Decanonizing Music, A Manifesto

I took ear training in college. It did not teach me how to listen to music. I took music theory in college. Despite the large body of criticism I will level against the concept, I still love music theory, but it did not teach me how to analyze music. Music school did not teach me the ways that I now talk about music, play with music, and love music. I had to learn those on my own. It did, however, teach me how to “perform” music. Not how to play music, like with an instrument, but to perform it, in the way gender is a performance. The same way that Judith Butler criticizes Foucoult for searching for a “truth” of gender (17), musical academic discourse, in an act of quite serious hubris, believes it has already found a “truth” of music that, frankly, does not exist. In my music history courses, the world of music ends at the deaths of Schoenberg and Shostakovich, or perhaps, if you’re extremely progressive, ragtime.

You could be forgiven for assuming the 100 years of music following these, admittedly, great composers are also worthy of study, play, and discourse. Or for assuming that the millennia of music from other cultures that aren’t 18th-20th Western Europeans is also worthy of study. But including new music in the canon without questioning why a canon exists or the ways we analyze that canon is just tokenism. If you were to speak to Heinrich Shenker on how he developed his analysis, the theoretical baseline by which much of modern music theory is founded, after he finished his long rant about the toxin of interracial marriage, he may offer you the idea that there are objective aesthetic qualities by which music should be judged and analyzed and placed in a hierarchy (Neely). After Schumann finished airing his insecurities about being seen as feminine for feeling emotions while listening to Schubert, he may offer you the rare example of a music theorist being willing to speak on his subjective, sensory experience of music (McClary).

What does it mean to analyze music? Someone who is inexperienced with music academia may be forgiven for not realizing how narrow the scope of it really is. Music theory, as we know it, is designed almost exclusively to analyze (and judge) 17th-20th Western European art music, and makes much less sense in most other contexts. Shenker’s analytical framework is, self admittedly, designed exclusively to analyze the melodic and harmonic content of less than 15 composers he labels “genius”, almost all of which are German men. Yet figured bass, which is a form of shorthand that became out of date in the mid 1800’s, is still taught in music theory 101 specifically because it leads up to Shenker (Neely). In some schools even jazz, which has been so graciously given a spot at the table by music academia, is so separated from the study of Western art music that it is placed in a separate building all together (such is the case at NYU, where I initially studied). You might, if you’re lucky, get to study one woman in the western art canon: Clara Schumann. In my time in music academia, I have been expected to study more fictional women within music and opera than actual female composers. The implication that Western art music theory gets to be just “music theory” is that white, male, cishet Europeans are the default and superior form of music analysis.

The same way that Judith Butler describes maleness as a default and femininity as the negative space for which maleness is not (11), music theory does not need the adjective “European” in front of it to let people know where that theory comes from. The fact that music theory can vaguely describe some other forms of popular tonal music is more coincidental than it is a shining endorsement of musical universality. The structure of the Western classical phrase: tonic, tonic expansion, sub dominant, dominant, cannot properly describe modern American pop music or hip hop or Japanese classical music or modal jazz.

Or even cannibalistically, contemporary post tonalism. The fact that post tonal theory is so baked into the curriculum of every music school right after taking 3 semesters of counterpoint shows that the places where European music theory decides to allow exceptions to its compositional rules are other Europeans. Alejandro Madrid describes the primary goal of music academia not in creating the next generation of great artists, but great “concert audiences” (125). To “perform” music analysis is to look at music as objective pieces of hard science. What this represents is not that we use the “wrong” music theory or the “wrong” canon, but rather that our very lenses by which we view music are white supremacist in nature. Adding more diverse literature is great, but it does not overcome this hurdle (Madrid).

What does it mean to talk about music? I initially went to school to study screen music, and much of my passion revolves around the stylings of video game music. My roommate at the time and good friend was once told in a review session by the deen of the music department that his composition had “too much melody”, an aesthetic sentiment that can only be described by a game music artist as bizarre. Tim Summers’ book The Queerness of Video Game Music starts with a striking moment. After a lecture to postgraduate students and staff on the music of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a video game game released in 1998, “one of the faculty at the institution made a comment that caught me off-guard. After thanking me for the talk, and mentioning some of the salient themes that they had found interesting, the staff-member asked: ‘But why does it sound so bad?’,” (Introduction).

The use of the phrase “sound so bad” was not in reference to composition or structure, but a timbral quality. Nintendo 64 games, due to hardware limitations, sounded nothing like what a purpose built music player could output. For someone familiar with video game music of the time, a quirk like this is irrelevant to thematic analysis, except perhaps in the ways that limitations breed creativity and push composers towards certain sounds. But to someone outside the culture, it is a marker of “badness”. I don’t, as Summers doesn’t, intend to accuse this staff member of some moral failing, but rather to point to the inherent subjectivity of aesthetic quality. A parallel fifth, while a mistake that lost me points many times on my counterpoint homework, is central to the sound of rock and metal music. To “perform” music discourse is to create a value judgment of the prescribed aesthetic factors deemed high quality. 
“The professor was identifying a kind of ‘failure’ in Ocarina of Time’s timbres, but, as a video game music devotee, I was hearing the timbres in a way that did not align with the system of value (i.e. realism) that the lecturer assumed was universal. Realism does not even seem to be a primary concern for Ocarina of Time: the least ‘realistic’ samples are sometimes at the forefront of the music, and the same timbres would be retained for the game’s 2011 remake. Ocarina of Time seems to ignore or reject timbral realism as a criterion of success,” (Summers, Introduction).

I had a similar experience in my time in music academia, but a positive one that informed my current desire for reform. I often loved to share my own personal “canon” of work that has inspired the way I think about and write music with my composition professor.. He was extremely receptive to this, and liked learning about what sorts of things lead me to think about art the way I did the same way I enjoyed learning from him. I once showed him the song “Dyslexia” by Team Grimoire, a mixture of classical and Japanese EDM styles. He was surprised to hear that a realistic representation of string and piano playing was not an aesthetic value held by the composition team, or by me. He took great advantage of this knowledge to teach me more effectively. He drew my attention to the use of automation, filters, and reverb on all of the individual sounds of the piece, and how I could use those techniques in my own music to make it sound expressive and dynamic. What’s special to me about this is that he took a concept he wanted to see in my composition and rephrased it into a language and technique that made more sense for my theoretical framework. Shari Stenberg describes this mutual position of partial knowledge in education: “Instead of the critical teacher positioning herself as a disembodied knower, an authority on social structures — not one who is always implicated in them — Ellsworth argues that greater possibilities are enabled when it is recognized that all members of a class, including the teacher, work out of partial knowledge,” (Stenberg).

Dynamism is, of course, not always a positive quality. In noise and rave music, for example, contrast is ignored in favor of creating an expressive texture. But what dynamism or the lack of it accomplishes is the emotional energy of a piece. Music is a sensory experience, and critique focused on that sensory experience as the driving factor is much more connected to a positive music discourse.

What does it mean to listen to and play with music? I specifically use the phrase “play with” and not “play” here. While music in some parts of the world is coded feminine, such as in Russia, the European project has successfully laundered the art of music into a masculine hard science. The idea that there is a strong distinction between the senses of the representational mind (coded masculine) and of the physical body (coded feminine) is a European project. When discussing students struggling with a hinge problem in a physics classroom, French physicist Benoite Pfeiffer noted that none of the students had ever performed the physical labor of repairing one, nor had they thought to look at the door to the classroom or cupboard to get a better reference for how a hinge works (13). Like physics, music is something best understood by playing with it. It is much easier to model how a basketball moves in the air if you have experience shooting one. It is much easier to image a 3D object by moving through it, touching it, and manipulating it than by staring at a flat image.

And it is much easier to make music if you’re listening to it, playing it, and making silly mistakes with it. Staring at scores might be one part of developing a musical imagination, but this is not how people learn to love music, nor how most of the world experiences their music. I think all musical academia should have “jams” like jazz musicians do. You should play with, dance, and cry to everyone’s compositions. But to cry to a piece of music or to edit it or to get up in dance in a classroom would be Schumann and music theory’s greatest nightmare, as McClary points out. To admit music is not just an object construction, but a subjective and sensory experience, would be to admit that the body’s primary experience of music is emotional (18) and informed by culture. It would be to admit music is not a science, but a form of love. To “perform” listening music is to avoid playing with it.

What does it mean to love music? The primary goal of music education should be to foster love of music. To love music is to accept a messy, flawed art form that has existed for all of human history and use it as a vector to express your messy, flawed self. To love music is to love the creativity of your neighbor, and accept that all humans are worthy of making and experiencing art. To love music is to break free from a canon.

Bibliography:

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble, Routledge. 1990.

Madrid, Alejandro. “Diversity, Non-Canon Musics, and the Crisis of the Humanities in U.S. Academia,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy, vol 7, no 2, pg 124–130. 2017.

McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, University of Minnesota Press. 1991.

Neely, Adam. “Music Theory and White Supremacy,” Adam Neely. Youtube. Sept 07, 2020.

Stenberg, Sharil. “Embodied Classrooms, Embodied Knowledges: Re-thinking the Mind/Body Split,” Composition Studies, vol 30, no 2. Fall 2002.

Summers, Tim. The Queerness of Video Game Music, Cambridge University Press. July 06, 2023.