Lecture (co-sponsored) | Philip Ewell | White Stories, Black Histories, and Desegregating the Music Curriculum

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Presented by Music Department, Emory University with co-sponsorships by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Hightower Fund, Department of Philosophy, Department of Film and Media, and the Department of German Studies.

In certain languages the words for “history” and “story” are the same, as in French (histoire) or Russian (история). There are of course differences. “History” usually implies an accurate account of past events, a summary of what happened over a period a time, while “story” usually refers to events that may or may not accurately reflect on the past, embellished as necessary by the “storyteller.” But in this distinction race is rarely mentioned. Anyone, irrespective of race, can write histories or tell stories, yet with remarkable consistency in the academic study of music in the U.S., our histories have been written by white persons, usually men, passing from generation to generation with little divergence from the main narratives of “great works” of the “western canon.” And when a nonwhite voice challenges the white narrative, efforts to stifle that voice are swift and sever, and all too often whiteness will accuse nonwhiteness of “storytelling,” a common critique of Critical Race Theory these days. In short, white persons write histories, while nonwhite persons tell stories. In this talk I’ll expand on music’s histories and stories, and explain why, in fact, the common American music curriculum is still quite segregated along racial lines, like much of the country writ large, mostly because of the distinction between history and story. I’ll then suggest that we don’t need to “decolonize” the music curriculum—that’s too vague—but, rather, that we need to desegregate it and foreground race in our discussions so that all racial musics, and musical races, have a seat at the table and a voice in the conversation.
PHILIP EWELL is Professor Music Theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York. His specialties include Russian music theory, Russian opera, modal theory, and race studies. His work has been featured in news outlets such as the BBC, Die Zeit, NPR, and the New Yorker. He received the 2019–2020 “Presidential Award for Excellence in Creative Work” at Hunter College, and he was the “Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow” of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2020–2021. He recently finished a monograph combining race studies with music and music theory and is working on a forthcoming book (at W.W. Norton) as coauthor of a new music theory textbook that will be a modernized, reframed, and inclusive textbook based on recent developments in music theory pedagogy.