What Needs To Be Said About Philip Ewell

I believe there is an inherent danger in what I'm about to post, but it's time to say something about Philip Ewell, because quite frankly, I smell another Boulez exploiting the good will of people lost in the confusion of a new era enacting a demagogic agenda for his own personal gain. There is something about his agenda that is just as ugly as the problems he's diagnosing, and while I'm not going to advertise or link to this point of view, since this is my page, I'm going to take a small risk and register my fear in writing that we're dealing with a calamitous demagogue that can hold classical music back from mainstream acceptance and prosperity for still another lifetime with a whole new brand of snakeoil.

Insofar as his thoughts strike me as coherent, I'm sympathetic to many of them. You have to be an idiot not to see a system favoring white musicians, male musicians, cisgender musicians, and if his remedy is to break the system wholesale (and it is), that would at least be somewhat fine if he were honest about the extent of what he proposes, but at least Boulez did us the courtesy to be honest about the extremism of his propositions. Ewell doesn't even have the courage to admit to his own extremism, but he means to take the citadels of music by force just as Boulez did. As a severely learning disabled musician, however white and male and cisgender, completely cut off from the mainstream of musical connections and acceptance, this storming the gates could in fact be of benefit to me if I kept my mouth shut. But as much as I'd like to value my own advancement, I love music more; and I suspect something ugly is yet again about to be done to thousands of American musicians who already can't make a living.

After relatively significant experience in both the worlds of popular music and international music, I do happen to believe at least a little bit in the inherent superiority of Western classical music which Ewell charges is a white supremacist conceit, and there was a long time when I didn't. Perhaps this makes me the kind of white supremacist to which Ewell refers, but I also believe it self-evident that white male musicians, artists, and actors of all fields, have spent the vast majority of Western history preventing women and people of color from achieving to their full potential, and that this must be remedied with all possible haste with far greater levels of funding, scholarships, distribution, and performance experience.

In one widely read interview, Ewell claims that the point of not studying any music theorists who are both white and male is purely a 'thought experiment.' There are five problems with this.

1. That is true only in the sense that every academic curriculum is a 'thought experiment.' The point is so self-evidently to cut traditional texts off at the root and replace them, it's little but an awkwardly concealed bit of opportunism. Obviously, the very first to be widely read in this curriculum is 'Philip Ewell.'
2. I guarantee that any non-white male musicologists who favor more traditional approaches will be excluded too from this kind of curriculum. The greater point of this 'exercise' is not to let diverse voices in but to keep all non-revolutionary voices out.
3. Regardless of such extreme measures, the speed of global communication is turning the whole world of music upside down anyway, and nowhere more so than in classical music where the internet is providing avenues for musicians to internationalize their learning properly to the music of other cultures. Whether or not the traditional texts are replaced by force or by choice, they will gradually be replaced by texts with a much less Western bias, and if the landing is soft, the replacement texts will be better and more inclusive, and there would be no counterrevolution of reactionary bias to his movement which Ewell's extremism is rendering inevitable.
4. By far, the most important point is this: if Western classical music is not the backbone of the classical music education, if learning the basic texts in German, French, and Italian are not priority 1 in a musicological education, if classical musicians are devoting a pluarlity of their time to other music than the Western canon, then what can Western classical musicians bring to the international musical dialogue that other genres of world musicians don't bring with ten times more authority? We the citizens of classical music will yet again be relegated to living and working in just another cultural backwater with little to contribute to the wider world of music.
5. By including non-Western ethnomusicology as an equivalent study to the study of Western Classical Music, how is that not a form of cultural appropriation which Ewell and his allies supposedly excoriate? The hypocrisy is rather breathtaking. If you come at non-Western or popular music through the rubric of Western classical music, regardless of your identity and learned experience, you are complicit in the same cultural appropriation you give lip service to reviling.

I have no doubt that being a person of color or a woman or a transgender person in classical music is a story of little but pressure and rejection, and as a learning disabled person I have no doubt that I know quite a bit of the same frustrations, even if the learned experience of people like me is still widely doubted because it is not as visible, and while I would imagine there will be some ancillary benefits to people like me from the systemic vacuum, I have not yet seen any hard evidence at all that my constituency will at all benefit by the changes Ewell proposes. And even if I ever did, any support I would loan to the cause would be transparently opportunistic. The solutions Ewell proposes are not solutions, they are terms of initiation into a kind of cult, the same kind of cult that once held the entire world of classical music captive from Darmstadt, a cult it took us two-thirds of a century to liberate ourselves from only to voluntarily place ourselves back into a wholly different cult from the very moment we were finally free. If you take on faith that classical music is inherently white supremacist, you become hammers in search of nails, and see white, male, and cisgender supremacy in literally everything, and could easily miss the real examples of it in a barrage of distracting false perceptions. If he himself seems more magnanimous than his agenda, then like any good demagogue, he can hide behind false notions of inclusion while the thousands of people he ideologically fires up do his dirty work for him. 

Generation after generation, new demagogues come to the fore and sway the music world with promises of a better world if only we pledge loyalty to this or that transformative solution, but there are no transformative solutions to problems, there are only demagogues who like power and promise these solutions as means of manipulating the public into gaining more power for themselves.

As Orwell said:

"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship... The object of power is power."