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A Response to Ian Pace’s “How the Culture Wars are Killing Western Classical Music"



Ian Pace’s recent article “How the Culture Wars are Killing Western Classical Music” (paywalled) in the Spectator aims to attack the dogmas he sees in recent musicological writings. While Pace is not against critical analysis of Western Art music, he feels that modern music scholarship, specifically from writers in cultural studies departments and “new musicology,” (a rather odd target since “new musicology” was a movement in the field that started in the 80s) has caused writers to lose sight about why the canonic composers are in fact great. Pace takes aim at the methodologies of modern musicology which he figures are unable to actually engage with “the music” (a claim that is much easier to state than to actually explain). Likely, Pace means that there is a certain formalist, theoretical knowledge required to discuss music properly. Given Pace’s claim that these musicologists lack the rigor to properly contemplate music, the fact that his article is a mix of misrepresentations, half-truths, and poor scholarship is bafflingly hypocritical. In all honesty, I have no idea how such a well-published (he has published 5 books and over 40 articles), educated (he has a Ph.D. from Cardiff University and a performance degree from the Juilliard school), and successful (he is the head of the City University of London’s music department) scholar could so obviously misunderstand so many current musicological writings.

Pace begins his argument by giving a quick history of the field of musicology. He accurately describes how the field has historically focused on music of the Western Art tradition, and that since the 80s the field has grown to include studies of popular music (who Pace refers to as scholars from “cultural studies” departments despite the fact many of them were music scholars) and studies of musics from non-Western cultures (ethnomusicology, although as a discipline ethnomusicology is much older than that, but did not receive full support from music departments until the 80s). Pace then goes on to argue that this academic expansion away from the canon ceded the field to music scholars who had an active dislike and distrust of the canon. Since these academic movements, specifically ethnomusicology, tended to emphasize the cultural, as opposed to formal, aspects of music, Pace argues they created a “musicology without ears.” Within Pace’s framework, these younger scholars based their writings on an ideological attack on the canon that is not based in the realities of the music. Through this dogmatic approach to music, Pace believes these scholars end up devaluing classical music to the point that no one will ever care for it because they only associate it with unfair accusations of racism.

Every aspect of Pace’s argument is either false, misleading, or poorly argued. Even his complaint against cultural studies is rather odd since he only cites music scholars. Susan McClary (Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard), William Cheng (Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard), and Phillip Ewell (Ph.D. in music theory from Yale), the scholars he takes issue with, all have advanced degrees in musicology or music theory from elite institutions, but that fact could be easily missed by an unaware reader. He also attacks the music scholar Christopher Small. While I was only able to find proof of Small’s Bachelor’s in music, Small received additional training in composition from the South-African/British composer Ivy Priaulx Rainier and was a highly respected musicologist/composer. In this essay, I will go through two of his examples, showing why Pace is unable to actually engage with the scholarship he is critiquing and because of these poor readings, makes it difficult to take his qualms seriously.

Pace’s arguments don’t hold water simply because he does not understand the writings he addresses. For instance, take his claim that Christopher Small is an example of postcolonial scholarship. Pace states:

From the 1980s a number of ethnomusicologists turned their disciplinary approaches to practices within Western classical music itself. Their findings were often roundly negative; selective and unverifiable sources (because they were anonymised), or simply broad generalisations, were used to indict the Western concert, conservatoire, or classical music culture in general, often from a ‘post-colonial’ perspective. (In Christopher Small’s studies of concert rituals, for example, concerts were ‘a celebration of the “sacred history” of the Western middle classes’.)


First, Small, who for the record died in 2011 and whose writings are from the 80s and 90s (so hardly a new trend in musicological writing), is not a postcolonial scholar at all. Postcolonialism is an academic movement that seeks to investigate the ways in which colonial practice economically exploits, has exploited, underdeveloped, and continues to underdevelop the global south and the effects that had on colonized populations. Small’s Musicking tries to explain how music is not an object, but rather a communal action, a ritual that helps establish values within a society (hence the gerund form of music). Small is arguing that the way people dress, sit, and interact at a classical music concert becomes representative of those communities' values. Since audiences at Western Art concerts are generally upper-middle class, those become bourgeois ways of musicking. Nothing in this analysis has anything to do with the history or lived reality of colonization.

It seems that Pace thinks that Small either does not understand the greatness of the Western Art canon or is denying it as an act of bad faith. While the position that the music of Mozart and Beethoven is undeniably great is already tenuous, I have no desire to litigate it. Rather, I would like to argue that this characterization of Small is odd. Small cares deeply about the Western Art canon. In fact, Small wrote an entire book about Arnold Schoenberg, certainly a seminal figure in the Western Art Music tradition. Additionally, Musicking, the book Pace presumably takes issue with, focuses primarily on Western Art music, a music that Small is deeply invested in as both a performer and listener. Small, in the introduction, says

“All that said, I have to confess that there is a third, more personal reason for taking the symphony concert as example...It is my heritage and I cannot escape it...I myself continue to love playing such piano works of that tradition as are within the reach of my modest technique.” (15)


In this quote, Small describes the deep care he has for the symphonic tradition. He is well-versed on the masterworks, and that fact becomes obvious when reading the massive number of symphonies, operas, and piano sonatas he cites throughout Musicking. While Small does sometimes paint the social relationships of the concert hall in a negative light, it is not because he doesn’t care for the music, rather he is uncomfortable with the current ways audiences in concert halls music (and I am using the word “music” as a verb, within Small’s desire to not talk about music as an object but rather as an action). Small continues to say:

“Now, in my seventy-first year, I have come nearer to pinning down what is wrong. I do not feel at ease with the social relationships of concert halls. I can say that they do not correspond with my ideal of human relationships. For me there is a dissonance between the meanings- the relationships- that are generated by the works that are being performed and those that are generated by the performance events” (15)


Small understands that this is a more complex manner than just wanting to “kill” the Western Art tradition; in fact, Small continues to stress that “I have no desire to impose these feelings on anyone who might read this book, and I hope that by acknowledging them right at the start I can avoid even the appearance of wanting to do so” (15). Small has no issue with people enjoying the Western Art canon, or enjoying it in the way that he does not. Rather, he wants to explain how the construction of normalized rituals within the symphony hall expresses and affirms these values. It is not about killing the tradition, but rather about using this genre of musical performance as a test case to see how it constructs a listening experience. In Music of the Common Tongue, Small applies the same thought process to musics of the African diaspora. At their core, his theories of musicking extend well past the practices of concert music.

In explaining Small’s work, I also have to question Pace’s conclusion that academic writings on Classical music are what is killing the genre. I don’t think people believe that concert halls are upper-class, white spaces because they read Christopher Small (or frankly any of the scholars mentioned here, myself and Pace included). Rather, I think people naturally notice the forms of musicking that occur in concert halls. When Black people go to the symphony hall, they notice that there are no other Black people on stage, in the halls, or on the board of directors. Most people associate Classical music with upper-class living that is also coded white. These have nothing to do with academic scholarship, they are just how people observe the phenomenon of musicking. Also, many scholars who take critical views of the cultures of Classical music have done so as a way to foster a more diverse Classical music culture (see Naomi Andre’s Black Opera).

I will admit it is rather vague if Pace thinks Small is postcolonial, but he is the only example Pace mentions here. He could have easily cited many other music scholars who cite postcolonial literature in their scholarship. Certain ethnomusicological literature does connect this bourgeois form of musicking to colonial practice; the fact that Pace does not cite said literature is telling. Pace could cite Kofi Agawu, a scholar who has written extensively about how the concept of “African music” is a creation of Western hegemony that reduces the multiplicity of African cultures down to one singularity, as an example of postcolonial ethnomusicology. Agawu’s musical analysis of African (and Romantic music) is dense and shows critical engagement with the music in ways that contradict Pace’s description of the trends of the field. To not provide a clear example of postcolonial scholarship simply leaves readers in the dark in a manner that weakens Pace’s points.

Equating Agawu (or other postcolonial scholars) with Small is only possible if a person is not familiar with postcolonial writing. To do so seems like a way to reduce the difficult arguments of postcolonialism, which often ask us to challenge our fundamental belief systems in deeply uncomfortable ways, down to a scarecrow to avoid such reflection. Postcolonial thought is dense, multidisciplinary work that requires one to engage with philosophy, economics, psychoanalysis, poetry, and many other scholarly traditions. The fact that Pace believes he has the right to discuss this literature without having actually considered the implications of the work is a problem in itself. The fact that a white man in a position of power has the ability to (and feels the need to) define postcolonialism without actually knowing what he is talking about is the exact sort of power dynamics that a postcolonial scholar would mention.

The simple fact is that someone can take a critical approach to Classical music, while loving the music, and embracing a wide variety of scholarly fields, and analyzing the music in a deep manner. They can do all of this while working to create more fans of Classical music. To remove this nuance from the discussion does no favors to anyone.

There are other examples of these inaccurate readings of musicological scholarship. When discussing William Cheng’s Just Vibrations, Pace seems committed to taking an overly antagonistic position. Pace writes:

All of this has led to a situation in which it is common to read quite stentorian denunciations primarily of Western classical music and its standard repertoire and long-established scholarly methods for investigating it. Thus, in 2016, the one-time pianist turned video-game musicologist William Cheng published his book Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good. Cheng wrote dismissively of such concepts as ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘aesthetic autonomy’, or ‘academic freedom’ and even ‘the belief that academics have a right to pursue their work free from political pressures and without fear of termination’. In place of these, which he associates with a ‘paranoid’ approach, Cheng advocates ‘a care-oriented musicology — namely, for a musicology that upholds interpersonal care as a core feature’. Whether musicology is to be judged to have achieved this was presumably to be determined by him or other ideological fellow-travellers.

Cheng’s passive-aggressive arguments — employing the tropes of victimhood to propound a highly censorious agenda — and some of the extensive praise they have received, are among the most disturbing developments in recent musicology. It is not hyperbolic to compare them to those common under Soviet-style communism, in which academic freedom and integrity were sacrificed in favour of ideological conformity.”

In this, Pace fails to accurately explain Cheng’s thesis, much less make an actual argument disputing those points or supporting the claim that they are censorious or explain why those arguments are bad, or how they are censorious. He either cannot or choose not to produce an example of this censorship but still found it appropriate to compare Cheng to an oppressive government without providing any sort of evidence. I think Pace does not give a proper description of Cheng’s argument, because in doing so, he would find out that Cheng is not arguing that we should not teach the canon (nor is he rejecting the value of the canon).

Cheng’s book opens with a heartbreaking account of powering through chronic illness that required numerous surgeries while trying to maintain a facade of productivity. Cheng laments about going to the bathroom during conferences to hide obvious discomfort while trying to stockpile enough strength to make it through seemingly trivial conference presentations. Pace describes this as “employing the tropes of victimhood.” But Cheng wasn’t being a victim. In fact, he was doing the opposite. Cheng went out of his way to avoid people knowing about his illness. He tried as hard as he could so that people would not see him as a victim. Further, in telling his story, Cheng explicitly says “In fact, with myself in these lines, I hope readers will feel free to scrutinize the book more, not less” (26). Bad faith or poor reading comprehension are the only possible ways to come to Pace’s reading of Cheng. I think Pace takes this antagonistic stance towards Cheng because he feels Cheng is attacking the Western Art canon (this is his only example of “stentorian denunciations” of Western Classical music).

Pace’s decision to link Cheng’s argument with a critique of the Western canon seems to misunderstand Cheng’s goal. Cheng’s thesis is best summarized on page 8 saying:

“My proposal, simply put, is this: what if the primary purpose of sounding good isn’t to do well, but to do good? In competitive economies, doing well tends to mean pulling ahead of others. Doing good would involve reaching out and reaching back, lending help to those in need, and seeking opportunities for care and repair.”


At its most fundamental level, this has nothing to do with the Western Art canon (and honestly, Cheng seems to be writing about the practices of academic musicology at a meta-level, not discussing the performance, studying, or teaching of Western Art music). Like Small, Cheng also cares for the canon at a deep level. He has published on French music during the 19th century (calling him a scholar of video-game music could be read as a backhand way of suggesting he does not have the scholarly ability to discuss “art” music) and in the book he talks about the joy he feels when improvising on Bach (29),. To claim he is critiquing the canon (or formal analysis) seems to require rather large and unfounded leaps.

I don’t think Pace is this heartless, rather I think he is distorting Cheng’s words as an emotional reaction to perceived slight at the canon. That’s why he uses the grabbag quotes “art for art’s sake” “aesthetic autonomy” and “academic freedom” free from any context. He is likely quoting from pages 51-52 (Pace does not provide page numbers, a faux pas for an academic), where these words are all used in close proximity, but does not include the passage that follows. Cheng states after these words:

“Such freedom can nurture creative thought. But how can one ethically claim such extreme immunities without also attending to others’ extreme vulnerabilities?”


In this section, Cheng is not talking about destroying the canon; rather he is asking us to ensure that when we discuss music, we consider how teaching these texts may affect students/other scholars. Pace omits that this discussion is about using the canon to deal with issues of sexual assault. Cheng is arguing that we should try and explain how operas often problematically depict sexual assault, and how culture can influence our understanding of these issues. In this sense, to support “art for art’s sake” is to say that we should teach operas that display sexual violence and tell our students that, for example, Mozart should not be criticized for displaying a rape in Don Giovanni because “art for art’s sake.” My reading of this section makes me think Cheng is asking us to think about how displaying sexual violence could hurt a student who has been a victim of sexual assualt, and if we should privilege the academic freedom of a teacher to teach such material over the reality of the damage it could cause to a student. Cheng is not saying we shouldn’t enjoy Don Giovanni (I, as someone receptive to Cheng’s argument, certainly do), but rather we should think critically about it. I’m not even sure Cheng is against teaching Don Giovanni. In fact, Cheng, in another essay, discusses why he still plays Michael Jackson for his students. Cheng states he wants his students to think critically about the music, the ways that music can encode social values and reflect on them. Cheng also claims that it is okay to recognize that we do take pleasure from music with questionable moral genesis (be it the artist who made the music or the music’s ethical values). However, reading Pace’s summary of Cheng, you would think he was going on a vicious tirade against the canon. This is clearly a poor reading of Cheng and the only possible explanation for such a conclusion is that Pace is purposefully trying to distort Cheng’s words.

Pace’s attacks against Susan McClary, who is the only exemplar of “new musicology” he mentions, are also highly selective in the way they choose to frame the issue. This is Pace’s description of new musicology:

These attitudes were also found in the third major development, the ‘New Musicology’ that emerged in the US in the mid to late 1980s, many of whose protagonists argued that social readings of music, which reveal its ideological content, should be the musicologist’s principal concern. While this approach was much less ‘new’ than its proponents often claimed, the emphasis shifted towards questions of gender, sexuality, race and elitism. Notoriously, the feminist musicologist Susan McClary likened a passage in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the frustrated, murderous rage of a rapist. The New Musicologists also took a harsh view of much avant-garde music, claiming popular music as a more worthy object of study.

The result of all this often led to what I have described as a ‘musicology without ears’: in other words, a further de-emphasis upon listening or studying the sound of music. This was especially the case as a result of a new emphasis on ethnographic methods based on participant observation, and focused on the verbal rather than the aural, which could be undertaken by those with few specifically musical skills.

A shift from aesthetic to moral judgment accompanied this. McClary, for example, censured Charles Rosen for critiquing certain operas on the grounds of ‘old-fashioned hierarchies of tastes’ rather than for ‘something ideologically pernicious, such as anti-Semitism, orientalism, or misogyny’. A work could only be judged bad if it fell foul morally.

I have no desire to relitigate the debate over the claim that the recapitulation of the 9th symphony represents a symbolic rape, which has already been debated at length in the field (although I do think that McClary does not think this is what Beethoven intended, but rather just how she hears the passage, a nuance that Pace does not recognize or present). What I do want to discuss is how deceitful it is to simply present such a trivialized version of McClary’s argument. Feminine Endings, a staple of new musicology, is a book that is based around a simple presumption: that music can help us understand the social construction of gender. In stating this, McClary is trying to discuss the ways musical figures have been and can be mapped to our understandings of gender. By referencing her claim about Beethoven (which is made in passing, and not a prominent feature of the book) instead of detailing out more put together arguments (such as her analysis of Carmen), Pace makes it seem as if McClary is just making wild statements about Beethoven that have no grounding in reality. In truth, Femine Endings is a well-researched book that offers numerous interesting analyses of music.

I know that Pace does not understand, and perhaps has not even read, McClary’s work because he claims that she a) is an example of “musicology without ears” and b) takes a harsh view of avante-garde music, and finally c) has harsh critiques of canonic figures. All of these points are comically inaccurate. The first point is rather odd. McClary’s work has a strong theoretical basis, and a common critique of her work is that she projects too heavily onto the score without providing enough historical contextualization. Her analysis of the tragedy of the title character in Carmen is based on the use of chromatic harmony, and the way that tonal closure signifies José reining in Carmen. Regardless of the value of the hermeneutic reading, it is built around an accurate theoretical analysis. The second point is simply wrong. In Feminine Endings, McClary discusses works by Laurie Anderson and Janika Vandervelde, both of whom are avant-garde composers. McClary is highly complementary of both women. I cannot understand why Pace would cite McClary as an example of new musicologists disliking avant-garde music. Finally, his belief that new musicologists were trying to destroy the canon is also misleading. While new musicologists certainly did want to remove the hegemonic control of the canon at the university level, many of them professed a strong love for the canon. McClary herself stated:

People often ask me if I regret having written this essay (about Beehtoven and rape). I have lived with the consequences for over thirty years, and no matter how much I publish on modal theory or Kaija Saariaho, I will always be identified with this sentence, nearly always taken out of context. I hasten to mention that I have taught a course on Beethoven quartets every other year since 1980; unless a student has googled me and asked about the controversy, no one in my classes would have any inkling of my presumed hatred of this composer. But no, je ne regrette rien. I still stand by my argument and even my imagery after all these years.

What I love about this quote is that it completely predicts all of Pace’s arguments (the interview is from 2019). She discusses modal counterpoint (a notoriously dense theoretical topic), Kaija Saariaho (an avant-garde composer), and her love of Beethoven. I found this quote on McClary’s Wikipedia page (I did double-check its source). It would not take stellar research to find this quote. If Pace gave a damn about telling the truth he would have realized how facetious his arguments are.

Ironically, the only way that I can explain Pace’s conclusions is if he was a dogmatic scholar, the exact thing he is arguing against. In my honest opinion, I am fairly comfortable claiming that Pace likes classical music (which for the record is fine) and that his love of classical music keeps him from considering anything past his close-minded viewpoint. Instead of critically engaging with the actual nature of modern scholarship, he perceives the slightest critique of the canon and instantly reverts into a defensive state. This hypothesis actually holds water when considering why he cites Timothy Jackson’s article in the now infamous Journal of Schenkerian Studies Vol. 12 to Phillip Ewell’s plenary talk at SMT (here is a written version of Ewell’s points). While I have no intention to rehash the arguments about Schenker (Megan Lavengood has already provided a wonderful rebuttal to those arguments), I do wonder why Pace thinks the JSS volume was so well-argued that it did not deserve criticism. While I could provide a substantial analysis of why the JSS volume was rhetorically dubious, that would take this paper well of the rails. The fact that any Ph.D. doesn’t understand the flaws in Jackson’s argument is somewhat baffling. On their face, these were wild misinterpretations of Ewell’s position or simply made points that Ewell had already refuted in his talk. To cite is to gift authorial status to the author, it is very telling that Pace chooses to cite Jackson.

Why is Pace so enamored by this bad argumentation? At the most fundamental level, being a scholar requires one to think critically about the sources they cite and the quality of arguments made, not the political baggage of those arguments. I think it is clear that Pace has flipped these two beliefs around, and used the political messaging of an article to justify its quality as scholarship. This is simply shoddy scholarship. This poor scholarship is present in Pace’s article as well. He opens by stating: “But several events in the past few years have pushed musicological debates into the columns of national newspapers, from the American academic who claimed that music theory was a ‘racial ideology’ and should be dismantled, to the Oxford professor who allegedly suggested that studying ‘white European music’ caused ‘students of colour great distress’, to the high-profile resignation of a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, reportedly in response to academic ‘cancel culture. These are likely dense arguments that Pace seems to summarize rather simplistically. He does not provide names or links to articles, leaving audiences with what I assume (because he has not proven his ability to summarize other’s arguments accurately) to be his caricature of a summary as a way to make the targets of his attack irrational without having to actually engage with their thought processes. As a reader unaware of the issues he is referencing, I am left to trust Pace simply on his word, not the value of the arguments of the sources he (doesn’t) cite(s). This is problematic because he misrepresents arguments throughout the entire article. When he makes his own arguments, they are bad. There is no way something like this would have passed peer-review in a good scholarly journal. This inability to deal with actual critiques of the canon seems to run against Pace’s desire to actually engage with critical thought about the canon. What is that if not dogmatic?


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