Hi.
Welcome to the Listener’s Guide.
I’m Steve.
Every time I make a video about diversity, I get some hate.
There’s this idea that music is a universal language.
People believe that we can separate music from the bodies making it, and let the music
speak for itself, separate from its culture and the people making it.
If I mention certain things about the composers’ or performers’ personal lives, these commenters
see it as extra information that gets in the way of the “music itself.”
Now, of course, I feel like I’ve made the case more than once that you can’t separate
music from the people making it.
I’ve talked about how Beethoven’s political beliefs shaped his career and legacy.
I talked about how Paganini’s creepy life story and zombie aesthetic helped his career.
I also made a video arguing that to understand Benjamin Britten’s music, you need to know
he was gay man in twentieth-century England, and especially know about the romantic partner
he wrote for.
Only that last video got any hate, and it was all about how I was injecting politics
into music.
But I don’t believe that anything about music is apolitical.
Classical music especially has always been the music of power.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the people paying for what we now call classical
music were mostly nobility showing off their wealth and greatness.
The other big player was the Church, which may as well have been a government at the
time.
Don’t forget that much of this music was also put directly in the service of imperialism—imperial
schools taught classical music to replace folk cultures of their colonial subjects.
The Romantic movement in the nineteenth century was related to the growth of the middle class,
the industrial revolution, and a new idea of the political individual.
Governments also put on huge shows, such as French Grand Opera, to entertain the masses
during politically unstable times.
Then when we get to the twentieth century, art music in particular was tied to the power
of global governments, whether it was the Nazis suppressing what they called “degenerate
music” like Schoenberg, the Soviets promoting socialist realism through composers like Shostakovich,
or the CIA covertly funding avant-garde composers.
Yeah, that happened.
All of these power structures were justified with an abstract idea of music that separated
it from them.
Famous composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all came from Germany and Austria and Austro-German
nationalists loved them.
But these nationalists talked about the composers in universal terms, as if any enlightened
soul would love the music.
They didn't talk about how it was specifically written for their own local audiences.
It was this value system that actually forms the foundation of my field of musicology.
The man who started the field, Guido Adler, unapologetically used the language of eugenics
to describe the musicologist’s role in the world.
He thought that our job was to find the best music from around the world and throughout
history to discover “universal musical truths.”
It’s probably not random chance that those universal truths ended up coming almost entirely
from the Austro-German tradition of the nineteenth century, since that is where the first musicologists
came from.
Adler thought that musicologists should actively promote this “universal” music among composition
students the way one would breed plants—essentially saying “this music is in; this music is
out.”
With all this history, it’s not really surprising that classical music currently has a diversity
problem.
We’ve turned into a monoculture.
Women have only been allowed in orchestras around the world for a couple of decades.
People of color still have little representation.
While LGBT+ performers are not exactly unusual, LGBT+ stories don’t really get told, even
when some of the most famous historical musicians were themselves members of the community.
We hear music by old, dead, white men more than 90% of the time, and that’s being generous.
One study found that women make up less than 2% of all composers at our concerts, and among
living composers they’re still less than 15%.
And there are people who actively want classical music to stay white, male and elite.
In a recent article, Zack Ferriday talks about how some white supremacist groups have started
using classical music to argue for their cause.
He also talks about our uncomfortable relationship with avowed Nazi musicians like the famed
conductor Herbert von Karajan.
And by uncomfortable, I really mean that many people uncritically celebrate him, and those
who know of his Nazi membership are often quick to dismiss it as a necessary part of
having a public career in Nazi Germany.
And it’s not just white supremacists or the historic association with German nationalism
that causes us problems.
The classical music world has its own hashtag-MeToo movement, most notably with the firing of
Met Opera conductor James Levine after the open secret of his pedophilia got a little
too open.
A few famous male conductors have also come forward over the last few years saying really
sexist things about women conductors, and there really aren’t that many women conductors
to speak of, at that.
Then there’s someone like Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the teenager who performed at the royal wedding.
He is obviously a great example of success on his own, but he also does a lot of community
work to raise money for music programs because the very programs that got him to where he
is are facing budget cuts, preventing any future Sheku Kanneh-Mason from breaking out.
And all of this is not to mention the blackface and yellowface that still occur on our opera
and ballet stages, despite the fact that virtually every other performing art has long since
left them in the dustbin of history.
And this is why it bothers me that people still believe that the classical music world
is a level playing field.
If you believe that, you would have to also believe that there are not really qualified
musicians from marginalized communities.
In other words, if the classical music world were truly a level playing field for all,
and if only a tiny bit of what we see and hear are not white men, that means that only
white men are actually worth seeing and hearing.
Nobody wants to say that out loud because it’s so obviously racist and sexist.
But the way we’re programming our concerts, it really looks like we believe it.
So now that I’ve ruffled all of your feathers, I will say I don’t think it’s your fault.
Most of us are just audience members who want to hear good music.
A big part of the problem is that we’ve all been educated to believe that this system
is natural and good.
Many of us just don’t know about the other people who have been overlooked as this history
was written.
And if you don’t know, someone has to tell you about them.
And that’s where I come in.
That’s why I do these videos on diverse musicians.
By bringing these stories to light, I can help everyone see that there are more people
out there who deserve to be heard.
Even if it is someone who has long since passed, we can still choose to make them important.
After all, we decide every day to remind everyone that our canonic faves are important—why
not also decide to tell people that their lesser-known contemporaries are also important?
The only thing that we get out of it is more music to listen to.
And that doesn’t sound to me like a bad thing.
So why is diversity important to classical music?
Because we’re so far behind the times and it’s high time we get with the twenty-first
century.
Because the world is changing and symbols of our white supremacist past are falling
by the wayside, and if we’re not careful, this music will go with it.
But also, with diversity comes more music.
What is so wrong with that?
Now I’m sure there are going to be a lot of people with a lot of opinions about this.
Please do leave comments with your thoughts, but also remember to keep it civil.
And know that I do take my role as moderator very seriously, meaning I am not afraid to
delete comments that don’t contribute to the level of discourse.
My general rules are: if a comment makes me angry, it’s gone, and if it’s actively
harmful, you’re blocked.
I just don’t find flame wars productive at all and find that the only way to fix them
is to prevent them from even getting started.
If you’re interested in resources that contributed to this video, I’ve left a bunch in the
description for your reading pleasure.
Other than that, thank you for watching this episode of the Listener’s Guide!
It has been a while since I made a video because the first year of PhD is always a tough one,
but I’m glad to be back.
The next video will be a full update with some updates for the channel, so stay tuned.
But until then, I hope you all also have a lovely summer and I can’t wait to be making
more content again!