DOI: 10.1111/musa.12226 BRYAN J. PARKHURST Sins of the Father:Schenker,Schenkerism and Ewell’s ON MUSIC THEORY So, if one argues that the hierarchic thinking that lies at the core of Schenkerian theory is white and racist, what is one to make of the fact that in West Africa, too, modes of hierarchic thinking are pronounced and functionally indispensable to an understanding of many an expressive structure, musical as well as non- musical? The worst consequence of claiming technical procedures for whiteness is denying the existence of shared ways of proceeding, and in effect enjoining our hypothetical West African theorist to go look for something different, a new grounding principle, better if it is anchored in nonhierarchy, something uniquely his own, something ‘black’. The domain of blackness is thus defined in its non- intersection with whiteness. I fail to see how such a strategy can be empowering for black scholars. (Agawu 2021, pp. 15–16) Introduction If the blogosphere, social media and the popular press are any indication, Philip Ewell’s new book, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, provokes strongly positive and strongly negative reactions in its readers. But everyone in Ewell’s audience – his ideological nemeses as much as or more than his sympathisers and proselytes – should agree that he has written a type of book that has never been written before: a music-theoretical page turner. Maybe this says more about me than it does about music theory, but I can’t think of another book with a Library of Congress ‘MT’ designation that I simply couldn’t put down. Ewell has a taste and a flair for playing the raconteur, and much of his manifesto is anecdotal, narrating the vicissitudes of Ewell’s academic career and the circumstances of his (by his own account) road-to-Damascus awakening to the deleterious effects of what he calls the ‘white racial frame’, a term borrowed from the sociologist Joe Feagin (Feagin 2009). He also has a taste and a flair for playing the provocateur. On Music Theory is written with an intensity of candor that verges on yellow-journalistic stridency. It doesn’t flinch at – indeed it revels in – airing music theory’s dirty laundry and dragging skeletons out of closets. Regarding the maltreatment and prejudice Ewell has experienced lately and over the years, there is whistle-blowing aplenty. He publicises private email correspondence, reports the contents of presumably confidential Music Analysis, 00/0 (2024) 1 © 2024 The Authors. Music Analysis published by Society for Music Analysis and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.