Author : Brenton Sanderson
The superiority of Western classical music is so decisive one could almost rest the argument for the superiority of Western culture on it alone. There exists a hierarchy in the world of sound, as in other phenomena. Noise occupies the lowest rung in this hierarchy; it is an undifferentiated mass of sound in which no distinction exists. The lowest kind of music, say that of Australia’s Aborigines, most closely corresponds to noise. Western classical music, by contrast, exists on the highest rung because it apprehends sound in the most highly differentiated way possible. It is the farthest from noise and most fully exploits the inherent potential of the world of sound.
How well this potential is apprehended and developed can lead to Bach’s inimitable counterpoint, the extraordinary tonal architecture of Beethoven’s symphonies, Bruckner’s sonic cathedrals — or to banging on a hollow log with a stick. Besides stimulating pleasure in audiences, great classical music has an unrivalled capacity to shed light on our ontological predicament and connect aesthetic experience with the transcendental. Goethe once noted, with reference to Bach’s great fugues, where as many as five separate lines of musical argument are simultaneously sustained, that “it is as though the eternal harmony has a conversation with itself.” Only Western classical music, I would argue, can create this sublime impression.
To point out the foregoing is to trigger rage from anti-White commentators who huff that it has “long been an argument of white supremacists, Nazis, Neo-Nazis, and racial separatists that ‘classical music,’ the music of ‘white people,’ is inherently more sophisticated, complicated, and valuable than the musical traditions of Africa, Asia, South America, or the Middle East, thus proving the innate superiority of the ‘white race.’” The problem with this assessment, aside from denying the very existence of the White race, is the inability to demonstrate (or even attempt to demonstrate) that Western classical music is not inherently more sophisticated, complicated (and yes valuable) than other musical traditions.
That classical music stands as a glaring (and galling) testament to the preeminence of European high culture (and implicitly of the race overwhelmingly responsible for it), was evident in the reaction to a speech President Trump gave in Poland in 2017. The speech, praising Western civilization, included the line “we write symphonies.”
Jonathan Capehart, a columnist at The Washington Post, fumed: “What on Earth does that have to do with anything? In that one line, taken in context with everything else Trump said, what I heard was the loudest of dog whistles. A familiar boast that swells the chests of white nationalists everywhere.” For Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times, Trump’s point, extolling the “richness, history and, indeed, the superiority of Western culture,” was “all too clear and dismaying,” Alex Ross, Jewish music critic for the New Yorker, found “ludicrous and sinister” Trump’s “implication that some cultures are incapable of creating symphonies,” a sentiment that, he maintained, should have “stirred bad memories.”
Classical Music as Insufficiently Diverse
As well as decrying as deeply offensive the invocation of classical music to praise Western civilization (and thus White people), commentators routinely bemoan the lack of “diversity” in the genre. According to Jewish music critic Greg Sandow, the “problem of racial diversity in classical music has long been the elephant in the room,” and he labels “ugly” the fact that classical music, “in practice pretty much a lily-white art,” claims “special privileges (lavish funding, school programs devoted to it) in an age of growing diversity.” Rather than simply reflecting the divergent preferences and aptitudes of different racial groups, the underrepresentation of Black and Brown people in Western orchestras (and their audiences) is inevitably ascribed to White racism. Black screenwriter Candace Allen, the ex-wife of conductor Sir Simon Rattle, branded the British classical music world “racist,” claiming a combination of discrimination and lack of exposure to classical music at an early age meant Blacks were unlikely to make it to the concert hall (in the audience or on stage), and when they did, “their sense of alienation made the experience not one to be repeated.”
According to this conception, an insidious White supremacist conspiracy keeps the classical repertoire dominated by the music of dead White men performed by living White men, and prevents Black and Brown people from succeeding in the genre.
Constructing Beethoven as Black
Even the romantic idea of the composer-genius is regarded as an element of this conspiracy to keep Western classical music a Whites-only field. For Shaver-Gleason, “The conflation of ‘genius’ and ‘white man’ means that no minority will be viewed as a real genius, and hence not a real composer.” Given Beethoven’s status as the archetypal musical genius, it is unsurprising that aggrieved Blacks have, since the early twentieth century, attempted to propagate the myth that Beethoven had some African ancestry. The basis for this spurious claim was the composer’s somewhat swarthy complexion, and the fact a part of his family traced its roots to Flanders, which was for a period under Spanish monarchical rule. Because Spain had a longstanding historical connection to North Africa through the Moors, a degree of blackness supposedly trickled down to the great composer.
The myth was eagerly disseminated by Jamaican “historian” Joel Augustus Rogers (1880–1966) in works like Sex and Race (1941–44), the two-volume World’s Great Men of Color (1946–47), 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (1934), Five Negro Presidents (1965), and Nature Knows No Color Line (1952). Rogers, whose intellectual rigor was basically nonexistent, claimed that Beethoven — in addition to Thomas Jefferson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, and several popes, among others — was genealogically African and thus Black. Despite being thoroughly debunked, the myth still lingers in contemporary culture: in 2007 Nadine Gordimer published a short story collection called Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories. The determination, contrary to all evidence, to make Beethoven Black is, of course, a desperate attempt to make the composer and his oeuvre a glorious symbol of Black accomplishment.
The East Asian Affinity for Western classical music
Curiously, the alleged White supremacist conspiracy that allegedly prevents Blacks and Browns from succeeding in classical music doesn’t have the same effect on East Asians – the one non-White group that likes performing and listening to classical music. A survey of Asian-Americans aged 18–24 found 14 percent attended a classical concert in the preceding year, more than any other demographic in that age group. Asian attendance rates match or surpass the national average up through the 45–54 age range. The younger the classical music audience gets, the more Asian it becomes.
Unlike non-White groups affronted by claims to the superiority for Western classical music, East Asians are under no illusion about the inferiority of their own musical tradition when compared to European art music. This acknowledgement lies at the heart of why East Asian parents are so enthusiastic for their children to play and appreciate the genre. As Amy Chua acknowledges in her widely publicized (and criticized) Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:
That’s one of the reasons I insisted [my two daughters] do classical music. I knew that I couldn’t artificially make them feel like poor immigrant kids. … But I could make sure that [they] were deeper and more cultivated than my parents and I were. Classical music was the opposite of decline, the opposite of laziness, vulgarity, and spoiledness. It was a way for my children to achieve something I hadn’t. But it was also a tie-in to the high cultural tradition of my ancestors [Chua is proud to be descended in the direct male line from Chua Wu Neng, Imperial Astronomer to a 17th-century emperor]. … To me, the violin symbolized respect for hierarchy, standards, and expertise. For those who know better and can teach. For those who play better and can inspire. And for parents. It also symbolized history. The Chinese never achieved the heights of Western classical music – there is no Chinese equivalent of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – but high traditional music is deeply entwined with Chinese civilization.
East Asia has produced countless young technical virtuosos, but their nimble fingers and admirable work ethics are often not matched by the emotional depth required for the successful interpretation of nineteenth-century Romantic repertoire. Chinese film director, and classical music fan, Chen Kaige, hopes Western classical music can educate an intensely materialistic and collectivist Chinese people in spirituality and individualism. “One of the biggest differences between Chinese and Western culture,” he points out, “is that we don’t have religion. We don’t worship anything. Western classical music has elements of love and forgiveness that come from religion. Chinese music is very intellectual, very exotic, but there is no love. You don’t feel warm after you listen to it.”
Appreciation of Classical Music Correlated with Intelligence
The East Asian affinity with Western classical music is perhaps not surprising given that appreciation of the genre has been correlated with higher intelligence. Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa posits that more intelligent people populate concert halls because they’re more likely to respond to purely instrumental works. By contrast, people across the intelligence spectrum seem to enjoy vocal music. Kanazawa’s Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis predicts highly intelligent people are more likely to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values. According to this theory, they are better able to comprehend, and thus enjoy, novel stimuli. Vocal music predated sonatas by many millennia, so, in evolutionary terms, purely instrumental music is a novelty — which, according to Kanazawa’s theory, means highly intelligent people are more likely to appreciate and enjoy it.
Studies support Kanazawa’s theory, finding clear preferences for instrumental musical genres among those who score higher on intelligence tests. Controlling for age, race, sex, education, family income, religion, current and past marital status and number of children, more intelligent people are more likely to prefer instrumental music than less-intelligent people. A 2019 Croatian study confirmed these findings, showing that people with lower intelligence preferred music with lyrics, rather than complex orchestrations. 467 teenagers performed a non-verbal intelligence test and were then asked to rank musical genres in order or preference. Those who recorded the highest IQ scores displayed a clear preference for instrumental music. On the other extreme, preference for rap music is significantly negatively correlated with intelligence.
Conclusion
Mass non-White immigration into Western nations has ensured that, for a growing percentage of their populations, classical music holds little or no appeal. Classical music audiences in the United States and other Western nations are contracting: according to a National Endowment for the Arts survey, in the early twenty-first century, the percentage of American adults who attended at least one classical music event dropped from 11.6 to 8.8 in just ten years.
Non-White immigration to the West was always unpopular with existing White populations who were assured it posed no long-term threat to their demographic and cultural dominance. This was always a lie: changing the demographics and culture of the West was the core motivation for these policies. With the Great Replacement now well underway, even White people who enjoy a White art form – like classical music – are regarded by some as engaging in an activity that should make them feel “uncomfortable.”
Classical music, like other aspects of Western culture, has been a casualty of the anti-White diversity mania that now infests Western intellectual life. The Cultural Marxist critique of classical music wallows in bad faith arguments and cognitive dissonance: Western classical music is nothing exceptional, yet cannot be invoked to praise White people because this necessarily implies the inferiority of other races; a White supremacist conspiracy thwarts Black and Brown achievement in the genre, but it utterly fails to prevent East Asian interest and success; Black composers have written symphonies (and, indeed, Beethoven himself was Black), yet the Western classical music tradition is inherently White supremacist and needs radical deconstruction.
Ultimately, the reason invoking classical music to laud White people is so keenly resented by anti-White intellectuals is because the gap in civilizational attainment it underscores is an embarrassing affront to regnant egalitarian assumptions. Classical music is one of the crowning glories of Western civilization, and White people have every right to take proud in their race’s achievements in the genre, and to cite these achievements as motivation for pro-White activism.