Referring to Mozart and Beethoven by their full names, as we might Florence Price or Scott Joplin, is the “only path to social justice in classical music” – so argues a new piece in US magazine Slate, known for its contrarian views, called Stop Calling Famous Composers by Their Last Names.
The author Chris White, an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, argues: “When we say, ‘Tonight, you’ll be hearing symphonies by Brahms and Edmond Dédé,’ we’re linguistically treating the former as being on a different plane than the latter, a difference originally created by centuries of systematic prejudice, exclusion, sexism, and racism.”
