Alexander W. Cowan

[Presented as part of the “Disciplinarity and the Affordances of Musicological Critique” Panel at the American Musicological Society, Chicago, IL, November 2024]

Historian of science Elizar Barkan identified in the 1930s USA a “retreat of race science”: a turn away from simplistic assumptions of the primacy of racialized nature over nurture, motivated by more sophisticated understandings of inheritance at home, and fear of science’s cooption by fascism abroad. A look at the history of music science, however, reveals a different story. The 1930s saw the crest of a wave of racialized studies on musical ability, motivated by the development of standardized tests for musical talent in the preceding decade, their endorsement both by educational institutions, and their adoption by one of the major promoters of hereditarian research, the American Eugenics Society. From 1925 to 1940, dozens of studies were conducted across the United States and beyond, that aimed to prove, via purported differences in musical ability, a general theory of innate racial difference.

Not all those who conducted these tests, however, did so in the name of eugenics. This paper considers attempts, in the 1920s and 30s, to turn musical race scientists’ methods on themselves—to use racialized studies on musical ability to disprove “hard” hereditarian attitudes about racial difference. After establishing a “state of the field” and considering other critiques leveled against musical race science, the paper focuses on the work of North Carolina scholar and anti-segregationist Guy B. Johnson, whose doctoral dissertation “Musical Talent and the Negro” attempted to prove, using data from standardized tests, that there was no difference in musical ability between Black and White test subjects. Drawing on archival evidence and new readings of published scientific texts, this paper examines Johnson’s multiple attempts to demolish (we might say) the master’s house with the master’s tools; and considers how these attempts were received—both by those he was seeking to critique, and those who were, nominally, on the same side. 

Through returning to this early moment of what might be called, in modern terms, “anti-racist” music scholarship, this paper aims to focus attention on the affordances and limitations of musical interventions in wider fields of political struggle, when institutional support for such interventions is—for the moment—on the rise.