All That Jazz

First it was mathematics as a tool of White Supremacists. And now this…

Staff members within the University of Oxford’s music department have reportedly suggested removing sheet music from the school’s curriculum because of its purported connections to a “colonial past.”

Professors said that music notation has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past” and that sticking with it would be a “slap in the face” for students of color, according to documents reviewed by the British outlet The Telegraph.

The same faculty also reportedly questioned whether the current curriculum was complicit in “white supremacy,” pointing to the program’s focus on “white European music from the slave period” – composers like Mozart and Beethoven.

The professors further suggested that certain classical music skills – like playing the piano and conducting orchestral arrangements – ought not to be required given that they “structurally center white European music” and cause “students of color great distress.”

I actually have a whole bunch of Mozart CDs from back when CDs were state of the art musical technology. The music from Cosi fan tutte gives me chills. In the 4th act of Le nozze di Figaro when the Countess forgives her unfaithful husband (Contessa perdono) my eyes water, so beautiful is the music and the moment. In the current climate I suppose I’d better keep this quiet lest this music be ‘cancelled’ or I be branded a racist. That seems to be getting harder to avoid; first it was my math degree and now my musical tastes being tools of oppression.

Speaking of Mozart, I sometimes refer to Duke Ellington as “America’s Mozart”. A genius composer and orchestra leader and pianist. I’m no music expert but I find myself listening to Sirius XM 40’s Junction and when Ellington’s Orchestra is playing I’m not changing the channel. I have some Ellington CD’s as well.

So here is photographic evidence that this American music master used both sheet music and the piano to create his masterpieces. I wonder if he knew these were a connection to a ‘colonial past’? Oxford take note…