Philip Ewell

His public intellectual work has included appearances on BBC and Adam Neely's YouTube channel. In March 2021, Ewell contributed to RILM's blog in which he wrote about his Twitter project "Erasing colorasure in American music theory" and delivered a public colloquium at Columbia University entitled "On Confronting Music Theory's Antiblackness: Three Case Studies".

Ewell's talk sparked the 2020 publication of fifteen responses in volume 12 of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The volume's contributing authors included the journal's co-founders Timothy L. Jackson and Stephen Slottow, as well as Charles Burkhart, Richard Beaudoin (Dartmouth College, assistant professor of music), Suzannah Clark, Nicholas Cook, and Jack Boss (University of Oregon, professor of music theory and composition), as well as "An Anonymous Response to Philip Ewell", which itself drew criticism.

Ewell's work on music theory's white racial frame—and the ensuing controversy from the 2020 publication of Journal of Schenkerian Studies' twelfth volume—has received wide-ranging media attention from Alex Ross at The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, and Inside Higher Ed. The Society for Music Theory's executive board stated that it "condemns the anti-Black statements and personal ad hominem attacks on Philip Ewell perpetuated in several essays included in the 'Symposium on Philip Ewell's 2019 SMT Plenary Paper' published by the Journal of Schenkerian Studies".

On November 9, 2019, at the 42nd annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Ewell participated in a plenary session entitled "Reframing Music Theory" which sought to "critique the confining frames within which [music theory] has been operating and explore ways in which to reframe what constitutes music theory". He presented a talk entitled "Music Theory's White Racial Frame". In his talk and in subsequent publications, Ewell argues that the "white racial frame" – a term coined by sociologist Joe Feagin – shapes knowledge practices in Western music theory and its institutions. Feagin defines the "white racial frame" as,

Philip Adrian Ewell (born February 16, 1966) is an American professor of music theory at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He specializes in Russian and twentieth century music, as well as rap and hip hop.

Phillip Adrian Ewell was born on February 16, 1966, and grew up in DeKalb, Illinois. Ewell received a BA in music from Stanford University, an MA in cello performance from Queens College (City University of New York), and a PhD in music theory from Yale University. His dissertation, Analytical Approaches to Large-Scale Structure in the Music of Alexander Scriabin, was advised by Allen Forte.