Marianna Ritchey: “Against Idealism: Music, Musicology, and the End of the World”

Marianna Ritchey: "Against Idealism: Music, Musicology, and the End of the World"

In 2020, the Louisville Orchestra offered a musical tribute to Breonna Taylor, whom Louisville police had murdered six months earlier. This "Concert for Healing" was widely celebrated for "doing something" about racism in Louisville. In this talk, I accept the Orchestra's invitation to think about the connections between orchestral classical music and social change. Via a mixture of archival research, investigative journalism, and critical theory, I tell a very different story than the optimistic one reiterated in proclamations about music's transformative social power. This other story is about the material role that major symphony orchestras like Louisville's have played in the racist urban development of their cities since the nineteenth century. I trace this history in an attempt to construct a materialist account of U.S. "classical music" very different from the idealist one that circulates in this musical culture. I ultimately argue that idealism constitutes a profound political problem that is omnipresent in social justice initiatives throughout the world of classical music.