shelf on music theory that are excellent. Will that continue, is the question.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteImmensely grateful for this blog, Bryan. Apropos of the current thread, here's a link to a story you (and your commenters) might find as disturbing (too mild a word) as I did:
https://www.city-journal.org/fictions-of-emancipation-exhibit-rejects-beauty-and-cultivates-racial-resentment
Thanks, Jim and welcome to the Music Salon. Quite a number of interesting things over at City Journal.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteFor me, the Music Salon serves as a kind of anodyne to the jackassery that passes for critical thinking nowadays. No mean feat, Bryan.
Thanks! But I think you mean antidote. I owe a great deal to my first year philosophy professor who instilled quite a lot of critical thinking in me. I actually called him up a couple of years ago to thank him.
ReplyDeleteThanks again, Bryan, for another of many articles worth pondering and reacting to. Although I might quibble with your use of the adjective "elite" [institutions], and with Glenn Reynolds' use of "ruling class" [my objections are from the perspective of a former leftist sensitive to emotional response these adjectives can provoke to color an analysis that maybe should be cooler and more detached to allow full consideration of all perspectives] --still I appreciate your eloquent apologia and mostly share it myself. Maybe we represent the monoculture of the non-elite New World common man? Ha!
ReplyDeleteI notice a refrain in my responses to your writings over the years: "don't over-worry about the simplistic and half-blind ideological frenzies of the moment, for they are rooted in some valid impulses that will be better incorporated into our culture in the longer run than they are now in our pained present exasperation of their sloppy and boorishly unnuanced presentation in our moment." Small comfort to those shouted down or cancelled, I admit, but nonetheless in the long run I think our civilization will be better for the discussion and come to more properly incorporate the elements worth survival in all present limited perspectives.
A much better case than my comments can be found in this article from the latest edition of the Atlantic. I'm a subscriber so I read it in print just a few days ago, I hope this link doesn't bring you to a paywall that I can't see:
The French Are In A Panic over Le Wokisme, by Thomas Chatterton Williams:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/03/france-tocqueville-democracy-race-le-wokisme/672775/
Some very good advice, Will, which is why I always welcome your contributions. Yes, the internet is full of simplistic, half-blind frothing at the mouth that we do our best to avoid here.
ReplyDeleteI made up the 99% and 97% numbers but a casual glance at Oxford's selection of sheet music will show that they are probably not far off. The idea that white men are being systemically excluded from publication in any serious numbers (much less in the kinds of numbers in which non-white non-men have been systematically excluded from publication) is asinine, and beneath the standards of this generally thoughtful and critically insightful blog. I beg any of you reading this to compare Slipped Disc's hysteria about wokeness run amok with some observations of the actual world that we live in. White men continue to dominate the "art" music world, and while that dominance is now up for some long-overdue discussion, very little has actually changed so far. Outside of Black History Month, it's substantially business as usual in the concert halls and school ensembles.
ReplyDeleteI kind of suspected you had! No argument that there is a huge preponderance of white males (mostly dead, mind you) in the Oxford catalogue, but that wasn't exactly the issue. The idea that, in the future, white males are going to be systematically excluded is simply what the policy states. You really can't argue that. If I were a young composer, I certainly would not submit anything to Oxford. I would probably choose Boosey and Hawkes simply because they don't have a policy like this, to my knowledge. This is what systematic exclusion looks like!
ReplyDeleteAtrocious how European publishers published so many European authors and compsers!
ReplyDeleteBut... look at what Oxford publishes! Almost everything is by white people, and the majority of it is by men. Even with their policy. Their attempt to belatedly balance out their past systematic exclusion is not a new form of systematic exclusion, that's like saying that I'm a vegetarian if I start eating vegetables ten percent of the time instead of five percent of the time. Submit to whatever publisher you want to submit to, but your reaction to Oxford trying to be less racist is wildly out of proportion with their actual policies as an organization.
ReplyDeleteIt kind of sounds as if you are saying that while their new policy is actually systematically exclusionary, unfortunately it hasn't been very effective yet?
ReplyDelete