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…

In Part 1 of this series of systems-level commentaries on Racism in Romantic Music (RRM), I discussed how the pervasive racism of the societies in which Romantic musics were born inevitably shaped those societies’ values, ideas in music history and music theory, and their music itself — so that racism…

Dear Constant Reader, I’ve been absent from this blog for a while, partly because I needed to recharge, partly because I’m currently writing a book-length biography of the extraordinary Margaret Bonds, partly because I’ve been working on some new editions. Mostly, though, my absence resulted from the proofs for the…

Some Thoughts on the Fantasie №1 in G Minor for Violin and Piano [First, a bit of context: by the 1930s there was a long tradition of sizeable works for solo violin and piano by men, including the superb composer and violinist Clarence Cameron White, but aside from Amy Beach’s…