© March from Selma to Montgomery by JAMES KARALES
handmade harpsichords for the price of fourteen DX7s or a recording studio and that teachers (even a few students) still laugh when you propose a Jimi Hendrix memorial guitar scholarship or suggest a series of workshops on the accordion (one of Europe's most widely used instruments) or try and start a course in Country and Western ensemble playing. Naturally, by setting this sort of aesthetic taboo on certain genres15, the conservative music college will ultimately commit cultural harakiri. At the same time, I am willing to bet that quite a few white European fans of 'AfroAmerican music' reading these lines would probably approve of the Jimi Hendrix scholarship but feel less sympathy for the accordion or C&W ideas. If I win this bet, it means that the most ironical effect of the twisted view of European music has been to perpetuate the rules of a 'betterthanthou' game in the field of musical aesthetics, so that even those of us trying to beat the ancien regime actually end up by
playing the same game as our rivals, instead of changing the rules or moving to another sport altogether. The reason for this intellectual debacle is that when we speak of the 'European tradition' and mean — without saying so of course — the reactionary caricature of European music presented to us by patriarchal bourgeois figures and institutions, we are not only misunderstanding and falsifying the historical position and role of this continent's classical music tradition, we are also, by acting 'little boy in opposition to naughty authorities', playing into the hands of the reactionary tradition of learning we seek to improve upon. By falling into a mechanistic anti authoritarian position, we perpetuate the ideas of the hated authorities with whom we live in an unresolved Oedipal relationship of dependence: we are the disobedient son who sees no value in himself without the habitual presence of an authoritarian father16.
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