In this week’s episode, Phil Ewell sits down with Dwight Andrews to talk about his keynote at the Theorizing African American Music conference and their experiences in the field of music theory.

This episode was produced by Megan Lyons.

SMT-Pod Theme music by Zhangcheng Lu; Closing music "hnna" by David Voss. Undine Smith Moore's "Before I'd Be A Slave" is performed by Geoffrey Burleson. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/season02/.

[SMT-Pod opening theme music playing]

Welcome to SMT-Pod! The premiere audio publication of the Society for Music Theory. In this week’s episode, Phil Ewell sits down with Dwight Andrews to talk about his keynote at the Theorizing African American Music conference and their experiences in the field of music theory.

[Bumper Music]

 Hi, my name is Philip Ewell and I am here with Dwight Andrews. And instead of me just giving a brief introduction on this pod, what I'm going to do, since Dwight gave this beautiful keynote address at the theorizing African American Music Conference back in June in Cleveland, I'm going to go ahead and read my introduction because it has lots of useful information about Dwight Andrews and then we're gonna segue into a conversation here. So, by way of introduction

In his 1993 Yale University Music theory doctoral dissertation, An Analytical Model of Pitch and Rhythm, in the Early Music of Igor Stravinsky, a young Dwight Andrews, quote, "In addition to the advocates of an axis theory, there are at least two other distinct schools of thought with regard to Stravinsky’s pitch organization. One views Russian folk music as the primary source of Stravinsky’s melodic and harmonic language; the other focuses on unordered pitch class sets as the basic underlying harmonic structure for Stravinsky's music of this period. The Russian folk music proponents include Richard Taruskin and his many essays on the subject. The latter group would include the influential studies by Allen Forte, Pieter van den Toom, and others interested in the structural organization of the repertoire. My own theoretical model is indebted to both these viewpoints."

Reading that last sentence, “My own theoretical model is indebted to both these viewpoints,” one from Richard Taruskin, the other from Allen Forte, I thought to myself, “now I know why it took Dwight so long to finish that damn Yale dissertation!” I first heard the name Dwight Andrews around ten years ago when I asked our mutual friend Joe Straus if he knew of other black music theorists aside from Horace Maxile. Joe immediately said, “well there’s Dwight Andrews,” since they were classmates at Yale in the 1980s. I was of course surprised when Joe told me that there was a black music theorist who had written on Russian music under Allen Forte ten years prior to my time at Yale when I did exactly the same. But I’m not surprised that it took so long for me and Dwight to connect, since it’s African American music that brings us together now, and so often such music has been actively suppressed in the academic study of music in our country.

It's been great to get to know Dwight over email and zoom these past several months, and our conversations are always invigorating. Both he and I spoke of that necessary compartmentalization of our love for black music as we finished our Yale music theory PhDs, and how silly it was that we couldn’t just openly love black music while at Yale. On the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta since 1987, Dwight’s a performer, pedagogue, minister, and an extremely well-published author and composer. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in music from the University of Michigan, and continued his studies at Yale, where he received a Master of Divinity degree in addition to his Ph.D. in Music Theory. Dwight served as music director for the Broadway productions of August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", Joe Turner's "Come and Gone", "Fences", "The Piano Lesson", and "Seven Guitars".

He also served as Music Director for the Broadway revival production of "Ma Rainey" starring Charles Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg and collaborated with Director Kenny Leon on the Broadway production of "A Raisin in the Sun", starring Sean Combs and Phylicia Rashad. Dwight’s film credits include PBS Hollywood’s "The Old Settler", Louis Massiah’s documentaries "W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices" as well as Louise Alone Thompson: "In Her Own Words", Charlene Gilbert’s "Homecoming", and HBO’s "Miss Evers’ Boys". Dwight has served as a multi-instrumentalist sideman on over twenty-five jazz and “new music” albums with various artists including, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, James Newton, Wadada Leo Smith, and Jay Hoggard.

He recently appeared as a sideman on Andy Bey’s Grammy-nominated American Song and Geri Allen’s: The Life of a Song". He is presently working on a study of Black Music and Race based on his Harvard lectures and a manuscript on spirituality in the works of John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, Sun Ra, Dave Brubeck, and Albert Ayler. Dwight has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2005 Lexus Leader of the Arts Award, a Pew Trust/TCG Artist Residency Fellowship, and Emory University's Distinguished Teacher Award. In 1997 he was named the first Quincy Jones Visiting Professor of African American Music at Harvard University, and he was a guest visiting professor of composition at the Yale School of Music in 2003. He is the recipient of the Reiser Theatre Fellowship, through which he is creating a chamber opera on W.E.B. Dubois with filmmaker and MacArthur fellow Louis Massiah and is currently a Hutchins Research Fellow at Harvard University. Finally, he’s been a consultant on two PBS documentaries on gospel music produced by Henry Louis Gates.

Toward the end of his 1993 Yale dissertation, the young Dwight Andrews alluded to his true musical love, African American music, by referencing Stravinsky’s love of the same, quote, "It is no accident that Stravinsky would, for a time, turn to jazz and ragtime as resources for new rhythmic sensibilities. It seems clear also that Stravinsky had already synthesized the harmonic language of early jazz by the time he encountered it in the nineteen teens. Thus, it is the gestures and swing of ragtime, rather than its formal organization or harmonic progression that fascinated the great composer. It is fitting to conclude with Stravinsky’s own remarks. Unlike many other of his comments, here he is clear, direct, and compelling. ‘Music exists when there is rhythm, as life exists when there is a pulse."

Like Stravinsky, Dwight would turn to jazz, ragtime, and other African American musical art forms for work and for inspiration. I would put to you all, as Stravinsky said about music writ large, that African American music exists when there is a rhythm and pulse, not only in the music, but of scholars like Dwight Andrews who are there to unpack it all for us and for our posterity. Please join me in welcoming Dwight Andrews. And here, of course, thunderous applause. Those were my opening remarks at the Theorizing African American Music Conference, Dwight, it's great to have you here.

Thanks, Phil. It's great to be with you.

I'm going to start off by asking some questions and we're just going to have an open conversation based on a few of these questions. So first, I'm going to let you get started by telling us a little bit, how you started in music and where you got your training.

Sure, that's easy. I grew up in Detroit Michigan in the 1950s and 60s and was a product of the public school system in Detroit, which was actually very, very good. And, like most public-school systems, all the students had to take, kind of compulsory music classes. Everyone had to sing in the choir, whether you could sing or not, everyone had to take up an instrument by the fourth grade, and I was a part of that generation where we thought it was really important for music and art to be a part of the general education for all students. And so, I was a beneficiary of great teachers and a great curriculum and a lot of exposure to a lot of different types of music as a very young person. I started on the clarinet and kept that all the way through high school.

I was lucky enough to go to a school for the arts called Cass Technical High School in Detroit, which had actually a music a vocational music program. And so many of the most talented young students in Detroit studied at Cass, and we just had a wonderful experience. Really, a kind of deep dive into music, classical music at that time, but it was wonderful because we had a chance to learn all of this repertoire and we had so many different ensembles. And as a freshman, I can remember, I think I mentioned to you sometime ago, hearing Dumbarton Oaks being played by high school kids and the Enigma Variations being played by the orchestra. I mean, it was just amazing. And I so, I think it was my time at Cass that was really pivotal for me because I heard so much wonderful music in a variety of periods and languages and that kind of sealed the deal for me. And so that I was my early training. I then went to the University of Michigan and majored first in Music Education but then, I got my Master’s Degree in Clarinet because I really was fascinated by repertoire and I really loved performance and practicing. And that's how it all happened for me!

Hang on, you loved practicing? Haha!

I, well, you know, at Michigan, remember at Michigan, everyone was practicing all the time. You were practicing or you were rehearsing. And I loved that because you didn't really, you just had to do it and so I loved the kind of tactile part of it and it was a very competitive environment . You couldn't not practice because, not only the competition, but the sense of vitality that all these young, gifted performers had. And so I was taken with that and really inspired by the other students.

Excellent. And from there you went on to a Yale doctoral program, of course, Divinity studies too. Tell us a little bit about the music theory graduate studies at Yale in the 1980s, that must have been very interesting.

Well, interesting would be one word for it. There are probably other words that one could use. But I had a very rich and complicated experience at Yale, probably like most graduate students at Yale. You know, from your own experience, the division of Music Performance and Composition from the Department of Music, in my day, really complicated your graduate school experience. The faculties were quite separate, there was sometimes some enmity between the School of Music and the musicologists and music theorists. And, even within the music department, there was sometimes division between the musicologists, who thought they had the sole handle on their music, and the music theorists who, of course, had a deeper understanding, as we all know music theorists do. So, it was a lot of fervent debate going on and many of us graduate students were caught in the middle of it. I loved my time at Yale precisely because it was such a rich environment.

Great historians and theorists like David Loorn and Allan Forte and Claude Palisca, I mean, really, are a part of the canon of the study now to be replaced by the next generation. It was a rich time to be there, but at the very same time, Yale provided me the opportunity to be conversation with fantastic performers at the School of Music and wonderful composers like Jake Druckman and Martin Bresnick and so, there was just a joie de vivre at that time. And, the other nexus point, Phil, was frankly, that African American studies was just beginning at Yale at that same time, in the early 70s. And so, I was a recipient and a witness to this evolving study of African American culture, life, and history. And, to be a part of that and to be both a witness and ultimately, become a student of African American culture was also pivotal. Because, here I was, getting a very rigorous music theory training, but for the first time, frankly, I was getting an introduction to African American culture that I had not had by being a student in these PWI institutions for the bulk of my young adulthood. So, it was a turning point.

That's excellent and just so we're all clear, PWI, Predominantly White Institution. I find that not everyone knows that, PWI, but everyone now knows HBCU, of course.

[Theron Brown Quartet Playing]

I have a question here, how did you handle your love of Black American musical genres with your music theory training? And that, I would expand that question a little bit to be, how did you handle being a black person in a white space in the 1980s? I could answer the same question of course, being a black person in a 1990s at the Yale Department of Music, in Music Theory, but I'm interested, from your perspective in the 1980s, ten years earlier, how was it, to be a Black person in a white space and how did you handle your love of Black American musical genres, vis a vis, the music theory training you were getting?

Well, I think I'm probably not like other young people who, in a sense, we're bilingual, right? We have music that we listen to at home and at night and it's quite different from the music we study and analyze in the day. I think we took that for granted, we didn't necessarily have to study James Brown and funk music in our theory seminar or on rhythm. And so, we came with this understanding, a kind of tacet understanding that one could love both types of musics, but one did not require either to be devoted to the other. That was never really a conflict for me because in those days, the idea of other black students doing graduate work in musicology, I mean, we were kind of on the frontier and happy to be on the frontier, frankly, because, I think, within our minds, we had something to contribute, which eventually got supported by my professors at Yale.

But at the very same time, I participated in this musical culture that I loved and felt no conflict that I wasn't studying it in my music theory classes. Which is one of the dramatic changes within the last few decades, you know, because many students now want to study who they are in their theory classes. They want to know, why not more Black music, why not Hip-Hop, you know, etcetera. These are really important and vital questions but they also come with very important discernment processes that is, if we want to bring these additional repertoires into our core studies of music theory, then we need to figure out what's appropriate, what are the appropriate tools, what are the appropriate questions? Quite frankly, I don't think we've gotten there yet. We seem to be in this strange time where our collective guilt about not having acknowledged Black people and Black culture for four-hundred years. Now, we want to do it, but we want to do it in a way where, I hope, will not further denigrate the study of the people by taking it for granted.

Right, right. Let me press you on that a little bit, in terms of the appropriate-ness or the appropriate tools, appropriate pathways, if I could, because that's a question, of course, we all ask ourselves, and I wonder what your perspective might be on that. What might be appropriate tools and techniques in music theory to be teaching now in 2023? I know, it's a difficult question, but we all think about it.

Yeah. That really is a tough question and I think every day, we go into our teaching with those questions in mind. And my ideas are changing, quite frankly, because as a theorist in the 1980s and 90s studying, I really had completely taken -- I drank the Kool-aid! I wanted to be a theory professor. I wanted to be, you know, an Allen Forte in Brown because of, I think, my admiration for this deep approach to music that I love but then had a new appreciation that it could be studied in terms of its architecture, and structure, and sub-structures, that, you know, frankly, as a clarinet player, I had never really thought about.

I really became a devotee of these other ways of looking at music. But, because of that, I completely committed to, at that time, the method and the methodology and ultimately bringing myself into that conversation as a theorist. But now, I think, our challenge is slightly different because many students who are studying music theory, they are studying it because, it's a requirement for their major and many of them have quite different musical goals than I might of have had decades ago. And so, part of the question is, studying theory or theorizing to what end? And I think that, the end of including African American music, really, requires us to ask a different set of questions. As you well know, you and I could dig into a motive in a Beethoven Piano Sonata and discuss it all day, and then have lunch and come back and rethink the structure of that and love it!

Exactly.

But, that is not necessarily the questions of what present music students are asking. But for me, the primary theorizing of African American music and teaching it, has to begin with an understanding or an acknowledgment that the music has a different function, and that the music has a different set of aesthetic and organizational principles. It’s tied back to the culture. So it's not quantifying how many tetrachords of x, y, and z are imbricated in a particular instance. That misses the point.

Wait, you just said, Dwight, you just said "imbricated", stop swearing, please! Haha!

Haha! Well, you know I have these words in my forehead and in my chest, I mean, I feel like I was wearing tattoos! Oh my God! I look back in horror because I really had become a disciple, I mean, there was a part of me that loved excelling, I think, at that language, that method, at that approach.

And it's fascinating because I'm thinking for the conflict within a Black person, within Blackness. As we were doing this, I remember once, I had a friend who played with Sonny Rollins on the green in New Haven right across the street from the Yale music department on Elm Street, and as I was watching the concert, I felt like I was an undercover agent going to see this concert! As a was a Yale doctoral student! I'm like. "well, I can't let anybody see me here, obviously." Haha! It was Sonny Rollins! You know what I'm talking about, right?

I know exactly what you're talking about! But, I think that's part of, both the challenge and the opportunity! I, frankly, didn't feel conflicted about loving all of these repertoires at once, I did feel at certain points, and asked myself, why are these other important musics not a part of the conversation? And, that's what lead me to, actually, my dissertation. I think I mentioned to you in a sidebar that, you know, when I listened to Petrushka, or The Rite of Spring, or The Soldier's Tale, there's a certain familiarity with that sound that had to do with those tetrachords, those diatonic tetrachords that, I think, Charlie Parker was interested in, certainly John Coltrane was interested in. I heard it, intuitively, in the music.

But I, I wanted to ask the question, what's the why of that? Why, you know, in these tonal musics, or tonally centered musics. And so that's what lead me, originally, to my dissertation. I, early on, understood, that I would not be able to ask that question in my dissertation. Because, as David [Unclear] reminded me, it's just a dissertation, you want to live through it. And so, I couldn't ask that bigger question but, asking those question has been a guiding part of my work to understand what's the common terrain of some of these musical practices that can help us understand both. And certainly within tonally centered music, there are references that we can understand how they are shaped and organized. But, I didn't, in a sense, struggle with my identity versus this majority identity of the repertoire, remember, that was the only music I had studied, right? In other words, I'd never heard of Black composers writing concert clarinet music until I was in graduate school, until I was at Yale!

I knew Florence Price by name, but nothing of her music because that was not a part of my training at Michigan. We studied the repertoire, we studied Mozart, we studied Brahms. And you know, I studied, even when I played the Stravinsky three pieces for clarinet, it never occurred to me that there were other composers writing music in the 20th century who were African American because that was a part of my miseducation. As I think I evolved, I began to discover that there are African American composers writing this music, and that kind of broadened my horizon, kind of, in reverse.

Absolutely. Before we leave Yale, maybe you could talk, you mentioned, you had had an interaction with Amiri Baraka while you were at Yale. That he, that you had interesting conversations with him. I'm sure the listeners would love to hear a little bit about Amiri Baraka, if you could.

So, part of the amazing history of Yale, was that the African American studies program, I think at that time, before it became a department, really made use of many of the brilliant minds and creatives of the day who came and did visiting professor stints at Yale. So, the litany of names was just unbelievable during my time there. But Baraka, LeRoi Jones, was there for, actually, a few years as a visiting professor. And his office was right next to mine in African American studies. And so, everyday, there was a debate about something, you know? Why did Coltrane abandon the Blues? And I'd go, "what are you talking about?" and he had, you know, all of these perspectives that, he just had a different take on the culture and the music that really was an important part of my education. It was really Baraka and really, his own creative juices, but also his perspective of looking at the relationship between music and the people that really changed the whole way I thought about music and culture. So, I owe him a great debt, if any of our listeners have not read Blues People, I encourage them to do so because remember, Baraka was the one who said the music and the people is the same.

The music and the people is the same. And that fractured way of saying it says everything. And so, he helps us to understand what happens between slavery and reconstruction or between the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance or the post renaissance kind of fissures and fractures. And it was Baraka that really opened me up to, not a one-sided way of looking at Black culture and music, but the multifaceted aspects of Black music and Black culture. You know, for example, why have historically Black colleges been so slow to accept jazz themselves as a worthy part of a curriculum? And to understand that is to understand Black intellectual history and to understand the languages of Alain Locke and DuBois and others. And that was very, very instructive. That helped to shape my way of thinking post that. And, as you know, Baraka, pulled no punches on his own view of Black culture in its richness and also in its contradictions, and so, that was a guiding matter. We argued about John Coltrane forever. He would always tease me because he knew that I had gone to seminary, and he would say "you still doing that preaching stuff?"

Haha, nice!

But, had a wonderful experience once playing with him. Backing him up in one of his poet readings in Brooklyn. He was still in his post-marxists phase, so I mean, he had kind of the Mao cap and, you know. It was just-- he was just an interesting figure. He was one of a kind and so that was really cool.

Yeah, and he pulls no punches. I remember reading Jazz in the Avant Garde, I think, and where he was speaking about Thelonious Monk and he was also talking about Franz Liszt, and then he comes to his conclusions. It's like, "but none of this would take away from the simple fact that Thelonious Monk was a better composer than Franz Liszt!" And it’s just kinda like "yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm okay with that!" But you know, obviously that's what a white framework has said about white composers over African American composers, well, since time immemorial. So, it's interesting to see it from that perspective.

[Bumper Music]

Okay, so we've touched on it in the next couple of questions already. What was theorizing African American music back then, and what is it now? And do you see paths or possibilities for theorizing African American music in mainstream music theory or mainstream music academies? You did touch on it, but, maybe we can think about the possibilities aspect of theorizing African American music in our mainstream, which is to say PWI, right? Predominantly White Institutions, mainstream music theory and music, academies.

Yeah, it's a great question. And I have thought a lot about that. In my day, sounding like an old grandpa, we didn't have theorizing African American music. We were theorizing African American music, but we didn't call it "Theorizing African American music", and so I, I think, once again, going back to those early days at Yale and the subsequent evolution of Black studies, I think we were theorizing Black music even then. But we didn't call it that. The instructions were coming from the creatives themselves and once again, this is why I owe such a great debt to Yale, because it was really, in the Yale context, you know, we were studying our theory in the music department, but I was also getting a chance to hear lectures and become friends with great writers and thinkers who had already evolved a way of thinking about Black culture in which music was a key part. You know, Toni Morrison was at Yale in those days, June Jordan was there, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, these great writers and thinkers, and they had very, very, clear, impassioned, evolved understandings of Black music and culture.

And so, they were theorizing in the sense that they were, kind of, unfolding and understanding of Black music, but it was in a broader cultural context. And so, I think that was where the theorizing was going on. And if we look at where we are now in the 21st century, much of the work that, kind of, contextualizing Black music in a broader framework — thee work of Fred Moten and Krin Gabbard [unclear] and so many others. Brent Edward — I mean, they're really kind of providing a way of looking at music in a way different, but still theorizing, kind of, how these practices come together. It raises really important and difficult questions, I think for, say, traditional music departments, which oftentimes, want to create an object that can be unpacked, but at the very same time, it doesn't necessarily require a certain cultural competence of how to understand music in, for example, in African American culture.

And so for that reason, you know, I'm always concerned that when we include pop music, for example, in our theory program, that we have an aesthetic, as well as theoretical, way to begin that study. Otherwise we come up with a really silly and simplistic way of analyzing repetitions, and ostinati, and call and response, and all of these things that we ascribe that really don't deepen our understanding. And so, the question is how do we, in the four years that we have undergraduates, how do you reeducate them right into the possibilities of what music theory, not only was, but what it should be, in a way that serves all of the repertoires and all of the different traditions.

Right. What it should be and what it can be, right? Because we do still have this massive edifice of music theory as this counterpoint, linear analysis, harmony, you know, voice leading, and then of course we get into the 20th century we talk about pitch class sets, and Riemannian ideas. And it's that edifice that makes it very difficult to bring in a cultural and a humanistic side. And that is why I, often say that African American genres are kind of stripped of their humanity in order to be kind of then presented. And Amiri Baraka made exactly that point, in terms of the appropriation of such genres. So just a couple more questions, Dwight, this is a fascinating.

Go back though, you said something very important though because, I think, and you've helped us understand this in so many ways. When we strip down the musical practice from its humanity and, once again, make it a subject that also has its own profound racial dynamic, right? That is, you can separate the cultural product from the people (because the people are secondary to the product for my introspection) and that is racist in its very nature, right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

That's why we have to, as you say, we have to kind of make sure that we are requiring that that doesn't happen because it will then predict the result of what your analysis, in quotation marks, gives you.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think it was James Baldwin who said something like, "ours is a history we must tell over and over and over again." Because the efforts to simply erase that history are so intense, right? So, a couple more questions here. Dwight, in your opinion, why are there today virtually no African American music theorists in our mainstream music institute institutions today?

That's probably one of the, on one level, one of the most obvious questions or answers. But on another level it's a much more difficult question to answer. I think that there are very few African American music theorists today, in part because to be in the pipeline of embracing music theory as a subject or an area of study, I think, you have to start that pipeline so early on in order to get people interested in that. This could be a very interesting vocation and I think for many people, today, for many young students today, as they look at vocations, for example, you know, "I want to grow up and be a music theorist" Just doesn't seem to rise to the the level of importance that perhaps a generation or so ago. But also it's because I think that the present generation doesn't see a relevance for music theory in that same way. And also they don't want to necessarily continue to build a structure that keeps not asking important questions. So I think it's, for many people, many African Americans, don't see the relevance of it. They don't see themselves on the faculty, you know how many of us there are.

And so that means there are a lot of students, music students, brilliant music students, who could be serious but because they don't see us, That limits their exposure to us. And until we had that big conference that you so wonderfully produced the last summer, I mean, I think that there were many students who didn't even know we existed! And so, you know, there's ignorance is part of it, relevance is another part of it, the changing ecology of how we prepare students and, in a sense, un-prepare them for music theory careers by the time they get to college is also a part of it. I mean, I had studied a lot of this stuff before I got to college, and so this was not foreign to me. But I had a very specific music training that allowed me to become a graduate student in music theory. Had I not gone to Cass, had I not gone to Michigan, had I not already studied Hindemith’s Elementary, you know, remember the, the workbook? The Elementary, Oh, dictation practice. I can't remember the title.

But that was all a part of my, you know, growing up. That is not growing up as the average student today and I think that is in part why we have such a limited number of African American music theorists. Think about it this way. Henry Louis Gates has been so successful at building the discipline, but he's also, in some ways, become the face of the discipline. I mean, people, even if you're not a student, you see Skip all of these different documentaries that tell us what you thought about Africa is wrong! Here's the way Africa can be taught. Here's how Black religion could be looked at-- that's engaging. And we see him as the public face and I think we, you and I and our colleagues, have to probably build a better social presence among our potential future music theorists or music scholars. And the term theory might be also itself, kind of, antiquated because it implies all this stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the follow up question here, is what's holding back African Americans from pursuing music theory as a career? Maybe I can make that even a little bit more pointed. And what you just said that, you know, there's, this kind of antiquated way or, you know, this is the harmony, linear voice leading, counterpoint, and those things that people still clinging to and they still actually believe is without question the most important thing a about music theory, right? Rather than just accepting music theory as theorizing music, right? Which can take many, many forms on our planet. So I guess the question would be, if there's something holding back African-Americans from pursuing music theory is there something specifically might change within our academies as they exist today? Because I, I can see what you're saying, to a degree is.. I think that we have what I call "Bladar", right? Our Black Radar, which kind of just says, "you know what? I don't need to go there. That's a dark alley I don't need to go down", right?

And, I think music theory, our "Bladar" kind of tells us that's not a place that's going to be very welcoming to ideas that I could put forth. And I wonder, is there something that, perhaps we could suggest to do to our mainstream academies? Is there, is there a way to be more effective at integrating African American musical ideas into our institutions? Of course, it has to be bilateral, right? A two-way street with the power structures as they are, and they're of course, very conservative structures that don't want these things to change -- I get that. But is there something else that you could point to from your perspective along these lines?

I think part of the possibility is it is the way in which music theory, by definition, privileges a certain world and repertoire that for many people is irrelevant to what they think about in terms of music. And so, part of what we can do within the discipline is we can broaden the set of questions. I mean, you framed, not theorizing in that small way, but theorizing music in a hugely global way, which asks a whole different set, or additional sets of questions, that then begins to chip away at the way in which we privilege certain repertoire, right? That this is a great piece of music because it does all of the theoretical things that we say, great pieces of music do, you know? When you start with that, I can guarantee who's going to come out on top at the end of that race.

But is there a different way of asking questions about, when we are theorizing music, what are the other sets of questions that should be put on the table, not just for Black music, but for all musics? That would in a sense, change the way in which we consider what theorizing is. And I think it, part of it, has to do with the issue of aesthetics and the way in which the European formulas for an aesthetic and our concretizing that by this scientific form of music theory, you know, I mean, they kind of, mutually reinforce one another. And it kind of says, this is why this music is in and this is why this other music is not in, because when you look at it, theoretically it doesn't meet the benchmark. I think that it invites the music theorists and the music departments to just ask what could we do differently? And to what end?

And I think that if we, for example, took a moment to look at Black music as a possible platform to ask additional questions, which not only would be self-referential, but give us a different way of thinking of, say, music in the early 20th century. What changes? And why? And to what end? Once again, I think this opens up a different set of questions. I think theory will always be, until we change the big rubric, I think theory as it presently stands, you know, as we quantify, you know, we say how many of these, how many of that, what are the overlaps? I think, we have an opportunity to kind of rethink the questions that we asked. I read a paper recently on John Coltrane, that does such a detailed analysis of some of his four note partitions in, oh, some of the late work. And it's an amazingly detailed quantifying of Coltrane. That I think understanding the music of John Coltrane is completely irrelevant to the music making that Coltrane did and, in a sense, ultimately misses the point of Coltrane's music. And so that's what I'm trying to get to get.

Yeah. Yeah. There's quite a bit of that actually, I find, in contemporary music theory where pop music scholars, jazz music scholars, there's lots of quantifying, there's lots of graphs and little arrows and nodes and networks. But again, that's part of the stripping of the humanity, right? The taking away of Blackness. That is, well, to quote again, Amiri Baraka, that's appropriation and it's unseemly in my opinion. There's a lot better ways to be theorizing African American music than all of the quantifying, all of the objectification, right, that, that goes along with that. My name is Phil Ewell and I have been talking with Dwight Andrews, professor of music at Emory, who gave an amazing keynote at our Theorizing African American Music Conference in Cleveland back in June of 2022. Dwight, this was lots of fun. Thank you so much for being with me today.

Great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for listening to today's episode and once again to the estimable Dwight Andrews for our conversation today. Thanks also to Kwami Coleman who did peer review, Geoff Burleson, who played the opening bumper music, Undine Smith Moore’s “Before I’d Be A Slave.” Thanks to everyone else at SMT-Pod especially Lydia Bangura, Megan Lyons, and Jennifer Beavers. Join us for the next episode of this special Theorizing African American music podcast series where I will talk with four participants from the conference: Steph Doctor, Marvin McNeal, Maya Cunningham, and Allan Reese. Have a great day.

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Visit our website smt-pod.org for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. Join in on the conversation by tweeting your questions and comments @SMT_Pod. SMT Pod's theme music was written by Zhangcheng Lu with closing music by David Voss. Thanks for listening!