A musician friend sent me a recent article in the Telegraph reporting that “Musical notation has been branded ‘colonialist’ by Oxford professors hoping to reform their courses to focus less on white European culture . . . Academics are deconstructing the university’s music offering after facing pressure to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum following the Black Lives Matter protests.” According to the British newspaper, music professors said the classical repertoire taught at Oxford, which spans works by Mozart and Beethoven, focuses too much on ‘white European music from the slave period.’” Actually, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, where the pair lived and worked, was not a colonial power hence hardly involved in the slave trade, but you get the idea. So it goes in music teaching in a venerable university. Can architecture be far behind? The field seems ripe for revision, after all, Western architecture is—or was, until very recently—rooted in ancient Rome and Greece, both slave-owning societies. Out, damned column!
