as i sipped my morning coffee on May 16, James McWhorter's (2023) headline “Is Musicology Racist?” assailed me from the pages of the New York Times.1 With this opinion piece, McWhorter joined the party of pundits attacking Phil Ewell, whose provocative ideas have just appeared in his new book, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (2023). Conflating music theory and musicology, McWhorter decried in his essay the woke ideology whereby the monuments of Western culture are summarily dismissed. But conflation aside, I want to begin by addressing the question as he phrased it.
To put it bluntly, musicology is undeniably racist, most glaringly so in its determination to avoid perhaps the most unlikely event in Western music history: the rise to world dominance of American Black idioms following the advent of sound recording a hundred years ago. A soundscape featuring...
