#1 The Vanderbilt Report and the Rigor of Music Studies

The Question

Hani Zewail's Response

The question connects closely with the paper I will present this month at the 34th Arab Music Festival and Conference in Cairo. The report was written for a commission, convened by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University, that asked whether political criteria have displaced scholarly ones across the humanities (Commission on the State of Scholarship 2026); its claim about music is that political pressure has narrowed both the field's skills and its knowledge of music (Fine and Morrison 2026). Let me begin with what it gets right before turning to the worry about the periphery.

On the first point, I think the report is right that cancel culture is the gravest threat to rigor in our discipline. Rigor depends on the freedom to be wrong in public and to be corrected in public; when a claim cannot be questioned without provoking a petition, an investigation or a forced apology, it is no longer tested, and an untested claim, however sincerely held, is not knowledge.

The cases bear this out. After Philip Ewell's 2019 plenary to the Society for Music Theory (Ewell 2020), a symposium meant to debate his thesis became instead a trial of its participants, and the academic question at its heart was never answered. When a jazz-theory award was stripped of Steve Larson's name because he had used Schenkerian methods, even as the committee acknowledged that no one had accused him of racism, the result was not scholarship correcting itself but guilt by citation. And when the president of the Society for Ethnomusicology could be driven to public recantation over a mild reply, ordinary members of the profession drew the obvious lesson.

Notice what the report defends in place of all this. It was written by a philosopher whose own work on essence, and on how wholes relate to their parts, is a model of ontological precision (Fine 1994, 1999), and it stands in a tradition, the analytic philosophy of music from Goodman (1968) and Wolterstorff (1980) to Levinson (1980), Kivy (1983) and Dodd (2007), that asks exact questions: what a musical work is, what makes a performance a performance of it, and how a score fixes its identity. Far from being idle puzzles, these questions settle real methodological disputes, as the debates over Rifkin's one-voice-per-part Bach and Norrington's period-instrument Beethoven, both of which turn on what counts as faithful to a work, make clear (Rifkin 1982; Kivy 1995).

The two points are connected, for formal and philosophical methods are slow, demanding and open to refutation, whereas political framing is fast and closed to it; where dissent is punished, it is the slow methods that lose.

Now to the worry about the periphery, where I think the report's case can be made stronger by drawing out a distinction it leaves implicit. Its "center" is defined twice at once, as a repertoire (the Western canon from the Baroque to modernism) and as a method (formal analysis with conservatory tools). It is the method that the report is really defending, and rightly so; but because the measure ties that method to a single repertoire, a rigorous formal analysis of a maqam ends up in the same bin as a paper with no music in it at all.

Once method is separated from repertoire, the argument sharpens, since the question becomes how much of the field still applies formal and philosophical rigor to any music at all, and I suspect the answer would be just as troubling while being far harder for critics to dismiss as a mere defense of a canon.

History supports the distinction. Music theory was never only about notes: Plato keeps some modes and banishes others for their effect on citizens (Republic 398c–399e), and Aristotle devotes much of the last book of the Politics to music in education. Yet the Islamic tradition I study shows that ethical concern and formal rigor can live together, for al-Fārābī's Great Book of Music derives intervals, genera and rhythmic cycles with mathematical care (al-Fārābī 1967; d'Erlanger 1930–35), while Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Urmawī built a modal system that still underlies Arab and Turkish practice (Wright 1978). The periphery, in other words, has a center of its own, and it is an analytical one.

This is the case I will make in Cairo: that the maqam is a kind of entity, and that it requires an ontology built with the tools of Western analytical philosophy. A maqam is not a scale but a structured whole, comprising a tonic, a set of ajnās (melodic cells of three to five notes) joined at fixed pivots, a dominant tone, a characteristic melodic path (sayr) and conventional routes of modulation (Powers 1980; Marcus 1989). Its intervals, moreover, flex: the neutral third of Sīkāh is not sung identically in Cairo, Aleppo and Baghdad, and yet musicians in all three cities agree that it is the same maqam.

That raises precisely the questions analytic ontology was built to answer. What are a maqam's identity conditions? Is it an abstract type, as Wolterstorff (1980) or Dodd (2007) would treat a musical work, a structure indicated in a historical context, as Levinson (1980) argues, or what Fine (1999) calls a variable embodiment, a single entity whose manifestation varies from one performance to the next? The stakes are practical, for when the 1932 Congress of Arab Music in Cairo debated fixing Arab intervals in a 24-tone equal system, it was taking an ontological decision without an ontology (Racy 1991).

To come back to the question, then: defending the analytical tradition does not concede that Arabic music, or any other music, is peripheral; quite the opposite. The periphery does not need less of the Western analytical tradition but more of it, since only a clear account of what a maqam is can tell us what notation must preserve, what teaching can standardize and what it must leave free.

As for the shift the report documents, a field may broaden its horizons and still keep its standards, but it cannot keep them once dissent is punished. I would ask only that the report's standard be applied to the whole of music, whose breadth the Greeks and al-Fārābī already understood.

— Hani Ahmed Zewail

References

• al-Fārābī. 1967. Kitāb al-Mūsīqī al-Kabīr. Edited by Ghaṭṭās ʿAbd al-Malik Khashaba. Cairo: Dār al-Kātib al-ʿArabī.

• Aristotle. Politics, Book VIII.

• Commission on the State of Scholarship. 2026. Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Nashville and St. Louis: Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis.

• d'Erlanger, Rodolphe. 1930–35. La musique arabe. Vols. 1–2. Paris: Geuthner.

• Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Ewell, Philip. 2020. "Music Theory and the White Racial Frame." Music Theory Online 26 (2).

• Fine, Kit. 1994. "Essence and Modality." Philosophical Perspectives 8: 1–16.

• Fine, Kit. 1999. "Things and Their Parts." Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23: 61–74.

• Fine, Kit, with Simon Morrison. 2026. "Report on Music Studies." Vanderbilt University.

• Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

• Kivy, Peter. 1983. "Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defense." Grazer Philosophische Studien 19: 109–29.

• Kivy, Peter. 1995. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

• Levinson, Jerrold. 1980. "What a Musical Work Is." Journal of Philosophy 77 (1): 5–28.

• Marcus, Scott. 1989. "Arab Music Theory in the Modern Period." PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.

• Plato. Republic, 398c–399e.

• Powers, Harold S. 1980. "Mode." In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan.

• Racy, Ali Jihad. 1991. "Historical Worldviews of Early Ethnomusicologists: An East-West Encounter in Cairo, 1932." In Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, edited by Stephen Blum, Philip V. Bohlman and Daniel M. Neuman, 68–91. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

• Rifkin, Joshua. 1982. "Bach's Chorus: A Preliminary Report." Musical Times 123 (1677): 747–54.

• Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1980. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

• Wright, Owen. 1978. The Modal System of Arab and Persian Music, A.D. 1250–1300. Oxford: Oxford University Press.