A Bevy of Biases

This article is in response to and in broad support of Philip Ewell’s keynote talk, “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame,” given at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, and essay, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” (".fn_cite_year($ewell_2020)."). In his address and its companion essay, Ewell notes how the repertoire we study and teach, as well as the theories we use to explain it, are manifestations of whiteness. My article will show, first, that the repertory used in the development of theories of harmony and form, as well as (and especially) music theory pedagogy comprises a small, unrepresentative corpus of pieces from the so-called “common practice period” of tonal music, mostly the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and only a small subset of their output. We (mis)use this repertory due to a combination of implicit biases that stem from our enculturation as practicing musicians, explicit biases that stem from broadly held aesthetic beliefs regarding the status of “great” composers and particular “masterworks,” and confirmation biases that are manifest in our tendency to use only positive testing strategies and/or selective sampling when developing and demonstrating our theories. The theories of harmony and form developed from this small corpus further suffer from overfitting, whereby theoretical models are overdetermined relative to the broader norms of a musical practice, and from our tendency to conceive of our theoretic models in terms of tightly regulated “scripts” rather than looser “plans.” For these reasons, simply expanding our analytic and/or pedagogical canon will do little to displace the underlying aesthetic and cultural values that are bound up with it. We must also address the biases that underlie canon formation and valuation and the methodologies that inherently privilege certain pieces, composers, and repertoires to the detriment of others. It is thus argued that working toward greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in music theory goes hand in hand with addressing some of the problematic methodologies that have long plagued our discipline.