UMass prof: We don’t say White male composers’ full names because of ‘inequity’

Article here. Excerpt:

'Christopher White, a professor of music theory at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, stated that the music world should “fullname” all composers to smooth inequities between White men and female, non-White artists.

In an op-ed for Slate, White noted that musicians refer to the last names of composers like Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach — all of whom are Western Europeans — while they use the full names of women and “composers of color” like Alma Mahler, Florence Price, and Henry Burleigh.
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He sees fullnaming as “a small act in the face of centuries of harm and injustice,” yet he believes that “by adopting a stance of referential egalitarianism, fullnaming at least does no more harm.”

White’s comments come in the wake of universities revising their music theory curricula to fight the influence of alleged systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.

For instance, students at Texas Tech asked the school’s dance and theatre department to overhaul its curriculum, opposing a “white heteronormative patriarchal canon” with “intersectional feminism.”'

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