Dudamel gets a Harvard PhD
OrchestrasAmong today’s six recipients of an honorary PhD at Harvard is the LA Phil’s outgoing music director. He is decorated as a doctor of music.
Five of the six PhDs are from minority ethnicities. The sixth is a president emeritus of Harvard University.
Political correctness in campus action.
Here’s the citation:
Known for his dynamic musicianship and his devotion to the power of the arts, Gustavo Dudamel is an internationally renowned conductor. Currently the music and artistic director of both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, he will become the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. He has conducted major orchestras worldwide, featuring works by composers from Beethoven to Mahler to John Adams, and his discography includes more than 65 recordings. Born in Venezuela, he began violin studies as a child through the celebrated El Sistema program. By his teens he had distinguished himself as a conductor, becoming music director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela at 18 and winning the inaugural Gustav Mahler Competition at 23. He is a passionate advocate for music education through his work with Youth Orchestra Los Angeles as well as the Dudamel Foundation. Named one of Time’s most influential people in 2009, he has received such honors as Spain’s Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, the Konex Foundation Classical Music Award, and the International Society for the Performing Arts’ Distinguished Artist Award.
photo: Danny Clinch/Los Angeles Philharmonic
“Five of the six PhDs are from minority ethnicities. … Political correctness in campus action.”
Thanks for inserting your agenda, norm! Have you considered that maybe these recipients deserved their honorary degrees, or do you just hate to see non-white people succeed in classical music?
Were the other five had anything to do with music?
All but two of them are American-born. America is a nation of immigrants (aside from its indigenous people, of which Joy Harjo is one).
I find the comment on ethnicity of the recipients a little distasteful.
It’s simple, outright, racism. Ever ready to accuse anyone, anywhere of antisemitism though …!
Dudamel is also American born. He was born in Venezuela. That’s America. Did you mean to say “U.S. born”? Big difference.
I remember Harvard honoring Jessye Norman, Gustav Leonhard, Placido Domingo and Yo Yo Ma. That’s diverse.
Envy is one of the 7 Deadly Sins.
I would assume political correctness! How could one not think that in this backwards society?
I would assume recognition of accomplishment, which all six of these recipients have in abundance. Despite being from ethnic minorities.
He’s certainly always ready to condemn the merest hint of concern about the Gaza genocide as antisemitism (!) and his continuing remarks about ‘wokeness’ and ‘political correctness’ raise some questions about his understanding of real racism.
There’s no genocide in Gaza. There was, however, an attempt on 7th October.
Some strange things have been going on at Harvard.
Dr. Dudamel is white. El Doctor Dudamel may be latino, but he’s a white latino.
In Harvard’s 388 year history, it has granted honorary PhDs to white men 95% of the time.
The few recent ethnic minorities who are finally getting their due are no worse than the average white male recipient of Harvard’s honorary PhDs.
Suck it up. You’ll never get one, white or not.
“To those who have, more shall be given. To those who have not, even what they have will be taken away.”
J. Christ
The Nazarene got it spot on. Chavismo’s puppet gets the world. The Venezuelan people get exile, starvation and la misère humaine.
What a world.
Are Venezuelan diaspora the same type as Floridian Cubans? Like Marco Rubio? Genuinely curious. Given the scale of Venezuelan exodus (actually I don’t know what the scale is but I assume from your comment it must be large), should we expect a similar politician sometime down the line?
I think “Chavismo’s puppet” is rather a narrow view of Dudamel. I know of your commitment to the Venezuelan people, and have given a lot of thought to your comments over the years. But this remark seems to wipe out any good Dudamel has ever done because of early political affiliations. I had thought — and you can correct me if I am mistaken — that Dudamel had been trying to distance himself from the regime in recent years. I do know he has taken out another citizenship.
In the end, as you are disposed to quote Christ, the assessment will be made by neither thee or me. My own is that a person ought to be considered in terms of their whole life, not only aspects of it.
There is no doubt that GD is a wonderful conductor and I have no doubt that he creates net benefit to the classical music world generally, and to youth communities specifically wherever he is resident. I also share his passion for music education. Where I oppose him is in his continuing collaboration and friendship with the architects of Venezuela’s collapse, while simultaneously trumpeting Abreu’s leitmotif that “music transforms society”. His distancing was too late in the day, too temporary, too vague and too strategic for a man of his massive influence. The regime continues to hide its evil behind the firewall of music. For example, right now it is organising El Sistema’s Guinness World Record stunt. All the while, they are preventing the opposition’s candidate of choice – Maria Corina Machado – from running in the upcoming presidential election, thus condemning society to continued misery under Maduro. To collaborate with these criminals is “puppetry”, in my view, and business as usual has very much resumed, both in country and on tour. For the record, I would not utter another word of objection if GD and the machinery of El Sistema would just drop the “transformation” tagline. It is the tension between that grandiose claim and the plight of 8.5 million exiles that I resist; the attempt to serve god and the devil at the same time.
Abreu probably considered that tagline aspirational, and at the outset of El Sistema, it probably had some success in that regard. After all, it was founded more than 20 years before Chavez took office. And Dudamel was on the move internationally about 5 years after Chavez came in.
Perhaps he has not distanced himself as much as you could wish, but he has taken pretty solid stances against the anti-democratic nature of the regime, and against violence toward the people. The prevention of this candidate from running is execrable, but it is neither the role nor within the competence of Dudamel to do much about it. The OAS might– might — have better luck, but it seems unlikely they will stick their oar in.
“Political correctness in campus action.”
I’m going to guess that if you look who has received an honorary PhD from Harvard over the last 20 years, that they were neither reflective of the demographics of Massachusetts nor the United States.
In fact, to test this theory, I pulled up the list and picked 2005 at random:
Mary Ellen Avery: white
David Baltimore: white
Caroline Walker Bynum: white
D. Ronald Daniel: white
John Lithgow: white
Quentin Skinner: white
Charles Marstiller Vest: white
Edward Witten: white
Always interesting that there was no outrage when whites received all the degrees, but when a disproportionate number of minorities receive them, that’s unfair, problematic, politically correct, etc.
Those honorary degrees are not Ph.Ds.
Ph.D is typically reserved for genuine academic degrees.
Dudamel’s degree, as announced, is a Doctor of Music which is not a Doctor of Philosophy AKA Ph.D.
Exactly.. There should be other ways of ‘rewarding’ non academics who have contributed.
I don’t begrudge them their well-deserved honors but it is indeed muddying the waters that an honorary “Doctor of Music” appears so similar to an earned “Doctor of Musical Arts” and that either might be awarded by legitimate degree-granting institutions.
But what else to do? Naming a building after someone is mostly for the wealthy who have forked over a huge chunk of cash to make the building possible.
Absolutely! In the UK at least they are always called ‘honorary doctorates’. You would have thought an Anglophile like Mr Lebrecht would have known that … or is this yet another example of deliberate, sour, mischief-making to pour even more scorn on Mr Dudamel’s extraordinary gifts and success? Surely not …
A DMA is also a genuine academic degree. It should be reserved for those who earn it.
None of these are PhDs – which is an academically earned doctoral degree. These are honorary degrees, so Dudemel was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music.
This honorary doctorate (DM) is very different from the academic PhDs that Harvard awards in Composition, Ethnomusicology, Music Theory, and Musicology.
So any time anybody not 100% lily white is recognized, it’s “politically correctness in action”?
In your face, Muti!
These are the REAL schools from which REAL Maestros are receiving honorary degrees … not some obscure Italian university that no one ever heard of 🙂
Speak for yourself. The University of Pavia is one of the oldest in the world, and considered very highly in Italy. And Muti has a raft of fist class honours and awards.
Ring
I wd hv thunk that the raft of fist class honours and awards wd go to Sir JEG!!
You really should talk to someone about this unhealthy obsession.
No one has ever heard of the University of Pavia? Is such abysmal ignorance typical of all American musicians, or just the rodent community of Chicago?
Norman – This is a new low for you. Did you bother to read up on who the six are?
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/05/six-receive-honorary-degrees/
All of them are extraordinary, and one of them is Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist Maria Ressa. A journalist who has for years risked her life and freedom to tell the truth about dictators. I commend you for your consistent opposition to Putin and your denouncement of his apologists; as such I would hope you would welcome this honor to a most consequential individual.
Or do you merely question Dudamel’s inclusion in this group?
Why are these damned grapes so sour?
“Political correctness in campus action.”… No surprise there. Woke-ism originated in American college campuses.
BTW- Mozart received an honorary degree from Univ of Bologna even though he never finished college.
What happened to the Dude’s hair?
Exactly. For 43, he ain’t lookin’ so good. Too many sleepless in-flight hours?
Here’s a bit about the first honorary degree recipient I looked up: Jim Gates was an army brat who moved often and spent much of his childhood in segregated schools, but he earned a PhD from MIT by the time he was 27, the first awarded in the emerging field of supersymmetry. He co-authored the first comprehensive text on supersymmetry, and eventually became president of the American Physical Society. He’s been a science advisor to a US president.
I look at that guy, and I look at the one writing off an honour for that career as “political correctness,” and I know which one has more richly earned my contempt.