The Myth of the Canon's Invisible Hand (Guest post by Anne C. Shreffler)

From Linda: Hello, everyone! This year has been remarkable for (among other things) public debates about women's experiences in our society, from the Women's March to the #metoo campaign. Just as the previous two posts on this blog have featured a multitude of voices, this post comes from someone else: Harvard musicologist Anne Shreffler. Many thanks to Dr. Shreffler for contributing to our continued discussion of the classical music canon.

Beethoven, the disembodied name of a
musical deity, in Boston's Symphony Hall

“But isn’t musical quality more important than gender?”

Anyone who has ever proposed a greater inclusion of women composers and composers of color—into a curriculum, a concert program, or an archive—is familiar with this kind of response. One of the most persistent myths in music history is that the classical music canon came about as the result of a rational, inevitable process that ensured the preservation of only the "best" works, those that "stood the test of time." An influential proponent of this view was the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, who maintained in 1977 that the musical canon was not made but "found." According to Dahlhaus, we can't shape or change the canon, since it was created long ago by the invisible hand of tradition.

How exactly is this selection process supposed to have worked? One imagines a fictional court of justice in the heavenly spheres, presided over by—whom? (God? St. Cecilia? Herbert von Karajan?), that conducts annual reviews of ALL the compositions by ALL the people, and hands down impartial judgment on their "musical quality." The verdict: Sibelius, yes; his contemporaries Amy Beach and Will Marion Cook, no.