In this week’s episode, Phil Ewell sits down with Marvin McNeil, Steph Doktor, Alan Reese, and Maya Cunningham to talk about their experiences at the conference and the fantastic papers they presented and heard.

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 0:00

Welcome to SMT-Pod, the premiere audio publication of the Society for Music Theory. In this week’s episode, Phil Ewell sits down with Marvin McNeil, Steph Doktor, Alan Reese, and Maya Cunningham to talk about their experiences at the conference and the fantastic papers they presented and heard.

[Bumper Music]

My name is Phil Ewell, and I'm here with Marvin McNeil, Steph Doktor, Alan Reese and Maya Cunningham. And we're gonna have a conversation about the Theorizing African American music conference that took place in June of 2022 in Cleveland. It was so great to have you all participating. Marvin submitted a paper, I didn't know his name before he came, but he gave a wonderful paper, it was entitled "We are The Bears, how and historically Black University marching band constructs community through music making." So the two parts, I guess Marvin would be just, you know, take us, give us a minute about who you are, where you're teaching, what you're doing, and then talk a little bit maybe about your paper, which was outstanding-- I really liked it a lot.

Oh, well, thank you, Phil. Thank you, first of all for inviting me to this podcast. And, you know, Phil said, my name is Marvin McNeil and I'm currently at a brand new position for me, at the Oxford College of Emory, the assistant professor of Music and African American studies -- Thank you! And this is, for me, it's a new career. I spent my 1st 21 years as a band director. So, at the crossroads, when I was at Wesleyan University, I was at the University of Connecticut and then at the crossroads of my career, I decided to take a chance and go back to school and study ethnomusicology. So I went back and, obtained my master's and PhD, which I still have a few little things to defend to make it official, but it should be done in the next couple of weeks, in a month or so. Thank you!

Okay. We'll get into the topic of your paper I think a little bit. Let's just go and have some introductions here and keep moving here. Stephanie Doktor is next on my screen. Stephanie gave a really interesting paper, "The Ways of White folks": Fletcher Henderson's 'Whiteman Stomp'" from 1927 and the "Sonic Theorization of Black music." And I should also mention, I knew Stephanie's name, he had just submitted a proposal, and got accepted. I knew her name because she wrote a great piece on John Powell, this really awful person, white supremacist. He was integral in the Racial Purity Act or Racial Integrity Act I think it was called in Virginia in 1924. He was one of the authors, very famous composer and a pianist at the University of Virginia. And Stephanie unpacked some of, well, his horribleness but in a very scholarly and appropriate way. So I knew her from that. Stephanie just maybe introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you do.

Okay. I'm Steph Doktor and I'm an assistant professor of music studies at Temple University. I teach music theory courses here and I was hired to, quote unquote, diversify the curriculum. But what I hope will happen is change the curriculum in ways that meet students needs and work towards anti racism. And my work is on the intersections between race, sound, and capitalism. And right now I'm working on a book that's examining the white supremacist foundation of the recording industry, especially as it pertains to the formation of jazz.

Excellent, excellent. Can't wait for that to come out! Alan's next on my screen, Alan who also gave a paper, and your paper was on Undine Smith Moore, "A Measure of Freedom One: Conflict and Quotation in Undine Smith Moore's 'Before I'd be a Slave'" a brilliant piano piece which, by the way, I chose as some entry music for this series. The first 30 seconds of that ahead of my colleague at Hunter College, Jeff Burlison, did a great performance of that and that's going to be the intro music to this series! So you have a little bit-- I'm giving you a shout out there. Tell us about what you do a little bit Alan.

I have to say first that will be a heck of an opening for the intro Music. Yeah,Yeah! So my name is Alan Reese. I teach music theory right now at the Wake Forest University in North Carolina and just started in August. In the last four years, I was at the Cleveland Institute of Music, so right next door to the conference. Most of my work has been on 20th century Polish music, specifically Karol Szymanowski and Grażyna Bacewicz. But, recently I've been getting into the music of Undine Smith Moore and some other projects.

That's great. You had a wonderful back and forth with Tammy Kernodle after your paper and I want to talk about that a little bit. But let's, before we do that, bring in Maya here and I'm going to just say, as I've said about everybody a little bit, a little something. Maya I invited to moderate a session and she moderated a session called "Pedagogies", which was great. But she first came on my radar after I watched this great series that she was curating as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, right, in Ethnomusicology. And it's called "The Cats Talk Back" and it was just mesmerizing. She had Steve Coleman, I think Reggie Workman was on one, right? Nasheet Waits and Eric Revis and just these really heavies, you know, in African American music. And it was just such, so brilliantly put together. I'm like, well, this is a person I need to reach out to and just kind of, you know, have a conversation with because I want to know what she's thinking about in terms of, not just African American music, obviously, but just music. So, I was so pleased when she agreed to come and moderate and just maybe might tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Well, thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure and everyone's work is so fascinating. I can't wait to get into the conversations. So I consider myself to be an Africanist and African American-ist ethnomusicologist. And I emphasize that because I think that I just, I follow the work and the guidance of the great Dr. Imkatiya [unclear] who said, to understand truly African diaspora musics, they must be understood in parallel and through the perspectives and in conjunction with African music traditions. And so, that's why I straddle both continents with my research and my work. I'm also a jazz vocalist, so I'm doing a project on understanding the African of the African American music through the lens of the South African tradition and investigating the bimusical ear of Black South African musicians who both work in, what has become an indigenized tradition, an indigenized jazz tradition there and in traditional musics. So, I can talk more about that a little later. You know, I am completing a PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I'm also an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music and also teach Black Music courses at MIT. So, I'm glad to be here, I'll save the rest for a little later, but just a little talk, a little, little smidgen on The Cats Talk Back, I'm really dedicated to contributing major interventions and reclamation work concerning African American traditional music like jazz by centering the voice of the culture-bearers who continue to create the music.

That's great, and you know what Maya, let's just have a conversation. I think that's the best way to do this and all the topics of your papers and your work, I think you can help to weave in, I'd love to hear a little bit more about marching bands at HBCUs, for example, Marvin, I think that's just so very interesting because it's such a huge part of HBCU culture. But since Maya just mentioned it, I remember this part, I think it was Steve Coleman who was talking about reclaiming jazz as African American music, and he said, look, we call it Italian music, you know, Italian music, and German music. Why shouldn't we call it African American music? We should! And then he said, "and they would call me racist for even saying so". And I just thought that was so poignant because that's true, when Black scholars talk about race, just the idea of challenging white power structures immediately brands us as racists, right? It's just, it's a simple facile actually, a trick of white white racial framing. But could you speak to that a little bit? Kind of go deeper into that idea of reclamation that your project was doing?

So, "The Cats Talk Back", was an effort, in this 100 year history of black musicians, reclaiming, claiming, attempting to take ownership of their music. And so that conversation stretches all the way back, or that issue stretches all the way back, to the original Dixieland jazz band, claiming themselves as the original Dixieland jazz band and Black musicians in New Orleans not wanting to record, not wanting their music to be taken, but it was anyway. And so there's this long history of African Americans not having or trying to exert agency. So that being said, for Steve to say, he said that because I'll quote the great Archie Shepp as he was quoted in John Baskervilles article on Black nationalism and jazz, "we create the music, they own it". And so, this is a dynamic that, you know, where white corporations, white individuals, control and own, and profit the most from jazz, whereas jazz musicians continue to create it.

And so, the reason why Steve said that is because still, and particularly now that the the audience has been whitened, and the face of jazz has been whitened in the public narrative, in publications, venues that present the music, etcetera. For him to make a statement like that, as a musician who needs to work, and who, unfortunately, is at the mercy of that power structure that is white controlled and that has in many, many different ways, as I said, try to whiten the music. So for him to say that as a Black musician, to claim it as a Black music when there's a public narrative that's in full throttle that calls it an "American music" and claims it as a national music, as other musics, other black music have been claimed, as a national music, is something that he knows, it draws persecution. That's why he's contacted me because I did a radio show called "Bebop is Black" and he said, oh, someone's finally talking about these issues and trying to create interventions. So that's why he, that's why he mentioned that.

And that's extremely important, you know, I don't need to tell you, but I'm telling the listeners that Amiri Baraka was crucial in laying some of these things out even in the sixties, right? And his compilation "Black Music", he commented on these things that, whereas before there was, quote unquote, negro music, now it has become, quote unquote, American music. If it has been stripped of its Blackness and then kind of presented to mainstream America. I'm gonna bring in Alan here because he talked on Undine Smith Moore, of course, she was a Black woman, a fascinating composer and music theorist, but she would have never been considered as a music theorist because music theory would not have allowed her to be considered as such. And I remember Alan, during your paper, you did talk about some of the humanistic side, some of the blackness of Undine Smith Moore. And I was happy about that. I should just say, also, that I was consciously, if I can step back in terms, of asking people to join today, I intentionally wanted to have a Black man, a Black woman, a white man and a white woman.

I'm just going to say that out loud because I think it's important, Marvin is black, Stephanie is white, and Alan is white, and Maya is Black. So I'm interested in these perspectives and how they kind of, obviously we're all colleagues here and this is very respectful discussion, as they always should be. But I remember Tammy Kernodle's comment after your paper, Alan, where she was essentially, I think saying something like you've done some of that work, and kind of reconnecting some of the, well, the Blackness to the actual music itself as Maya was just saying, that's how important that is to actually understand Black music. You can't separate it and you should not, it's inappropriate to do so. Yet we in music theory, of course, are really good at that; scrubbing the Blackness of something in order to make it, legitimize it to the white structures. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that, Alan? Some of the things that, as a white person, as a white man that you're dealing with, and Tammy's response to your paper.

Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, for the last several years I've been really interested in trying to diversify the repertoire that I've been looking at in teaching and in my research, but especially in my teaching and a lot of that work takes a lot of labor. Sometimes I'm compensated trying to find as many examples to diversify the core. But certainly what I've mostly struggled on is trying to, I guess, answer the title of the conference? Of theorizing in a different way? Whereas I felt that I was good at throwing the same kind of analytical gizmos at different kinds of music and coming up with, I think, engaging analyses that I'm very happy with and that I've been able to share with my students and they've shared with me, but really thinking about stuff in a different way, coming up with new methodologies has been something that I am still really struggling with trying to think of things in a different way because, you know, we've been trained, I've been trained very well to think in a particular way. And with that paper, you know, certainly I was trying to get at some different way of thinking about the piece by focusing particularly on this very loose quotation. What I consider to be a loose quotation of the spiritual.

Alan, can I press you a little bit on this idea? You've been trained to think a certain way. I think I know what you mean by that, but I'd love to hear you kind of expand on that a little bit and then continue on with the paper.

I think that I've been trained at least, in certain kinds of tools that allow me to either kind of solve the piece in a certain way that often focuses on particular kinds of, I think, narratives that come out. So, for instance, in this Undine Smith Moore piece, it was essentially a conflict narrative, which is about as old as time, in terms of, you know, analytical narratives that you throw out a piece. And I feel that, you know, I was using the language, I was taught to try to get at something different and, frankly, I don't know if I entirely succeeded. I mean, I felt happy with my analysis, but in terms of doing something new, I'm not sure sure about that.

When you said using an analytical gizmo, that really also caught my ear because we do very much use these analytical gizmos, and in the most basic sense, we talk about linear progressions, and harmonic syntax, and you know, all of the things that-- these are the gizmos that we throw at different repertoires, right? A little bit about Tammy's comment that I thought was so poignant.

Yeah, because I was getting at the piece where I was-- or what I was trying to say, was I was focusing on this loose quotation of the spiritual, where the piece gets its name from, and trying to, kind of talk about how it's coming from a different style from the rest of the piece, which felt very, you know, sort of European American modernist and just truly brutal kind of soundscape that she created and, especially compared to her other work, and then suddenly this spiritual, this pentatonic little figure comes out of, you know, of nowhere. And really contrasts between these two styles and I was trying to use that lens to kind of get at that piece and also get into Undine Smith Moore's biography as well, because this was coming around the same time, she was starting to do a lot more with spirituals and arranging spirituals which is what she is, I think most, probably most known for. But I feel like I was only scratching the surface at that element, I think., and then, of course, Tammy Kernodle's was talking about that and she of course, I believe studied with her, if I'm correct? She certainly knew her, at least I couldn't remember. And so just, yeah, hearing some of, you know, I wish it was all transcribed but, hearing a lot of her comment about, you know, bringing in a lot more of that information about how more thought and taught, I think was, was really, really helpful.

That is really half the battle for us, right, in music theory, because we're really taught very strongly to not do that. Oh, that's history. Oh, that's ethnomusicology. That's not what we do. That's of course, nonsense. Let's just have a group nod, it easily, easily could be what we do, if we chose to do it. And that's just a constant refrain one hears from Black music scholars is, please don't take away the Blackness of music genre X, music genre Y. Don't do that! It was always wrong, so let's just have a group nod and then move forward and I love the fact that you were already moving in that direction. And it seemed to me, Tammy's comments were basically like, just keep going in that direction a little further and you're going, you know this is really going to be good and she's absolutely right. One little caveat, of course is, it's really hard to get published and you're you know, pre tenure and publishing in music theory is hard regardless. But if you don't actually buy into what, I of course, have called music theory's white racial frame, it's hard to see those things, to get them to the light of day in order to, for you to be successful in your career. Of course, these things are changing and we hope that they continue to change

["Little David Play on Your Harp" from three Spirituals for Cello and Piano arr. Dolores White, performed by Khari Joyner (cello) and Dianna White-Gould (piano)]

Steph, I'd love to hear some comments from you about this because I know you have some. I'm interested to hear what kind of brought you to a social justice mindset, to write about Fletcher Henderson, or before, that John Powell, as I've already cited because it seems to me that you really have a pretty good understanding that we can't be separating out people's lives from the music that we analyze and study. And I think that that's so admirable and maybe, if you could just give us a little background on how you came to music to think about, and conceive of music in that way.

Yeah. So I'm not technically a music theorist. I didn't go to Eastman, you know.

University of Virginia!

Haha, yeah that's right! So we don't actually have the disciplines there, you know, designed to kind of blur and we're not supposed to be-- we have technically have a degree in critical and comparative studies in music. But I've always centered my methodologies around music analysis. My questions have always been, how can we find the answers in the sound. But because I have this sort of, you know, historical training, I technically worked with Carl Hoekstra Miller, who's a historian, and Bonnie Gordon, was a major influence in my life. I've been always interested in the people, in the culture aspect of it. I actually grew up in Georgia and I grew up in Forsyth County where the KKK was still extremely active and visible. So I was, you know, I really was immersed in white supremacy and saw it.

So I think I was very inclined to tackling that aspect of my life growing up and as a working class, first gen student who felt sort of like, uncomfortable and like I didn't fit in, I'm just really interested in issues of power and inequality and there was space for that in musicology, so, and history. So that's where I sort of gravitated towards and bootstrapped my way through music theory and then for some reason, Temple hired me which under under music theory, which I tricked them! But I'm super excited about that. But that's sort of, how I got to those issues, and I think one thing I'm struggling with is actually how to position myself in the field of music theory because I am going to continue to talk about, you know, how do we hear inequality? And how can we theorize sound in terms of race, and gender, and sexuality? And I'm not sure where that fits in some of the published discourse, but also things like conferences, you know, that aren't Theorizing African American music. So.

Right, right. Marvin, I want to get to you, but before I do, can I come back to Maya and maybe ask, you know, we're having a conversation here. Maya, do you, just based on what we've been talking about here and also just your experience, Maya, do you think that-- how would you rate, like the changes taking place in our American music academies, if you could kind of like, give a general view of what you think is happening? It's a difficult question, I know, something I get asked quite a bit, but from your perspective, you know, kind of in African American studies, music studies, kind of connecting these dots. How do you see things in our music academies currently?

I mean, I can try to just speak from my own experience, it does seem like there's been a responsive shift that's happening, it's been happening since 2020. But I don't know, I think that I'm going to just speak very, very frankly. I think that the people to really give that answer are the people who don't-- that have less power to really say, oh, is this really changing. So, I mean, I think that there seems to be, I hope that I'm answering this correctly or trying, or like being responsive to what you asked, but I mean, there seems to be an effort amongst some, you know, academics. But, I mean, I think that at one of these musicology conferences, that this was before 2020, I was waylaid by a scholar who's lots of power at a university in the southern region, who gave an hour or two explanation of why her, the pictures she found of her grandfather in blackface, wasn't wrong, you know? And in the article she was writing about it. So, yeah.

Yeah. No, no, it's difficult but I do enjoy, or not enjoy, but I recognize that dynamic that you're, the picture that you're painting there because that's something that I've seen play out many, many times Because those who actually do have power, well, in music theory, I often say, and have written that it's 94% white people, those are people with tenure in music theory. Fact. That's from Society Music Theory. You know, it's pretty obvious that they have written rules and policies to benefit their own belief system about what music should be, what it can be, and how we should teach it. That's human nature, it's not even that I'm blaming anybody, you know, they're writing policies to benefit themselves, right?

But I would hope that anybody, including the 94% of my colleagues who have tenure in music theory, could see the injustice and realize that it actually impoverishes themselves and it impoverishes music for absolutely everybody. It's hard to look in the mirror when you are senior in rank and you've devoted your whole life to one way of thinking about music, and that one way has Beethoven, and Mozart, and Bach up on a hallowed hilltop and then, it's very much in a vertical structure, right? Other people, and composers, and musics going down from there. It's very hard to look in the mirror and realize this is not okay. When you have the power itself and you realize that you're gonna need to cede some of that power. I think Steph has something to say and then Maya's gonna jump in again.

Yeah, I just wanted to add to that, because I think even, you know, aside from the example that Maya shares, there's the cohort of people who are really committed to preserving that right? And preserving these white supremacist traditions and aren't shy about it. And then there's another group of people of colleagues who are well meaning, right, and they want to diversify the curriculum in some way. But they're prone towards solutionism which you so greatly critique in your article, and what I see, because I've been talking to a lot of theory departments about their curriculum changes is, well, you know, can we add William Grant Still instead of thinking about, broadly, these white supremacist structures. There's a-- I don't even think they know how to rethink the curriculum in ways that really break down white supremacy, and I think unfortunately, it takes a lot of discomfort, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of conversation and what I'm seeing is an impetus to just really quickly find new changes in the curriculum instead of okay, let's start by just reading and having conversations with each other for a year, and listening, and interviewing students, etcetera.

I love the interviewing students part of what you just said. I mean, I loved everything you just said, Steph, but interviewing students, in other words, engaging with people who are younger than we are because to a very large extent, some of the problems that we face in academic music are generational, right? Younger folks just kind of understand some of these things and the senior folks are very often so ensconced in what they've been doing. They tend to still think in a very top down fashion whereby they say things like, oh, they just haven't-- their musical tastes just haven't quite matured yet. They'll come around, right? They'll see the light, they'll understand the greatness of the great masters, right? Which is extremely, in my opinion, offensive language that really should be just banished from the music academies, "great masters" of the Western canon and the pinnacle of musical civilization and things like this nonsense that we talk about. Maya, did you have something to say before we get to Marvin?

Just, something new that just happened, that kind of speaks to all of this, I was just a part of a symposium, kind of a think-tank thing, at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and it was called, let's see, A Music Theory Curriculum for the 21st century, it brought together theorists, ethnomusicologist and other folks from different parts of the country. And then, we talked all through these issues and it was really interesting, you know, to hear thoughts. There were people at different, you know, levels in their career, there were chairs of departments, there were, you know, assistant professors, all that. So people mid-career. So it was interesting, and I guess the, the solution or the idea was how do we move forward, what to do, you know? So anyway, I can mention a little more about that later.

Okay, thanks. Marvin, I'd love to bring you in here and before we talk a little bit about your paper, which I thought was so interesting, maybe you can comment or respond to some of these themes that we've been talking about, and so maybe a broad question first, how do you see things changing? I don't, I'm not the kind of person who asks, what do we do? What should we do? You know, because that's just, you know, that's the solutionism that Steph just mentioned rather, I do like to say like, what's your interpretation of how things are changing and, you know, in what direction because, sometimes they're in bad directions. We hope that they're in good directions, where you're teaching and just generally like an academic music, what's your take on those big issues?

Well, first of all the reason why, you know, I am where I am now and took this path after teaching band for 21 years, is because I had those questions in my mind and, you know, I think, I struck out because I was not finding those answers and, you know, the collegiate Band Road, which, you know, band music in itself is, in their eyes, understudied, in certain areas. But also within --I'm not a music theorist, but, you know, as a music educator, I had to go through the music education, you know, component of it and then, you know, teaching for quite a while in PWI institutions. So I was the, you know, kind of the oddball there. But I began to ask the questions, you know, we keep replicating the cannon, we'll talk in the band world, you know, Percy Granger, but we never would extract, you know, we never would put, you know, the life of the music together with --

Heaven Forbid! He was not a very nice person, that Percy Granger!

Right! Right, and so, you know, that began my question of how, you know, I can expand how we engage in the study of music in the whole humanly organized sound and why, and kind of strip it down to its bare core. Even when I was at the University of Connecticut, I found out after maybe the third or fourth year, I was actually in Hale Smith's office. Hale Smith wasn't even brought up most of the courses there and, you know, most people don't know about Hale Smith's great work. And so, you know, taking off of what Maya was talking about Imkatiya [unclear] work, my entry into this reimagining, you know, as Dwight, Dr. Dwight Andrews said, you know, what does the study of African American music look like moving forward? I felt like I had to strike out on my own and, you know, come up with some solutions and, you know, some ideas and, as I say, be the change you want in the world. And that brought me to New Orleans and actually, I studied New Orleans brass bands before HBCU marching bands down there, studying with this band called the TBC brass band.

And, you know, what blew me away, it was my first time engaging in brass bands by the youth on the streets, and so I spent a lot of time with the brass bands on the streets in the second line parades, you know, in not so nice areas, but most importantly, engaging in intellectual conversations with, in my case, it was mainly young men about music, about life, about theory, about core changes, about this and that, and even in, you know, research and ethnomusicology papers and books really never boiled down to the production factor of it, it's usually cultural, they play for the parades, and this is part of this tradition, and so forth and so on. And so now I'm seeing, as Maya was saying, it was a reckoning in 2020 for many reasons. But I'm seeing, you know, more attention from, you know, more areas, music theory being you pushed that envelope, but also that trickled into the other areas as well with the band research, of course, you know, the band tradition was still, good old boys, you know, good old, basically, white boy clubs and then, you know, now we're starting to incorporate and diversify and reach out and engage in the excellence of women and people of, you know, all ethnicities.

And so I think what Alan was alluding to or talking, and yourself earlier, it's just we have to break it down this, you know, psychological brainwash that was used to perpetuate the system in the first place, right? We put this as, we have to make, you know, everything adhere to this. Yes, we have structure, we have this, but, you know, looking at, at African Americans as humans before the Atlantic slave trade is very important because we think a lot of this research is like, well, they're not, you know, until America made these people. No! You know? And my research intersects with community, the ways we can see community, where we can learn how to community within the band area, and that reason being is that when I spent time with the brass bands, and also my other research site was which was Morgan State University, I could see these connections.

They're similar cities, far apart, based around the band, but within these contexts, you had these systems that were basically the cultural capital per se, and so when we look at, you know, the HBCU band, the sound, and the uniqueness, on the outside, but in the inside, it's a lot of this continuation of what, you know, Imkatiya [unclear] writes about community, and music, and musicing for community. And so I'm looking to expand, you know, that thought process as well and then attach the theorizing of the actual sounds that are made, for example, spending time with the TBC brass band, they have three trombones, and he was talking about counterpoint, playing amongst the three. Person A has to know where person B is going. Person B has to know where --you know, and that's part of that collective improvisation, which is, you know, from New Orleans, from the very beginning. And that collaboration, that engagement, that understanding where someone comes in, someone goes out, being replicated, you know, constantly through the music. Somehow you can see in the actions of the members of the group. So I'm trying to connect that sound, you know, with that human behavior.

That's excellent, Marvin, let me stay with you. And let's pivot now and talk a little bit about the conference before we get off the call. I just did some back of the envelope calculations here in terms of the representation at theorizing African American music, not 100% certain about this, so don't hold me to it, but I think out of all the people who presented or moderated, I counted 25 sorry, 24 black people, 26 white people, and 3 Asian Americans. So 27 people of color, 26 white people, which is, you know, pretty half and half, which is even a little bit better, well, different, from our country at large, but better in the sense that there are even more representation of BIPOC, because our country is about 60% white currently. So Marvin, tell me about some of the impressions, of course, I loved your paper where you got into some of the things you were talking just talking about, but impressions about being at this conference thinking about, you know, representation and who's there doing what. I'd love to just hear and, definitely this is a question for the rest of the group here too, but let's start with Marvin.

Right. First of all, I felt it was a very supportive environment, you know, me as a new scholar in this area, you know, there was a little bit of nervousness and, you know, hesitancy about what I was about to engage in. But I found that, in coming into it, there was a relevancy for the scholarship, and I think that comfort level really inspired me to rethink, to be open, to see different, many wide varied avenues into theorizing music, and what African American music, and what does that, you know, mean? And how can we move forward with this? I would say during my paper, well, the response, the question and answer period, was probably the most inspiring, you know, portion of my experience. Although one, I have one other tidbit, which is very special but, you know, to have um scholars that I've read and look up to and it's, you know, this the awe factor even yourself, you know!

Oh, wow! Stop, stop! Haha!

Haha, but as you know, someone who's restarting a career and questioning, you know, is this the right thing? Am I looking at the, you know, into the right topics and so forth and so on.

What's the tidbit?

Well, the tidbit is our moderator was Naomi Andre, you know, the great Naomi Andre. And so, in addition to her preparation for us to, you know, arrive and to make sure everything's all right. She asked, I would like to have lunch, you know, with, I forgot the other presenter, her name, but I'd like to have a lunch and I'd like to treat both of you afterwards. And so sure! So we went over to the restaurant area and not only did she buy us lunch, she had taken notes on our presentation, you know, things that we can improve on, but things we did well on and things moving forward and she spent that time with us, you know, and I think that goes back to that community, you know, it's that responsibility of passing down, as we learned in your early New Orleans, you know, is passing down the culture, I mean, and so I think, you know, those experiences and she would never promote that. But for me, that's life changing.

That's so, so very important.

["Little David Play on Your Harp" from three Spirituals for Cello and Piano arr. Dolores White, performed by Khari Joyner (cello) and Dianna White-Gould (piano)]

I want to bring in Alan here if I could, but before I do, I would just wanna maybe emphasize what Marvin just said that, you know, people like Naomi Andre, it's not only are they outstanding scholars in doing what they're doing, and pushing us to think in new ways, but they're just so welcoming and humble, right? And I've often said that I'm a newbie in terms of, quote unquote, theorizing African American music. I'm a Russianist, right? I spent seven years in Russia. I'm a cellist, I'm a music theorist. I did everything the way I was supposed to do, quote unquote, right? And I just reached out, of course, I knew some of the names, I've known Horace Maxwell for quite some time now, almost 20 years I would say. But, very, there are very few Blacks in music theory, right, proper.

But I just started reaching out to people, well before this conference last summer and the responses were like, "absolutely, I would love to do that". And Naomi was one of them and Tammy Kernodle, it's not like she's not busy, right? She's very busy, but she was so supportive and just open arms and I think I even said something in my opening comments to the effect that we should all be so welcome and just, you know, open hearts, open minds as so many of the people I reached out to have had great --it's really just been exhilarating actually. Not that I don't like Russian music theory, or cello playing, you know, it's just that my career has taken a little bit of a turn, I still do play cello and think about Russian music, but it's just an enriching, a greatly enriching environment. I'm sorry, I went on a little bit too long there. But Alan I'd love-- because Alan is very much on the inside of music theory, right? You're a white man and you got a PhD at Eastman, one of the finest programs in the country for that, and yet you came to this conference, which was not like a theory conference, right? It was different. So I'd love to hear some impressions and reactions from you.

Sure, I think that was one of the more rewarding aspects of the conference was having musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, just music adjacent fields, all combined, and for instance, being able to get feedback from people like Tammy Kernodle, who normally wouldn't be at my paper, and I wouldn't be at her work and stuff unless you sort of cross into AMS, every other year at the national conferences. So that I found really rewarding because, you know, as you were talking about, like in my education, unless you sought out, musicology and ethnomusicology classes, especially ethnomusicology, I mean, I never had an ethnomusicology course at all, which I just kicked myself for never pursuing that, but I had to, of course, actively pursue it because it just wasn't considered necessary as part of the curriculum, and so just being able to be exposed to that and being able to be exposed to their questions and insights was really, really rewarding.

I also, there are several papers that I very much enjoyed at the conference that I thought were especially, compared to mine, really trying to go after rethinking how we do theory, what our methodologies are. So, for example, Danielle Brown's paper that was looking at polyrhythm and form and trying to rethink how we approach that, or Steven Hudson on and the sort of dominant sus chords, and just trying to rethink that from a different perspective. I just found that really rewarding because it gave me like, I don't know, a glimmer of a path to where I could go forward in terms of rethinking things. And I would say the final thing that I found really rewarding was seeing some of my former students there, one of course, being Chris Jenkins who, you know, helped put the conference together, and of course, you know, I can't claim really any credit whatsoever for that. I mean, he's one of the most impressive people I've ever met.

But yeah, just having one of my first grad classes ever, and I remember just reading his critiques of the readings that I would assign each week and I just really got my brain thinking, it made grading a lot more enjoyable, I have to say. And then also one of my other former students, I remember at the final keynote panel just gave this, really kind of just, essentially thanked you all for the conference in a sort of a tearful thank you and that was just really moving to see someone who had been to, you know, Cleveland Music for four years, which is this classical only institution, it's built into the mission statement and, you know, he really hadn't gotten anything like that before and just seeing how that touched him was really something.

Are you speaking of the, the black bass player? Drew?

Drew, yeah, Drew Collins.

Right. Yeah, that was a very touching moment, I think for everybody because, and he choked up a little bit because he just was like, I just didn't even think this was possible and just to hear that from a Black classical musician, I mean, Chris and I worked very hard, as you could imagine, to get this conference off the ground. And there were lots of question marks before we were arriving in Cleveland, certainly from my side. But at that moment I said to myself, well, everything was worth it. Everything was worth it. At that moment, I realized that like just by providing or creating this space for a person like him to just say, "wow, look at all of these Black people and non Black people talking about Black music like it should be and always should have been talked about", right?

Because it's just not the way that our music academies are set up. They're set up to denigrate, their setup to dismiss, and that, because they're part of our --it's not so much they're music academies, it's that they're American music academies, and that's what our country still has to grapple with, this denigration of the other. The other being non white, of course, because, you know, there was a time where there were no, quote unquote, white people in North America, obviously. Maya and Steph, I don't know who to go to next. But, let's just say, Maya, do you have some general impressions about the conference before we get off the call?

You know, similar impressions, you know, I was very excited to be there. I think quite a lot about what it means to theorize African American music, thinking about internal indigenous theorization of different African American musics, and of course, how that speaks to my own research. I formed great relationships, met, you know, other scholars, you know, across disciplines, other Black scholars, you know, we really had lots of great informal conversations. I really enjoyed all the papers I attended, but particularly the one on Yusef Lateef.

Mark Hannaford?

Mark Hannaford. I'd seen Yusef Lateef, he actually was a professor, longtime professor at my university, and I've seen his writings and his, I mean, he was a music theorist, but as were many of the African American jazz musicians. And they write, but they're not, I don't think that, you know, I mean, from what I'm hearing, they're not considered that, to be that formally, but they are. And so I'm really interested in investigating that further and I was just really intrigued, you know, my imagination and my research interests were piqued and intrigued, so that's, that's what I can say.

Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up before I go over to Steph. Yusef Lateef, of course, was a music theorist, but the point being here that he would never have been considered as such by American music theory, which, again, is a travesty and it is impoverishing to the field of music theory. Like we don't get to study-- you couldn't have done it in the 90s when I was a grad student at Yale University. Now, you could probably get away with writing a dissertation on Yusef Lateef, certainly at Yale, and maybe even at Eastman, which I think is a little more conservative, if you don't mind my saying, so, it's a pretty conservative place up there, and it's a great music school, of course.

And one point that Mark made at the end, in the Q&A, that I think is worth repeating here, because somebody was talking about Yusef Lateef and what a, you know, using some of the hagiographic language we use about, when we talk about white musicians, like he was "titanic" and a "towering figure" and all of this stuff, and Mark said, "he was really good at what he did, but I think it's really important just to realize he was just another really interesting music theorist". There were a lot others besides Yusef Lateef, like Wadada Leo Smith, and George Russell, and Barry White, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Or the folks that you had on "The Cats Talk Back", Maya, and he just made it, kind of, Mark Hannaford, when he made that comment, he's just like, "look, yeah, sure. Latif is interesting, but he's one of hundreds. And so let's not stop with one person and say we're done like we do with Florence Price now in our, in our student performances in college and university".

Boom! We played Florence Price, we are good to go. Nothing against Florence Price, she was a great composer who wrote very interesting music, we should have always been playing her music. We should have never not been playing Florence Price ever. Period. Steph, do you have anything to add about your impressions of the conference? I'm always interested to hear.

Yeah, I mean, I sort of want to add to that. I've actually started because of Mark Hannaford's talk, and also his work on George Russell just came out, I started teaching it in my post tonal theory class, as well as my analyzing Black American music course. So I think this conference really motivated me because of all the incredible papers, and the community to really make some radical choices, some innovative choices in the classroom, because I realized I'm not alone. I had this whole, you know, room full of people who were doing the same thing and, you know, who would have my back if there was criticism. And I think I saw that really poignantly in the final keynote panel.

And I think it was Teresa Reed who talked about the NASM requirements, and she just said, I think she just said so loudly and strongly like the NASM requirements are never an excuse to not change the curriculum because they're written broadly, specifically for this reason. And I was like, oh, that's been total bullshit the entire time! And that was so empowering and then to have A.D. Carson, you know, next to her, he is changing the curriculum, he is teaching hip-hop to students and they're creating it in the studio at UVA, and so that to me was, you know, the most powerful part of it is, I left with ideas, and I knew I had support to actually create that change immediately.

That's excellent Steph, thanks. Maya had something to say?

One little thing, I found out after looking into it a little more after the paper, the diagram that Latif presents in his book, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns, the spiral bound book, he actually got it from John Coltrane, that's one thing to know. I can't remember who told me that, it was a jazz musician who told me that, he got from John Coltrane. One thing, a little comment, since this is going to be, you know, engaged with by many, when changing the curriculum, no shade or criticism on the teaching of hip-hop, but there is a tendency to stereotype Black music, and grab what is visible.

What is visible and made visible by nonblack controlled corporations, and so I worry about that, and I think that in engaging Black musics, and music of other groups, it is really important to make informed decisions about the classical heritage musics of those groups. The musics that speak to and are representative of the long history and identity of those groups, particularly African Americans, since the identity of African Americans, concerning music has been so caught up in the colonial project of the US, and questioned and maligned, and distorted. And so I really think it's important to get response, guidance, from multiple voices of leaders and others, you know, and music makers and from the group, particularly, African descended groups.

Indeed, Maya, I would completely echo that. And in music theory, the history is not good in terms of how music theory has engaged with African American musical genres. Whether that genre be jazz, rap, hip-hop, blues, R&B when it does it. I actually make an analogy: in the history of prisoners and war, right, and colonization, oftentimes, over many, many, many centuries, oftentimes medical doctors have conducted medical experiments on prisoners, to the point of killing the prisoners, right? And this is, quote unquote, for the science, you know, for the advancement of mankind, right? Quite literally, just like use them as human guinea pigs, right? And that's just the horrors of war and how horribly humans can treat one another, right? American music theory has so treated Black American musical genres as a subject to be, like a medical experiment on, right?

It's just something that we can use for ourselves, it doesn't really matter because it was just written by Black people, right? It's taken it and it's extremely inappropriate. I actually talked a little bit about this, without the medical analogy, I have a part in my upcoming monograph about this. It's inappropriate the way American music theory has dealt with Black American genres, and we need to make changes. And I have a couple of suggestions in that part, I won't get into that here, but it is not appropriate. And I mean, I said it earlier, the Blackness had to be stripped of a music like Amiri Baraka said, in order for that music to then be presented as American, of course, never on the level of Schubert, and Chopin, and Beethoven because that would upset the racial hierarchy, the racial ordering of things. And so, I think making these changes, and making the connections that Maya is talking about are so incredibly important, and I was heartened at the conference too. I didn't see any music theorist, mainstream music theorist, doing this inappropriate, kind of, medical experiments on Black music that I'm talking about. Steph, you have to have something to say? To add?

I just wanted to build on that, I was speaking with a friend of mine, and she was criticizing the way in which people sort of, what she said, parachute into popular music studies, because it's their side project or, you know, it's easy. So-- and I am so glad you said that, Maya and Phil, just building on that because I really don't want people, when hearing this podcast, then just parachute into studying Black music. It is racist to think that you can do that without years, decades of training, and exposing yourself to the intellectual leaders within that tradition and the makers. So, I appreciated that metaphor of parachuting, because we see theorists sort of doing it, or this is my side project, or I'm trying to diversify the stuff that I do, you know, and it's really problematic, and so it doesn't mean that I wouldn't encourage other people to do it, but I think like Maya said, you want to be in conversation with as many people as you can, getting as much, kind of, mentorship throughout that process.

That's exactly right, and that's why a conference like this is so important because this is where you can make some of those connections, and draw from different sources and, and meet the people who can help you, not just parachute in, but actually start to live these things, and also to like let go of some of the mythologies that we were taught about the greatness of western and white civilization. Not to say that there weren't great composers, there were. But the whole building up of a mythology of course, is something that we should be very skeptical of. I'm going to give Maya the last word here at this point.

Two things, I would really like-- it would be interesting those, the composers that are lifted up, the white, male composers and women, you know, were lifted up so, so highly, it would be interesting to really look at the way they were creating that music in the context of the history of Europe. Something I do with my students. Okay, so what year was this, what was going on, you know, how many slave ships were down the street? You know, who was being sold? Like what-- the economy of the, you know, how exactly was that ivory imported in and procured to create those pianos?

I mean, these basic questions, you know, that really help to contextualize the making of the Western art canon and that tradition. And then, last thing--sorry! On parachuting in, what happens, and I think that you mentioned this, Phil, is that, you know, when someone who doesn't have, who's not conversant with literature, not conversant with the tradition, is not, you know, engaged with the culture bearers, and kind of wants to drop in, what they do is they rely on commonplace understandings and use those as structures of analysis, which is why we kind of have the same, kind of, repeating patterns over and over again, and so that is something to bear in mind and to stop in order to create change.

Yeah, and to your first point, Maya, I would cite here Olivette Otele's "African Europeans: An Untold History". It's a book from 2021 where she lays out the simple fact that there were always Africans in Europe. In fact, they're always Africans everywhere if you simply realize that all human beings came from Africa, which is an anthropological fact. But at any rate, I am going to wrap things up, so I'm Phil Ewell and I have been talking with Maya Cunningham, Marvin McNeil, Alan Reese, and Steph Doktor, and I just want to thank you all so much for taking some time out today and having this conversation. So, thank you so much.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you.

It's a pleasure!

Thank you! Bye, y'all!

[SMT-Pod closing theme music playing]

Thanks for listening to today's episode. And of course, a huge thanks to my four panelists Maya Cunningham, Steph Doktor, Marvin McNeil, and Alan Reese. Another huge thanks to the peer reviewer for today's episode, Eileen Hayes. And also, to my colleague, again, Geoff Burleson for playing the opening bumper music, Undine Smith Moore's "Before I'd Be A Slave." Join us for our final episode of our summation of Theorizing African American Music next week. I will be joined by my co-organized Chris Jenkins and we will have a conversation with two of our keynote panelists for the final session, Louise Toppin and Teresa Reed. And we'll be joined by a very special guest who's name I will withhold; you will have to come back next week to listen to that. Have a great day.

[SMT-Pod closing theme music playing]

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!