https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/leftists_are_now_rampaging_against_beethovens_and_mozarts_last_names.html
The latest racist screed from the angry left is that it’s a major insult to refer to classical composers by their last names (e.g., Beethoven, not Ludwig von Beethoven). To wokesters desperate for new psychic injuries, the failure to “fullname” classical composers is yet another despicable sign of white privilege.
Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: We refer to well-known composers, all of whom happen to be dead white men, by using only their last names. However, when we speak of works by modern composers who are new on the scene, many of whom are women or minorities, we use their full names (aka “fullnaming”). According to the new political correctness, fullnaming new composers, but not the old, is a sign of inequality.
I felt like an idiot just writing the above words, but that’s the theory that Chris White puts forth in a Slate article entitled “Beethoven Has a First Name: It’s time to ‘fullname’ all composers in classical music”:
[Conductors introducing a program] might talk about Beethoven, Schumann, and Bartók. And they might talk about Alma Mahler, Florence Price, Henry Burleigh, and Caroline Shaw. Many of us, used to the conventions of classical performance, will hardly notice the difference: “traditional” white male composers being introduced with only surnames, full names for everyone else, especially women and composers of color.
The habitual, two-tiered way we talk about classical composers is ubiquitous. For instance, coverage of an early October livestream by the Louisville Orchestra praised the ensemble’s performance of a “Beethoven” symphony, and the debut of a composition memorializing Breonna Taylor by “Davóne Tines” and “Igee Dieudonné.” But ubiquity doesn’t make something right. It’s time we paid attention to the inequity inherent in how we talk about composers, and it’s time for the divided naming convention to change.
