Or, How Margaret Bonds and Florence Price Came to Be My “Whys” Over the years most of my friends have known me as a musicologist whose interests centered primarily on Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and European music of the long nineteenth century (ca. 1780-ca. 1914). There have been ripples and waves in my stream of my books, articles, and published editions of Mendelssohn’s…

This post is an update to my post of March 26, 2023. As I noted there, in 1912, two years after the death of Dr. James H. Smith, father of Florence Price, her mother, Irene Gulliver Smith, left Arkansas for good, cutting all ties with the family and spending the…

In the last few years, a music-publishing industry that historically has resolutely ignored compositions by composers of color and women has released more editions of music by composers of color and women than they’ve ever before shown any interest in publishing. Make no mistake: the system of music publishing still…

IN TODAY’S POST: (1) European anti-Jewish intellectuals tender a hopelessly confused mélange of cultural anthropology, history, and biology to create a fictious race of “Semites,” who — just as they’ve believed all along — are essentially “different” than the likewise fictitious race of “Aryans” who constitute the supposedly embattled majority…

n Part 1 of this multi-post I talked about the peculiar ways in which the anti-Jewish elements that were ubiquitous and probably foundational to the worlds of Romantic music derived from the thought of the late Enlightenment, and in Part 2 I said a few words about Richard Wagner’s “On…

Updated: a few seconds ago Richard Wagner’s “On Jewry in Music,” first published pseudonymously in 1850 and finally published in pamphlet form under Wagner’s (1813–83) own name in 1869, is one of the most-discussed documents of musical anti-Jewishness in Romantic music. In Part 1 of this post I showed how…

This post and the following three are about the phenomenon of anti-Jewish attitudes and deeds that were pervasive in the musical worlds of the long nineteenth century. All are adapted from the second edition of my forthcoming Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music. Because that book has a great deal of…

As a prefatory exercise for this post, consider the “rule of 4%”: less than four percent of the players in professional orchestras with budgets over $1 million in the U.S. are non-White; less (MUCH less) than four percent of the professionally recorded Romantic music is by non-White composers; and less…

In Parts 1 and 2 of this four-part post I attempted a systems-level analysis of the means and mechanisms (“linchpins”) by which racism saturated the worlds of Romantic music and music historiography while managing to avoid the sort of recognition that is routinely afforded topics such as nationalism, exoticism, organicism…