European Music Analysis and the Politics of Identity (special issue of Danish Musicology Online)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
speech "Music Theory's White Racial Frame" at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Music Theory became a watershed event, the reverberations of which are still felt throughout musicology.Ewell's speech and his subsequently published expanded article (2020) gave rise to a state of public attention that the field of music theory has arguably never seen before.Ewell's claim was as simple as it was powerful: Music theory is white-literally and figuratively.Literally because the overwhelming majority of the members of the North American (i.e. the United States and Canada) Society for Music Theory are white, and figuratively because North American music theory is characterized by its "white racial frame," a term Ewell (2020, 2.1) borrowed from Joe Feagin ([2009] 2013) to denote how "music theory has many of the prejudices and stereotypes that are part of the white racial frame, most noticeably in how we privilege the compositional and theoretical work of whites over nonwhites."Ewell backed up his claim with a case study on the most influential music theorist in the United States, Heinrich Schenker, arguing that Schenker's racism and nationalism permeated his music theory and that it had been "whitewashed" by generations of US music theorists who failed to acknowledge and face the grim sides of his theory.The public debate seriously began when the infamous "Symposium on Philip Ewell's SMT 2019 Plenary Paper, 'Music Theory's White Racial Frame'" was published in the twelfth issue of Journal of Schenkerian Studies (henceforth JSS12).This symposium, to which Ewell had not been invited to respond, was seriously stained by dubious scholarly practices such as ad hominem attacks on Ewell and an anonymous contribution.The widespread critique of the issue ultimately prompted a formal investigation of the conception and review process of JSS12 which found several structural problems. 1During the Summer of 2020-in the wake of the brutal police killing of George Floyd and renewed attention to the Black Lives Matter movement-the debate reached popular media outlets such as Fox News, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and more, and it also spread to European forums.The public debate is often especially high-pitched when it comes to areas bordering on "identity politics."That this is a general phenomenon, is, for instance, seen currently in the ways that Critical Race Theory is heavily debated and largely misunderstood in political discourse in the United States; and in Denmark, the very term " identity politics" has been a most disputed concept in recent years (we put the term
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".