ABSTRACT In an effort to present a new context of engagement between Berg and the culture of his time and space, Pierre Bourdieu’s social theories of habitus and field are applied to create a unique understanding of social influences that motivated Berg to compose his operas Wozzeck and Lulu. This article investigates the narrative symbolisms found in the two operas as they reflect Berg’s experiences in Vienna and the prevailing public interpretations of Viennese society at the time. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework illustrates the parodying nature of the operas, both of which mirror hypocritical and subversive elements of Vienna’s identity of place.

ABSTRACT Dismantling U.S./Canadian music theory’s white-male frame requires the field to commit collectively to intellectual projects that contest the existing power structures of white supremacy, coloniality, and heteropatriarchy. I argue that entering into dialogue with ethnic studies offers music theorists the necessary vocabulary and frameworks to speak precisely, responsibly, and thoughtfully about issues of race, identity, and power, and to connect our work to broader activist movements taking place within and beyond the academy. Centering the critical methodologies of ethnic studies in music theory can therefore serve as a crucial step towards making “music theory more welcoming” for minoritized scholars.

This essay serves as a meditation on the final chapter of Philip Ewell’s On Music Theory, “Outro: On a Path Forward and Music Theory’s Future.” After disclosing my own perspective as a junior scholar of color, I highlight a selection of the author’s suggestions for “making music theory more welcoming for everyone” — the subtitle of this book. Citing Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, I analyze on the suggestions, and the book more broadly, through a classed-based lens, and offer more thoughts on what inclusion in music studies can look like, in dialogue with Ewell’s own cadenza.

ABSTRACT This essay offers a critical intervention into Philip Ewell’s On Music Theory, which adapts Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist framework to expose music theory’s structural whiteness and maleness. While recognizing the force of Ewell’s intervention, I argue that his framework remains limited by its race-first orientation. I advance Black Feminist Thought (BFT) as both a critique and a constructive vision, pushing beyond antiracism’s binaries toward an intersectional, systemic critique. Drawing on the Black feminist imagination as a speculative method, I reframe music theory as a discipline whose survival depends on centering Black women’s epistemologies.

ABSTRACT In Phillip Ewell’s 2023 book, On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, he provides a theoretical framework analyzing the actions and policies of white structures within a binary: antiracist or DEI. An example he provides of a DEI framework includes staging a rendition of Shirley Graham Du Bois’s opera Tom Tom, while an antiracist approach has a scholar writing a paper explaining the structural policies and incentives that excluded Tom Tom from the opera canon. Using this example, we argue that DEI nor antiracism are stable political or theoretical frameworks for music scholars pursuing Black liberation.

ABSTRACT The virulence of the reactions to Phil Ewell’s resistant reading of Schenkerian analysis has been extreme. Editor Timothy Jackson’s decision to devote a volume of the Journal of Schenker Studies to excoriating (and, significantly, non-peer-reviewed) reactions to Ewell’s work moved graduate students at the University of North Texas, where the journal is based, to demand his dismissal. Nonetheless, one writer implored Ewell to “renounce the calls for the ruination of Dr. Timothy Jackson’s career, as demanded in the [University of North Texas] graduate student and [Society for Music Theory] open letters”—Ewell had had nothing to do with either—and ended with an imperative: “You must call them off.” Another resorted to schoolyard bluster: “First, let me say what an idiot I think you are … talk to me about counterpoint, harmony, linear analysis; you are inept at all of those.” How could Ewell—a music theorist prosecuting a careful critique of the work of a central figure in his discipline—provoke such choler? Ewell’s attention to the race theory underlying Schenker’s analytical system, and his repeated statement that the latter followed from the former, made contemporary Schenkerians cry “Cancel Culture!” Schenkerian analysis has long occupied a privileged disciplinary position, though; any threat to it represents an existential threat to its practitioners—hence the contradictory nature and chaotic intensity of the backlash. The merits of Ewell’s measured critique may well result in a wholesale realignment of the contemporary music theory curriculum. 1 1 Because of the nature of some of the comments used here, certain sources will not be identified. I am interested in the general tenor of the responses to Prof. Ewell’s thinking, and the identities of certain individuals are, for the present purpose, less important than the general outrage of the reaction. Some may be easily identified by reading Ewell’s book, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming to Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023); their identities are not secret but to invite further ridicule is not my goal. Others may be personal friends and/or colleagues of mine who made a remark or two that illustrated a typical attitude but for whom there would be no purpose in exposure to scholarly scrutiny.