i write this as a music psychology researcher who has spent much of her career thinking about how humans acquire tonality. I also write this as an immigrant and a child of colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong who has personally experienced openly racist remarks. And thus even before the #blacklivesmatter movement and as part of the Anti-Racism and Equity Committee of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (Baker et al. 2020), I have continually been asking myself, Is this line of work anti-racist? And by extension, Am I being racist?
Yust's thought-provoking essay couldn't have arrived at a better time. He treats tonality as bipartite: both as an institution (as in, tonal vs. post-tonal music theory), and as a set of organizing principles (such as major vs. minor) used to describe the pitch-related forms and functions of music. The former branch of this bipartite definition arose presumably as...
