On September 7, 2020, composer, musician, and YouTuber Adam Neely posted a video to his channel called “Music Theory and White Supremacy.”1 The video essay tapped into a broader, ongoing conversation in the public digital sphere about the state of music theory as a discipline as well as a praxis. Neely’s video was a response to the online debates between Philip Ewell and various Schenker scholars, colloquially known as “Schenkergate,” that were primarily taking place on social media, specifically Twitter. Neely’s video response to these debates showed his ability to pivot away from the somewhat insular academic spaces of the text-based social media areas of the Internet to the wide-reaching public area of user-generated digital content—in this case, YouTube. While diverging slightly from Neely’s usual content, the video fits right into not only his channel’s brand but the larger brand of music theory digital content; in fact, many of...

You do not currently have access to this content.