The classical music of Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven (among other classical composers) is now considered racist, oppressive, and white supremacist. It is a representation of the colonization of oppressed minorities that the capitalist West is shoving down people’s throats.

Really??

I thought my jaw would hit the floor when I heard that Cancel Culture is leveling their sights on Mozart.  And then, when I thought about it, I realized that it is the woke Left’s goal to suppress beauty and true quality in art, including music. They want to replace it with cheapened music (think Cardi B at the Grammy Awards, and you’ll look no further).

But first, let’s look at the facts of this news story.

Classical Composers & White Supremacist Music (According to Oxford)

No college wants to be called the “R” word (racist), especially the prestigious and well-respected Oxford community.

After the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations, woke Oxford professors have created a movement to put “a ban on sheet music and an end to the focus on classical European composers” (New York Post).

A Breitbart article states, “The Telegraph reports that University of Oxford academics have complained that ‘Teaching notation which has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past” would be a “slap in the face” for some students’, as it has ‘complicity in white supremacy’”.

Side Note…

For those of you who don’t know, notation in music is the notes printed on a piece of paper with markings for a musician to know when to play loudly or softly, when to “rest” (or stop playing for a moment), when to speed up, etc. You can’t have written music without notation.

The woke professors worry that students of color are offended because classical music was written by white men and, according to Breitbart, “is too focused on ‘white European music from the slave period.’”

The university is also concerned that the majority of the music professors are white males.  It hopes to “decolonize” music, stating that “musical notation itself is a ‘colonialist representational system’ that has ‘complicity to white supremacy’ (Breitbart).

Instead of focusing on artists like Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven, the university hopes, according to the New York Post, to focus on music genres like “‘African and African Diasporic Musics’”, “‘Global Musics’’, and pop music such as “‘Artists Demanding Trump Stop Using Their Songs.’”

Postcolonial Theory & Mozart

In case you’re wondering, “Why the heck do these professors want to ‘decolonize’ Mozart’s music?”, I can explain.

You’ve heard me talk about Critical Theory before (the idea that racism is inherent in everything, and that Western Civilization needs to be deconstructed).

<<You can read more about how Critical Theory has affected Identity Politics here!

Critical Theory has a subsystem that seeks to “decolonize” everything in the West.  It is called Postcolonial Theory.

In Postcolonial Theory, anything that has to do with Western culture (from Winston Churchill to square dancing to the Founding Fathers of America to… you guessed it… Mozart [he was white, you know]) is supremacist and oppressive.  It needs to be deconstructed.

Critical Theory & Art

This idea that Western Civilization and capitalism is bad has infected every aspect of American culture, including Western art forms, such as Beethoven’s music.  In college, if you are studying art, you can bet safely that you will learn about Critical Theory and how it relates to art.

For example, Lib Guides provides a guide to the college course “ARTS 4012: Senior Studio Seminar: Art & Critical Theory.”

In this guide, it says, “Applying theory is an intrinsic part of our current practices of making and understanding art.”

In this “art class” the guide states students will study Semiotics and Structuralism, focusing on “language structures understanding: visual elements in an artwork can be ‘read’ as signs that structure culturally specific meanings in relationship to one another and the viewer’s understanding of those signs.”

It continues. “Reality is subject to the structures of language; language is a system in which all units are interdependent;…”

It is clear that Critical Theory has infected art and music.  Because music is a form of art and has oppressive power (when its origins are rooted in Western society, such as Schubert and other classical composers), art is included in the woke attempt to “decolonize,” “de-Westernize,” and make it more inclusive of people of color.

Conclusion

Classical music is graceful and poised. It is orderly, and above all, many of the classical composers were Christians.

Mozart once said that before conducting a symphony, he had a “secret: ‘I prayed to God for His mercy that all might go well, to His greater glory, and the symphony began.’”

Beethoven admired the “beauty and order” of music, saying, “It was not a fortuitous meeting of chordal atoms that made the world; if order and beauty are reflected in the constitution of the universe, then there is a God.

The Woke mob certainly noticed that many of the classical composers were white men who adored the orderliness of classical music and attributed their talents to the Christian God.  This would make them the ultimate oppressors, and therefore, college students attending Oxford should no longer study their music.

And yet, now the Woke mob unleashes its wrath by removing classical music studies from one of the most prestigious universities in the UK and simultaneously praises Cardi B, listing her as the woman of the year.  The madness spirals downward.

Decolonizing music and removing the “white supremacy” of classical music is not setting us in a good direction for society.