Free writing session on debugging the canon
CW abuse, depression, self-harm, CPTSD
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways the dead white male canon affects performers and what it means when I ask a performer to play my music. We know through US orchestral statistics that in the 2021-2022 season the dead white male canon comprised of about 60% of programming. I don’t think this reliance is new to any musicians who have trained through informal or formal western classical European music (WECM) ecosystems. This could be through public or private K-12 schools, individual lessons, self-teaching, community ensembles, and higher education degrees. With all this reliance on the dead white male canon, I often wonder how a performer’s body is affected? What is happening to their bodies throughout years of having to play the same music a majority of the time? Is it possible that their bodies are being unconsciously programmed and how do we debug the effects of the canon? What is the relationship like between muscle memory, canon fundamentalism, and musician health?
I have CPTSD from repeated childhood trauma as well as emotionally manipulative relationships in my 20s. There’s probably some inherited trauma too… After having worked with five therapist, I’m happy to say I finally know how to take care of my body. I now know the trauma literally rewired my mind and body’s systems and made it difficult for me to understand the reality around me. I could be in the safest situation possible and yet my body would feel like it was under attack. Or I could be giving a presentation and be triggered and have to go off stage…then continue giving the presentation in zombie mode while disassociating. This and other symptoms such as depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, and repetitive coping behaviours were all caused by a narrative of repeated abuse. My body had been programmed to always be on edge and hyper aware of my surroundings and to always have an escape plan.
Things are different now that I understand the self-compassion my body needs. I also take medication and have worked with awesome therapists. But this has got me thinking about the repetitive behaviours musicians do over the course of a lifetime of seasons, performances, gigs, etc. I can’t imagine what it must be like to play the same white music for all my career. Let alone how this would program my mind and body unconsciously. I wonder if this is true for any musicians? As a composer, this is a terrible realisation to have because not only am I already fighting gendered programming conventions (See Doolittle and Banas 2018), sexism, racism, and ableism, I now have to think about how to interact with yet another barrier in my career. I don’t know what to call this barrier aside from it is another symptom of canon fundamentalism.
While doing my masters in composition at the Vermont College of Fine Arts I heard one musician say that she had recently been doing a lot of baroque music gigs. She continued talking about how baroque music had gotten really easy for her after doing so many contemporary music gigs. That exchange has stayed in my mind living rent free and I have continually sought to understand what she was experiencing. And then it happened to me about three years after the interaction!! Over the pandemic I had gotten a shitty piano and I began to practice on it as well as compose. After going through tons of contemporary scores I started revisiting pieces I learned in undergrad by Schubert and Beethoven. I also looked at many Scarlatti sonatas, Bach interventions, and some Ravel impromptus. Although my technique was horrible now, I found I could learn other pieces by them I had never played in a few hours and that I could stumble my way through at a slower tempo. I had this weird feeling I was connecting to my past where I had spent countless hours in the practice room as a student. I noticed my body would quickly fall into its positions I had worked so hard to perfect in undergrad. My wrists would become loose, and my sitting posture would relax while my right big toe would slide onto the very tip of the sustain pedal.
There are certain body positions required to play our instruments in a healthy ways for a good career. This is slightly different for all of us though some musicians like Gould and Horowitz have found their own unique positions which may have caused them health concerns later in their career. I think we can also say that, for example, there are very specific body positions required to play a C major scale on any given instrument. So I wonder if colonial tonality from WECM maybe has a type of white body language to it? There are countless writings on how WECM has been used to control people (see Bull 2019). Is it so hard to believe that the canon, its conventions and performance practices, have and continue to program the bodies of performers in very specific ways? I think about the ways our bodies react when we hear, for example, the opening of Beethoven 5. Many musicians I have spoken to anecdotally will, upon hearing this excerpt, instinctively move to the position required to play the first four notes. Although this might be a silly thing to witness or do, and it may just happen in the context of jokes, I think there’s might be more here to talk about.
As a composer I am now realizing that if I don’t write in any relatable styles adjacent to the canon, most musicians, amateur and professional, will struggle. I’ve always wondered why this is and have tried to explore it in my own piano playing. I always try to compose music that matches a performer’s musical world and am careful to not ask for too much practice time. I am aware that practicing, especially given our economic instability, is precious. But I do feel that even with graphic scores where there are no virtuosic passages to learn, musicians struggle in different ways to make a performance out of it. I know there are many factors we can discuss that affect how a musician approaches contemporary classical music, but I do wonder if a musician’s body has been trained to move in very specific white canon fundamentalist ways, and, how can I help them? Because it’s not just about writing an easy piece of music. As mentioned earlier, I have noticed musicians struggling with graphic scores and very non-virtuosic pieces composed by me and others throughout the field.
This leads me to think that contemporary performers have, as an industry body, lost their connection to the musical body of contemporary composers. In other words, the practice of white canon fundamentalism will never allow for a practice of contemporary music. I feel foreign in the industry for many reasons as a Brown, nonbinary, disabled composer. But I think I am also foreign because contemporary composers are not known as intimately as the body of the dead white canon. To know a composer musically intimately is I think one of the most thrilling things I have experienced in my career. I’m not sure I can explain or define this type of musical intimacy but I think you will understand. I think we all have composers we connect with for many reasons and it is a joy to re-listen and re-play their music. There are also many composers we probably hate playing and listening to but, because of canon fundamentalism and, for performers, contractual agreements, we must play the music we are assigned while our physical bodies are unconsciously programmed to move in white ways year after year.
I’m not trying to say this is true for all musicians around the world or even true for all musicians who train and stay within WECM. I have worked with musicians who have never played a C major scale—usually actors!—and I have noticed that they are more quick to come up with sounds that are outside of the WECM realm. For my own career, this is really exciting! But I can’t stop thinking about the WECM industry and how canon fundamentalism continues to exclude contemporary composers, possibly now because of the way WECM performers’ bodies are unconsciously programmed to move in very specific white ways. I wonder if this partly defines the resistance I and other composers continue to face in our industry. I'm currently working on a piece titled 'statues of bone flowers' that is about this subject and deals with the movements musicians are unconsciously programed with (listen to it here!). Part of that piece is about revealing these movements and also healing and self-compassion so I imagine if we are ever able to free ourselves and debug the white canon fundamentalism, it will take a lot of love. We must also be careful that we do not center whiteness while doing the self-compassion work as we transition to a cannonless reality rooted in equity.
There’s more to unpack here and this is just a free-writing session for me. There are significant questions to wrestle with like how performers access race and other identities, how a composer’s career can be defined by the canon even today, how canon fundamentalism controls a composer’s agency, how canon fundamentalism affects the bodies of audiences, and many more.
References
Bull, Anna, 2019. Class, Control, and Classical Music (New York, 2019; online edn, Oxford Academic), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190844356.001.0001 (accessed 26 Jan. 2023).
Doolittle, Emily and Banas, 2018. ‘The Long-Term Effects of Gender Discriminatory Programming’. https://emilydoolittle.com/the-long-term-effects-of-gender-discriminatory-programming/ (accessed 03 Feb. 2023).