True Left

Why did something so obvious take so long?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/07/decolonise-ears-mozarts-works-may-instrument-empire-students/

Cambridge music students are being instructed to “decolonise the ear” and consider the classical canon as “an imperial phenomenon”.

The works of composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giuseppe Verdi are being taught in relation to topics including European imperialism and Orientalism, as the music faculty pursues work on “curricular decolonisation”.

Undergraduates studying for the course, titled Decolonising the Ear, are taught to consider listening to sound in a “postcolonial” way, while a “music, power, empire” module explores how the classical repertoire is a middle-class and imperial phenomenon.
...
According to a course guide for Decolonising the Ear, undergraduates will examine topics including how musical repertoires could be “complicit… in projects of Empire and neoliberal systems of power”.

Students also learn how “Empire… affected our understanding of what constitutes ‘music’” and how “genres like opera seem particularly susceptible to racialised representations”.

The imperial leitmotif appears in a Western music history course dedicated to studies of “music, power, empire”, which urges students to consider the classical canon as an “imperial phenomenon”.
...
A 2021-22 undergraduate handbook stated that students learn how 19th-century “concepts of middle-class musical value resulted in the creation of a canon of European masterworks”.

The course overview added that this canon was played, enjoyed and patronised by a “musical establishment that was leveraged in the service of patriarchy, class aspiration, and imperial expansion”.
...
The University of Cambridge’s approach followed a reappraisal of music across institutions in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, with the Royal College of Music pledging to examine instruments made from “colonialism” materials and to make its classical curriculum more diverse.

A professor at the University of Oxford also suggested that musical notation is “colonialist”, amidst internal discussion over the question of the curriculum’s “complicity in white supremacy”.

Our enemies are also discussing this:

https://www.amren.com/news/2022/05/decolonise-your-ears-as-mozarts-works-may-be-an-instrument-of-empire-students-told/

"the Royal College of Music pledging to examine instruments made from “colonialism” materials".
Piano keys, for example, are made with ebony and ivory. Are they going to smash up all pianos?

Used to be made - nowadays they are mostly made of wood and plastic, not wood and ivory... I remember practicing on a 1905 Bluthner baby grand with ivory keys... An absolute delight!

Comments like these just prove the point of the article!