This professor <i>almost</i> comes close to getting the actual point of what he dismisses as “cancel culture,” then veers off. From his essay:<p>> Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.<p>Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.
The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge. A critical statement – one that better represents the ideal of scholarship, and of undergraduate and postgraduate education, in my view – would read something more like the following.<p>Nineteenth-century musical works were written during the period of empire, and they carry that history within them. But as well as being part of the imperial world in which they appeared, they are also musical works. As with a protest song written at the time of the Vietnam war (which fell during the US’s imperial epoch), a piece of classical music is simultaneously imbued with the history of its own time and also minimally separated from it as a partially autonomous object. As with a protest song, there therefore exists the possibility that it could offer a form of critique of existing social conditions. There is also the possibility that works of this kind will affirm the existing social conditions. What actually transpires in the music itself is therefore determinative of the question whether we can judge it to be for or against anything in particular.
An outcome of the first, dogmatic statement could be that music departments stop teaching music by Beethoven, Wagner, and co., in the (frankly insane) belief that doing so will somehow materially improve current living conditions for the economically, socially, sexually, religiously, or racially underprivileged.
> (end of quote)<p>What he describes as the correct way of interpreting the history of music IS IN FACT WHAT “DECOLONIZING” THE CURRICULUM WOULD INVOLVE. The broad framework means looking beyond the canonization of great composers into the social and political role they inhabited, and being willing to give a hard look to people once simply beatified as “greats.” It doesn’t mean NOT teaching Beethoven, and nowhere can he find an actual example of a curriculum “canceling” Beethoven except in his thought experiment.<p>I have noticed that people who complain about “critical race theory,” etc. seem not to recognize that re-examining history and culture is about <i>adding to</i> the sum total of human knowledge, not subtracting—restoring the perspectives of people whose lives and histories were purposefully left out of the historical record for centuries, and trying to get a more accurate view as a result.