> Was Schenker promoting a race that he didn't even belong to?
I think this is an error, trying to map our understanding of race onto the past like this. I don't know what race Schenker thought of himself as. He was Jewish, and he consistently asserted the natural superiority of german people and culture. That doesn't cleanly reconcile with any conception of race that I've come across, which indicates to me that those conceptions are not a useful lens here.
My goal wasn't to start up the is-schenkerian-analysis-racist-or-not quagmire here. It was to point out that I believe the author of this essay has misunderstood or misrepresented a more nuanced conflict for their own purposes.
Isn't that what Ewell is doing, by declaring that a 19th-century Jew born in modern-day Ukraine is actually a white German?
And Ewell isn't a Schenker expert - he focuses on Russian and modern music. He does self describe as: "I am an activist for racial, gender, and social justice in the field of music theory."
And he writes stuff like:
> Beethoven occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years, and we have been told by whiteness and maleness that his greatness has nothing to do with whiteness and maleness, in race-neutral and gender-neutral fashion. Thus music theory’s white-male frame obfuscates race and gender, one of its main goals….
Has there ever been a worthy white/male composer, or have they all been problematic racists because of their demographic information?
This guy is, basically, a clown. He, like many social-justice minded people, epitomizes Maslow's hammer. Writing in an academic style or in journals doesn't mean you have anything interesting to say. I did not agree with the author of the original article one bit, but I don't think they did any kind of disservice in their brief take on Ewell's paper(they even linked to it, which is at least a sign of good faith in my opinion).
(It's worth noting the flip side of that argument, too - we literally have historical sources telling us "when you see a composition made of big, white notes, that will sound a lot better if the performer improvises on them melodically on the spot, keeping the overall meter of the white note" (Lorenzo Penna, Li primi albori musicali). And of course, on-the-spot improvisation has been mastered to an unprecedented degree in the modern day by the "black" tradition of Jazz!)