In the words of Eric Lewis, “approaching Afrological musics from the theoretical perspective of a Western aesthetic…yields not only a lack of understanding…but can have pernicious political and social results.” In this paper, I demonstrate the relevance of this statement to the British Music classroom. In Part One, I outline the current state of the UK’s Model Music Curriculum and seek to identify its underlying ideology. Part Two offers a survey of how the universal understanding of music as a series of autonomous products generates a prescribed set of criteria for musical evaluation. By ascribing idiosyncratically European notions to our evaluation of music on a universal scale, we are left with an incomplete understanding and appreciation of music not conceived according to this ideology. Looking to the future, Part Three suggests how we might approach music in a fair and germane way via a transfer of emphasis from the musical product to the people involved in the musical process. I name this an outside-in approach to music, and consider it a universally applicable and fruitful mode of musical analysis—people are, after all, the common denominator for music-making. By beginning with the social and cultural conditions in which musicians create, students are equipped with a multiplicity of lenses through which they can better appreciate the value and beauty of musical cultures both near and far.

Leonard Feather (1914−1994) was one of the first (and only) prominent jazz critics to recognize gender discrimination within jazz and attempt to redress the issue. But even by the 1950s, Feather grew frustrated with his inability to effect meaningful change for women musicians. He could not understand why women like Beryl Booker, Melba Liston, Vi Redd, and others did not receive more attention, even after he arranged tours and produced record dates for them (Feather 1987). The privileged position he held within the music industry—a position he had cultivated and leveraged in support of other musicians he felt had been unfairly discriminated against—ultimately seemed to do little for many of the women he championed. Women jazz masters remain few and far between.

What does it mean to be a jazz master, and who determines modes of mastery? In this article, I examine some of the musicians for whom he advocated and how he advocated for them, including columns he authored, albums he produced, and Blindfold Tests he administered. To conclude, I follow Feather into the 1990s to examine how he dealt with who was to blame for jazz’s gender discrimination. In doing so, I reveal how jazz patriarchy maintained dominance over one of jazz’s most prominent decision-makers. I demonstrate how, despite his intentions, Feather’s embeddedness and investment in jazz patriarchy (in its ideological and commercial systems) resulted in a gender ignorant failure to critique the systems of mastery at the root of his connoisseurship.

Received wisdom has it that the Marxist intellectual and political theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote little about music. Nevertheless, scattered across his Quarderni del carcere (1929–35) are a small number of trenchant comments on Italian opera, which Gramsci probed for its role in creating the civil society of a unified Italian state – a state whose failures led to the rise of the Fascist regime that kept him imprisoned for the last decade of his life.1 In Mary Ann Smart’s words, ‘Gramsci saw the popularity of opera in Italy as both a substitute for and an impediment to the development of his preferred vehicle for Romantic sentiment, a popular literature that demanded a solitary and reflective mode of consumption diametrically opposed to the experience of the opera house.’2 Opera’s melodramatic excess partly accounted for what Gramsci saw as the Risorgimento’s failure to be a truly popular movement in Italy; from an infirmity on the aesthetic plane sprang many of the irresolvable cultural and political schisms that beset unified Italy.

The hugely discrepant valuations of the alterities of opera and racial slavery – differing additionally between the period under consideration and our own – would seem to preclude their being addressed in the same article. The former has been lauded as the ne plus ultra of human artistic expression. The latter was embraced as an essential economic driver, and morally, spiritually and legally sanctioned by the finest Anglo philosophical, religious and legal minds of the time. That the enslaved decried and rejected their capture and enforced labour – through suicide, rebellion, flight, sabotage and cultural separation – has long been clear. The use of the profits, obtained through the sale of commodities that slave labour produced, to fund musical activities, including opera, has remained hidden. By using the published lists of subscribers (issued as books and fans) for the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, and combining that information with what can gleaned from demographic, genealogical and slavery sources, the extent to which the opera was dependent upon families whose wealth lay in plantation ownership or other forms of profit allied to it is established. The proportion is higher than might be supposed. Three families – Lewis, Young and the Heywood sisters – are spotlighted in case studies of box subscribers.

Responding to Kenneth Smith’s recent essay, I theorize that Lisztian two-dimensional sonata form and Stravinskian ‘block’ structure exhibit a tightly bound relationship in Alexander Scriabin’s late sonatas. Such analysis stitches Scriabin both backwards in time towards Liszt, through the latter’s disciple Alexander Siloti, and forwards in time towards Stravinsky and the fragmented aesthetic of much twentieth-century musical modernism. Thus Scriabin’s late works, often thought to be hermetically sealed from traditions before and after him, are situated in direct contact with two practices. Though of little note in isolation, biographical connections to Liszt and Stravinsky are also compelling from a sonata-specific perspective. I examine not just how Scriabin’s mature sonatas are Lisztian-Stravinskian, but why.