A Grove of Ashes and Aspens

Now Playing: Wonderland by Tungsten

So as a classically trained musician living in Canada, I read music in the traditional European (or “Western”) fashion. Basically, I was trained to read music like all those snooty, elitist assholes who act like the big name composers from before 1920 are the best thing to ever happen to music.

Something I find annoying about those snooty, elitist assholes is that they tend to act like anyone who doesn’t read Western music notation isn’t as “sophisticated”. This tends to lead to some rather interesting opinions on other methods of understanding and communicating music.

It’s not common that you’ll see it when you’re in casual circles or even a lot of the circles that I’m in, but in my experience, a lot of classical music is dominated by white people, and especially a lot of community ensembles not specifically geared towards kids/teens/young adults being dominated by older white people. This leads to a lot of potential for racism.

Also, a really good example of racism in classical music is Austrian composer and music theorist Heinrich Schenker. His writings on music theory and analysis have had a profound impact on modern musical analysis, but his negative beliefs on race caused controversy in the circles he ran in in his time, and then once again came to light in 2020, causing much controversy in modern classical music groups.

This is not to say that everyone in classical music is inherently racist or an elitist asshole. Most musicians that I know personally are generally very cool people. There are also a lot of metalheads who have some level of classical training in music. So being a piece of shit isn’t required to be a classical musician.

It’s just more of a weird situation to be in, because there’s so much within classical music that is based on racism. Many of the big names in classical music also profited from the slave trade, which brings up a whole other set of issues when studying music history. There are also attitudes within classical music (see the elitist assholes) that see Western classical music as the “best” or “correct” way to learn music, ignoring all the ways of making, teaching, and sharing music that come from traditional pre-colonial cultures from Africa, Asia, and American Indigenous nations.

Many non-Western cultures have their own traditional musical styles and methods of teaching, and by acting like the European method of teaching playing music is the best, these traditional methods and styles often get ignored.

It is my opinion that all musicians should strive to celebrate music of all kinds, including the traditional forms and styles that don’t get recognised as often within the frame of classical music. No one style is inherently better than any other style, and they all have their place.

So basically, there are a lot of people who look at classical music as the best thing on earth and so much better than traditional styles, whether intentionally or not, and that position is just so frustrating when there is so much more to music than that.