Pianist, Professor of Music, Culture and Society, @citysociology. Views here my own. Co-convenor @cityuniafaf, Secretary @lucaf_london
City of London, London
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
Five years later, the Vanderbilt Report on Music Studies has confirmed this. We must eliminate ideology from musicology to save it.
cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/…
It’s almost exactly 5 years since this article of mine, which caused a mini furore amongst some parts of the musicological profession, was published in The Spectator. I’m glad I did. The field is dying and whilst there are great musicologists doing vital work, I think others have played a significant role in bringing about the decline. Do have a read
openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/epr…
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
The Vanderbilt “Report on Music Studies” by Kit Fine concluded that political pressures have narrowed the field’s skill sets and knowledge, with trends rooted in the 1980s “new musicology” movement and ongoing shifts toward presentist political topics.
cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/…
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
As the world & its wife knows, literary criticism is in the toilet atm, full of freaks & weirdos who can’t write for toffee & publicly sniff their own farts.
Most thoughtful reviewers are found outside the academy, & this is why @pensandpoison is my #FF this week.
Get in!
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
Traveling tomorrow, 4 airplanes, 15 hours.
So I’m taking this for the flights, so I can keep my head in a book of one of my favorite writers. Airplane/vacation book choices are almost as important as where you’re going.
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
It was a joy to speak to @WestminsterWAG about scrapping the childcare cliff edge so families have the freedom to make the right choices for them, my ongoing battle to protect childhood from the harms of screens, fighting Labour’s education vandalism & Kemi’s Madonna-level fame.
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‘Like academics in other identity studies fields, women’s and gender studies scholars have long seen ourselves as activists as well as scholars. From the beginning, we gave ourselves the charge to change the world and not just interpret it.
As time went on, I couldn’t help seeing ways in which the ethos of activism can come into conflict with the ethos of scholarship. Unless we’re willing to presumptively declare that careful observation and analysis of data will always yield results that serve particular political agendas, how could they not conflict?
When confronted with even the possibility that there may be a conflict between what activism requires of us and what scholarship requires of us, academic progressives deny that there can be such a conflict. And they wonder why anyone would raise the question unless they were harboring right-wing impulses in their heart.
[….]
Whether you’re an orthodox Christian or an academic progressive, if you believe that you and those who agree with you have the only answer to every contentious question—that you understand what is at stake morally and politically, and your opponents are dreadfully, even wickedly, wrong—you will embrace, and demand that others embrace, “rigid orthodoxies.” You will not consider it a matter of “moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.”
Inevitably, some progressive academics publicly divulge how to use their positions as scholars to advance political goals, also known as saying the quiet part out loud. One of these is the English professor Julie Stone Peters, whose reflections on how to think about the political goals of instruction couldn’t be clearer.
Not all of our students will be original thinkers, nor should they all be. A world of original thinkers, all thinking wholly inimitable thoughts, could never get anything done. For that we need unoriginal thinkers, hordes of them, cloning ideas by the score and broadcasting them to every corner of our virtual world. What better device for idea-cloning than the cliché? …. Maybe we should … strive to send our students forth — and ourselves too — armed with clichés for political change.
Peters’ examples of academic clichés that do “real political work,” “chang[ing] how people see, what they think, and, ever-so-slowly, what they do,” are “performativity” and “genderqueer.”In this startlingly cynical vision of education, we pretend to help students learn to think while they do the grunt work of spreading our political ideas. And they pay us for the privilege. Is this a great country, or what?
In addition to holding the view that there’s no conflict between activism and scholarship, my colleagues instruct their students that this is so. Because to acknowledge that such a distinction—even contradiction—might exist is to open the larger enterprise of academic progressivism to criticisms we’re unwilling to entertain.’
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Been watching The Wargame. Gripping stuff (but haven’t watched Part 4 yet - so no spoilers!). Michael Gove, Nicola Sturgeon, Jim Murphy, Penny Mordaunt, Richard Barrons, Ayesha Hazarika all excellent - really responding to the challenge and the incredibly difficult decisions. Harriet Harman and Sayeeda Waarsi completely out of their depth. Great stuff from Anthony Scaramucci and George Robertson as US Secretary of State and NATO Secretary General.
But thinking with horror about the idea of Corbyn + co being in charge when something like this happened.
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
The Vanderbilt report on music studies. Just out - it is US-focused but gives numbers and percentages relating to the subsumption of the discipline of musicology into social justice ideology.
‘The 505 individual papers on the AMS program of the meeting (a joint AMS/SMT meeting; the concurrent SMT sessions are not included) were each coded for political framing, with 0 indicating no meaningful social/political/identity framing, 1 indicating that such framing is present but secondary, and 2 indicating that a social, political, or identity thesis is the central organizing frame of the argument. (Each paper was coded separately by three language models, whose codes were combined into a per-paper consensus; details in appendix D.7.) Nearly half of the papers (47.9%) were coded as 2 (with political framing as central); under a third (31.9%) were coded as 0 (no political framing); just over two-thirds (68.1%) carry at least some political framing. Indeed, many of the titles of the sessions made it seem as if they were more concerned with political issues than with music itself. Examples include: “Race, Nation, and Identity”; “Theorizing and Mythologizing Whiteness”; “Seeing and Depicting Queerness”; “Colonial Narratives and Negotiations”; “Colonial Perspectives, Stereotypes, and Caricatures.”
The papers were also coded along various political axes (such as race, gender, or colonialism); the axes question was asked separately from the framing question, and a paper can carry more than one axis. The most frequently assigned axes are race/ethnicity (25.0% of all papers), nationalism/migration (20.2%), gender (19.6%), and colonialism/indigeneity (16.0%), with a catch-all category for other dimensions, such as religion, disability, or climate, at 17.0%. The papers were also assigned a single primary scholarly approach. The most common was critical or cultural theory, at 53.1% of all papers; historical and archival scholarship accounts for a further 27.3%. Formal or music-theoretic analysis of musical structure was the primary approach of only 8.5%.
[….]
A related set of data (detailed in Appendix 😎 concerns the frequencies of certain clusters of words over time in the abstracts of the annual meetings of the AMS, covering 52 meetings between 1969 and 2025. The frequency with which the names of canonical composers are mentioned went down from around 60 (per 10,000 words) in 2001-2005 to around 12 in 2021-2025. This represents a roughly fivefold decrease. Moreover, during the previous period, 1969-2000, the frequency showed no comparable decline. Core music-analytic vocabulary fell similarly (from 45.6 per 10,000 words in 1986-1990 to 18.0 in 2021-2025), as did early-music terminology (21.4 to 6.3) and Schenkerian vocabulary (6.0 to 0.28). As explained above, the AMS is currently managing a crisis of scholarly integrity stemming from the imposition of DEI mandates on conference programs and publications.
There was a corresponding increase in the frequency of identity- and justice-related keywords: gender and feminist vocabulary rose from 3.8 (per 10,000 words) in 1986-1990 to 12.5 in 2021-2025; justice-oriented language from 0.46 to 7.5; scholarly race vocabulary from near zero to 5.1; and “queer” from zero to 5.3. Similarly, the frequency of popular-music words increased, from 6.2 to 15.5, as did the frequency of screen and media words, which were nearly absent before 1990 and stand at 13.8 in 2021-2025. In the period 2021-2025, one would be at least as likely to be reading a gender keyword, or a popular-music word, or a screen media word in an abstract of the AMS as the name of a canonical composer.’
@ivanhewett @SalemLola @amwilson_opera @carolinefrmus @carlgomb @epkaufm @jgro_the @HJoyceGender @Baroness_Nichol @IGMansfield @EdelaQuintaine @elladorn_ @verdur_in @Fox_Claire
cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/…
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
Can you imagine the political, media, institutional outrage if say a far right terrorist murdered a Labour grandee like Harriet Harman and it turned out he'd previously tried to burn down Andy Burnham's house? Imagine the universal outrage and the backlash against the right. Now compare the reaction to the news about Ann Widdecomb's killer.
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
If you want to read a novel about aging, about vanishing into a body that feels ghosted by life’s vitality, Eva Figes’ GHOSTS offers it. I can still hear the wind blowing over the thresholds of the speaker’s alienation. “Becoming my mother” is Figes’ leitmotif.
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
These universities are not looking for experts in the history and theory of music. They are looking for ideologues.
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
intersections with critical race theory.”
Univ. of Guelph: “The successful candidate will also demonstrate practical experience in ethical, inclusive, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and decolonial recording practices that emphasise community-engaged learning.”
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
Here are some job ads mentioned in the report:
Wash Univ: “The Department is seeking a composer whose work addresses issues of race, power, equity, and/or justice.”
Swarthmore: “We are particularly interested in candidates whose work is grounded in music scholarship and its
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
Scholarly integrity requires critical thinking. Part of critical thinking involves checking your work to make sure it does not reflect your biases. Ideology is such a bias.
amazon.com/Critical-Thinking…
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RT @sapinker: Yes, many critical-social-justice dogmas can't withstand intellectual scrutiny, so their proponents try to protect them via i…
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
Michelle Shipworth is an Associate Professor at UCL and an advocate for academic freedom and free speech. She has spoken publicly about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on UK universities and the threats this can pose to academic freedom.
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
🚨 TICKETS ARE SELLING FAST!! Don’t forget to grab your place at KCLFSS’s event next week:
How Can We Defend Free Speech On Campus? (link in bio)
🧵 Learn more about our speakers in this thread:
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
John Cleese has been reported to Prevent, the government’s counter-terrorism watchdog.
My thoughts here…
andrewdoyle.org/p/john-clees…
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Prof Ian Pace retweeted
Perhaps the two key works of twentieth-century Japanese literature: Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility and Ōe’s Silent Cry. Both are formidable, challenging works — mixing genres, ruthlessly observing history and society, very different in style but offering many echoes and mirrors.
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