Philip Ewell Go Down In History

“I believe my mandate as a music teacher is to help my students become better musicians.” – Philip Ewell

Part 1 of Philip Ewell Go Down In History
Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Contents

• • Introduction
  • Academia
  • Musicology
  • Music Theory, Music Literacy and Musical Skill in Academia
  • Philip Ewell Until 2019

Introduction

Though this particular story has already receded into the recent past, their effects on many individuals have not. This essay is directed not only to musicians, but to all individuals who found or still find themselves at a loss for meaningful response to the subversive and successful efforts by Ewell and other Critical Theory adherents to impose their views on the domains or careers of others, or whose work was distracted, destabilized, or impacted financially by the trends that individuals such as Ewell so successfully utilized.

Academic Life

The cool, clear style of published academic writing camouflages an altogether different world. Academic musicologists and music theorists, like most in American academia now, experience enormous frustrations in their daily lives and work. After completing advanced degrees, years or decades can elapse before job applications result in sustainable employment. Some subsist on adjunct positions, or worse, accept full time workloads for unlivable salaries. This has worsened in recent decades as faculty have been tempted even out of teaching into administration, which has in turn consumed more money and resources, while full-time professorships have been replaced piecemeal with hourly adjunct jobs.

Even after successful employment, the rise through faculty ranks can bring shocking obstacles and bitter disillusionment. Even the most gifted and enthusiastic individuals who enter American academia may find their lives and minds soon riddled with stress, doubt, and pressures never remotely anticipated. The politics of tenure, faculty rank and promotion, administration, committees, service, and student life at American universities can feel intensely laborious, petty, and depleting. By the time they achieve tenure, many either want out of academia or disengage from any but the most superficial commitments. Professors may involuntarily accumulate jealousies and resentments even toward former trusted colleagues and friends, leading to feelings of isolation, suspicion, insecurity, and finally burnout or severe mental health crises.

It is not surprising that American Critical Theory itself fermented in such an environment, or that many faculty in all fields have found Critical Theory an appealing and ready-made worldview through which to interpret the personal diminishment and fear that academic life can bring.

Musicology

Musicology is, essentially, the study of the work done by musicians, as distinguished from the study of music itself. It is hard to name any other field, in or out of academia, with a recognized subfield devoted to the exclusive study of itself and its own past and present practitioners. Musicology is one of those academic fields so specialized as to sometimes push esotericism to the bounds of absurdity. Articles like, for example, “German music from the perspective of German musicology after 1933“, suggest it is even useful for musicologists to actually study neither music, musicians, nor musicology, itself but other musicologists. It does not take much thought to realize that the potential for recursive subfields, each one studying practitioners of the previous, is infinite. Most musicologists will note this in good humor. Some will not.

Music Theory, Music Literacy and Musical Skill in Academia

Music theory, characterized variously as either a subset of or separate field from musicology, can be summarized in any case as the study of the exactly nameable and quantifiable elements of music, most often outside of any performance context. These typically involve either explicitly notated items such as pitch, rhythm, harmony, meter, dynamics, etc., or else things generally derivable from analyzing these, such as form, structure, style, linguistic elements, underlying stylistic patterns, and so on.

Even when treating music that is not fully notated, such as jazz, music theorists usually rely on transcriptions or similar written or graphic documentation that can be analyzed with the same methods. When the possibilities within these areas seem to have been exhausted, music theorists, like many in specialized academic fields, may extend esoteric hypotheses and attempt evidential proof, via written papers, about compositional (or improvisational) methods and processes. These regularly extend outside the practitioners’ primary areas of knowledge to nearly any other field, such as linguistics, physics, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, and so on.

Music literacy must be distinguished from musical skill: the ability to perform, or execute, musical ideas with accuracy, comfort, flexibility, and real-time response to context.

Though some music students arrive to music college or conservatory with little or no written music literacy or skill, most arrive with some, and some arrive with advanced written and aural skill integrated into performance ability. Of this latter group, many are astonished to discover how desperately their theory professors and graduate assistants struggle aurally even with the rudiments of music, rhythm in particular, and to witness how quickly their skills collapse when confronting anything not expressed visually or verbally. Standard introductory textbooks exceed five-hundred pages and are taught with such verbosity and ponderous elaboration that students can feel almost as if they are being made to restudy, for example, the alphabet, or first-grade grammar.

The fact that others may feel very challenged is no better success on the part of teachers or curriculum planners. There are surely exceptions, but the level of musical skill, as well as musical literacy, among American both academic faculty and students has declined noticeably over even the last few decades. Which group has brought down the other could be a topic for endless study.

It is important to recognize that almost no one in the world, even among professional musicians, generally reads, listens to, or cares about what academic music theorists or musicologists think, write, or say. Here again I intend not to offend but to inform. The primary audience for musicologists and music theorists is, in fact, other musicologists and music theorists. Though trends and fashions in academic music scholarship may be of central importance in the lives of the small populations who study them, it is easy for those practitioners to forget just how hermetic and self-reinforcing life in academia really is.

Most classical musical audience and laity in America, along with the general population, are only barely aware of musicology or music theory as distinct professions. Music theory papers, when read at all, are mostly read in specialized academic journals, or aloud at conferences of other professors. Seldom does debate of any kind make its way out of the insular, tenure-seeking world driven by the pressure to publish in order to remain employed.

That is the reason Philip Ewell’s sudden rise to international visibility is so remarkable.

Philip Ewell Until 2019

Ewell spent most of his previous career producing a small but respectable bibliography of writings on Russian composers including Scriabin, Gubaidulina, Rimsky-Korsakov, and topics related to Russian opera and music theory, rap, hip-hop, sampling, and race. Prior to his present position at Hunter College, CUNY, he taught theory at North Central College, Naperville, Illinois and the University of Tennessee School of Music, Knoxville, where he had various duties in administration, curriculum development, advising, and thesis supervision. As emphasized above, he also played cello on faculty recitals, and coached student cellists. He has also taught cello.

How did Ewell manage to leverage such inauspicious circumstances to international attention in only a few years?

> Part 2 : That Scared the Shit Out of Them: A New Narrative