jcoleknowsbest:
I wonder if there is a study that talks about how white supremacy informs our musical preferences… or even the way we approach music…
Or even… for a lot of people I notice that classical music seems to be the measuring stick used to determine someone’s musical ability… like they will say… “they play/sing classical music.. so they are really good musicians/singers”… which I think is such bullshit…
But I wonder if there is quantifiable data to back up my assertion…
*googles*
This is definitely something I’ve been wanting to look into recently as well! I have a very distinct memory from high school band, where our (white) director told us how happy so many classical musical instructors had been in the late 90s when boy bands were becoming so popular because everyone had been so terrified of rap “destroying music as we know it.” That even the boy bands and Britney Spears and all this pop music that they always turned their noses up at were a far better alternative to the horrors of rap.
There’s a lot of racism in several aspects of classical music and the culture surrounding it. One of the things I started looking into before I dropped out of uni was how music outside of the European classical tradition, music that is just as complex and has just as much history as “classical” music, is classified as world music until it’s been appropriated by white composers. Then it becomes exotic flavoring. Obviously there’s a long history of white composers taking European folk and popular music, but there’s something more to it. There’s several traditions in Asia and Africa (and probably other places that I’m just not familiar with) whose musicians require just as many years of rigorous, strict study and have complex theory and performance practices that are very similar to European classical music, and could easily be considered classical or art music in their own right, but are often relegated to folk/ethnic/traditional labels that are seen as a lower form. Every now and then you’ll see things like “Indian classical music” but it’s still only viewed in a world/folk music context next to the European classical tradition. If you were to go to a concert in the US that contained sitar and tablas and other classical Indian instruments, more likely than not, it wouldn’t be considered a classical concert. And you certainly wouldn’t hear people like Ravi Shankar being called a classical musician… if you’re an Asian person, you have to play violin or piano for that title. Also, I’m pretty sure that there’s not much distinction made between folk and art music outside of Europe, at least not at the level of ethnomusicology I’d gotten into (which, admittedly wasn’t all that far).
Then you get to jazz music, which was just lowly Black music not good for anything but dancing, until it made its way over to Europe. Of course once that happened, loads of white US composers travelled to France to study jazz and jazz theory with Nadia Boulanger, a white woman, and suddenly you start seeing jazz brought into classical music. You do start to see some differences here in 20th century American classical music. Duke Ellington and William Still Grant made their way into our musical history and (non-jazz) theory text books and classes, but they were certainly an exception to the rule.
I think I may have gotten way way off topic, sorry.