About a decade ago, someone published an article in my field of music theory arguing that the composer Igor Stravinsky’s early-period music was not, in fact, organized primarily around the octatonic scale, but rather on a smattering of other more traditional scales, including rotations of the harmonic minor scale. While this may seem innocuous and esoteric, this claim was a swipe at the work of a more-established author who had spent much of his career arguing the exact opposite. What followed was a series of somewhat vicious back-and-forths in the pages of that journal arguing both sides of the case, attacking each other’s methods and knowledge of Igor Stravinsky’s music.
Academic debates are so juicy because they are so personal and so petty. The great debate of the 90s as to whether key is better determined by a passage’s intervallic content or its pitch content. The vicious conflagration a few years earlier as to whether prolongation was an essential aspect of the concept of “tonality.” These are the stuffs of academic soap operas. Of course, for most of the world, none of this matters. But for a few people, the legitimacy of years of work – a lifetime of work – is at stake. Even if the opposing side has a point, giving up ground means giving up some of the validity and authority you’ve been working so long to acquire.
The story of the golden calf is one of the most iconic of the Old Testament. It was one of the first Bible stories I remember learning when I was a child. And even then it seemed so perplexing. The Hebrews have been led out of Egypt following a series of miraculous plagues that had been called forth by Moses. They had not only witnessed Moses parting the Red Sea, but had walked through that sea on dry land. Then they watched the water swallow up Pharaoh’s army. Their leader, Moses, literally has conversations with God. And then Moses goes away for a few days and the tribes and their leaders quickly forsake the practices preached by Moses. They build a golden calf as an idol to worship.
Now, a little research reveals that calves and bulls were common deities and idols in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time and could even have been a manifestation of an earlier form of Judaism, in which the God of Israel was associated with the image of a calf or bull. What’s going on here is that the people are sliding back into an older practice at the absence of their leader.
We read this story and find it nearly impossible to empathize with. In the story as told by the scriptures: for the last days, weeks, and months, these people witnessed a steady stream of miracles. Moses was preaching adherence to the one true God, and these people were witnessing the power and actions of that God first hand. The things Moses is teaching are obviously correct. Even if these are new and progressive ideas, they can see their benefits with their own eyes. The evidence is right in front of them. And yet, at the first moment of Moses’s absence, they shrug off those ideas and return to an older practice of idol worship.
But then I think about academic disputes. I think of how much self-worth people can have tied into concepts that seem so petty and how tenaciously people hold onto ideas that are part of their identity. I then imagine throngs of people who grew up with ideas of gods-as-idols or God as needing to be manifested in an object in order to be worshiped. It would have been obvious to them that when they wanted to worship, they needed an object, and that object should be gold, and it should be a bull… and sure, they’ve heard from Moses that this isn’t what they should be doing, but Moses isn’t here and who is he, after all, to tell us that the ways we’ve been worshiping all our lives are wrong, it’s the way I worshiped as a kid, and it’s how my parents worshiped, and it’s always worked before so LET’S MAKE THAT COW.
There was a recent flare up in my field that was unlike most academic disputes. A music theorist named Phil Ewell – he works at Hunter College in New York – pointed out music theory’s connections to white supremacy in a lecture at our national conference last year, and then in a subsequent article he published. His logic was that the music we study and the methods and thought-systems we use are infused with the outlooks held by thinkers in 19th and early-20th century Western Europe. That thinking includes notions like a male dominated society, and white supremacy. And it’s not hard to find symptoms of this within my field– greater than 90% of full-time music theorists are white. If you could the musical examples that appear in the most-used music-theory textbooks, only 1.67% of examples are by non-white composers.
And of course there has been pushback. We can put this pushback into two categories. The first is the “arguing against” camp. Here, you say things like: “Just because a composer or theorist we study held racist beliefs, doesn’t mean their music or scholarship was racist. We are teaching our inherited culture – it’s of course wrong that women and people of color were excluded from Western European classical music, but that’s simply a historical fact – that tradition is our tradition, and it’s a tradition of white men. We can’t take away time from studying the great works of this tradition – the Beethovens and Brahmses (“The Music I Love and I Grew Up With”) – it’s great music, and we’d be doing a disservice by studying it less in order to make room for whatever “diverse” music you might be trying to push into my classroom.”
The second camp is the inertia camp. And I have to confess, I realize that I find myself in this encampment far too often. Here, you say things like: “I’ve taught this class using these pieces for 20 years, and it just sounds exhausting to have to learn new music let alone learn a new style. I can’t go out and find new music, I’ll just rely on what the textbooks provide me. I don’t have time, I have other priorities, other people will do it, it’s always worked this way… why change.”
But it’s just so obvious that classical music has a race problem. If we’re only white folks – and mostly white men – only studying music by white men, and only teaching music by white men to our students… that’s a problem. It’s the kind of problem that we need to solve NOW. And it’s the kind of problem that people will look back at 20 years from now and wonder why people were arguing about it. Why were people defending the status quo? Why wasn’t everyone doing something?
I’m using an example from my corner of academia, but it’s an example in a sea of so many. We can look back at almost all progresses causes with this kind of incredulity. It just seems so impossibly wrong that people were arguing against or lazily indifferent to women’s suffrage a hundred years ago. That enslavement was up for debate and compromise 150 years ago. That the ability of same sex couples to have a family was on ballots 15 years ago. Believing women two years ago. Black Lives Matter seven months ago. Soon it will be climate change, or essential worker’s rights. And at each of these junctures, there exist a plethora of reasons why these causes should be supported, reasons that in retrospect seem so obvious. But people argued against these reasons, often letting their want to keep things the same shield them from seeing rational evidence in front of their faces. And people ignored it. It wasn’t there problem. And the status quo has worked forever, so why change it.
This is how I make sense of the Israelites desire to make the golden calf. A bunch of folks were falling back into how they had always done it. Some thought the new, progressive teachings of Moses were going too far, even in the face of plenty of evidence that Moses was teaching the literal word of God. And some just didn’t want to think about it. The easy thing to do was to fall back into old habits.
Adopting progressive causes – causes like curtailing white supremacy – means taking risks. It means doing hard things. It means being willing to work harder than you would under the status quo. It means looking at the evidence you see around you rather than just relying on inherited assumptions. It means discarding arguments like: “because it’s always been this way,” “this is just the way things naturally should be,” or “doing that would take too much time and too many resources.” It’s taking the long view. It’s wondering what people in 20 or 100 years will think.
Now stories of progressive ideas can have their ups and downs, and just because something is progressive, it doesn’t mean it’s right. The story in Exodus takes a very Old Testament turn in the next several verses, where Moses orders those who were not worshiping the calf to murder those who were. It’s a dark story. Progressive ideas can go too far, and they can become warped.
But I hope this story challenges us to check ourselves when our intuition tells us to stick with the status quo instead of building a better future. To not do the easy wrong thing, but to do the hard, right thing. If you’ve been meaning to donate to a charity but have been putting it off, do that this week. If you’ve been putting off calling a friend who might be going through a hard time, but you’re worried about how awkward it might be, do the hard thing and call them. Try to break yourself of some unhealthy habit. Think twice when a politician tells you that right now everything’s fine, and that people who are advocating for change are just whiney and weak complainers. And when some Moses challenges us to follow a new, better way, don’t ignore the miracles, logic, and beauty of that new way. Walk the hard road.
Amen.