By Chris Menahan
Sheet music is now canceled!
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”.
In response to widespread Black Lives Matter protesters and riots last year in the United Kingdom, music educators at Oxford University have joined the wider iconoclastic movement which has been sweeping through British academia.
Academics proposed changing the way music notation is taught because it is a “colonialist representational system”, with professors seeking to focus less on white European heritage and culture, according to documents seen by The Telegraph.
The woke educators went on to claim that musical notation itself is a “colonialist representational system” that has “complicity to white supremacy”. The claim is similar to leftist pronouncements in America that mathematics is inherently racist.
The Oxford academics went on to pronounce that teaching the piano or conducting orchestras could cause “students of colour great distress” as the skills involved are closely tied to “white European music”.
Professors at the university said that the classical music which is taught at Oxford, which includes Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert, among others, is too focused on “white European music from the slave period”.
Why teach Schubert and make these poor, disadvantaged youths (at Oxford) feel inferior when you could be teaching Lil Nas X?
How much of this is just unremarkable students coming up with excuses not to do any work?
This article originally appeared on Information Liberation.