Let’s decolonise music in high schools
NewsPress release:
Instructional Supervisor and Opera singer Dr. Kevin Johnson is working to comb through school K-12 music libraries in New York City to build a diverse, culturally-responsive music repertoire for school ensembles and music classes.
Dr. Johnson says:
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“Historically, white Western European and American music, narratives, and practices have dominated music classrooms. Additionally, Black musicians accounted for only 1.8 percent of the country’s orchestra players in 2014. The work of fostering the next generation of musicians and classical music audiences begins in the classroom and the truths we tell. “
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“We cannot combat racism, inequity, and injustice without facing ourselves. This past year, ETM reviewed our library of over 1,400 pieces of repertoire and curricular resources to ensure the music education we are providing our students both represents their cultures and exposes them to new ones as well. This includes unrooting the repertoire deeply embedded into American popular culture that has caused and continues to cause harm to Black and Brown students. We have done this in part by removing some music from our repertoire, and by providing important cultural and historical context which will be shared with students in class. In engaging our students with the full breadth of Black and American Music History, we can champion the next generation of musicians to engage and do the same.”
More on this topic from a recent podcast here.
You want to be taken seriously? Stop capitalizing the first letters in adjectives referring to colors.
Well, he is taken seriously. ETM New York has been around for 30 years; there’s also an ETM Los Angeles. Each is an “affiliate program” providing music education for local elementary schools that could not offer this themselves. Sponsors include: Colgate-Palmolive, Goldman Sachs, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State, Sony, Steinway & Sons and Wells Fargo.
But the news release NL is quoting doesn’t go to every journalist, and it does seems odd for ETM New York to quote Kevin Johnson saying the stardard repertory “has caused and continues to cause harm” to anyone. There may be a mistake. Strange too is the notion of deracination of the repertory, given ETM’s mission.
Why are black people so obsessed with only ‘white’ culture and no one else’s?
If they can find some fault with white/European culture (the intellectual high water mark), it lets them (collectively) off the hook for always being behind.
Because they’re heavily into neo-racism and neo-segregationism.
He doesn’t say that the entire standard [classical] repertoire causes harm, though I’m not sure what he means by ‘unrooting’. He is talking about ‘the repertoire deeply embedded into American popular culture’ and he may be thinking, for instance, of Stephen Foster, who wrote for the blackface Christy Minstrels.
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He/she/it/they only capitalises one colour, the way he/she/it/they are supposed to.
Oh brother, here we go. Sounds very snowflake.
Why? Because it mentions race? Get over yourself.
No one will ever change the fact that most of the classical repertoire people wanna hear is from Western Europe: mainly Austria/Germany, Italy and France. Russia as well. Quite a bit of this repertoire originated as part of nationalistic schools of composition, or thru the patronage of the Catholic Church/nobility. There are no undiscovered BIPOC Bachs, Mozarts or Puccinis.
Additionally, Western classical music is part of MY cultural heritage, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Dr. Johnson should get out of NYC and see what other parts of the country are doing. In the desert southwest, many schools have the traditional band, orchestra, choral and jazz programs. But the school my kids attended also has Caribbean steel drum bands, Mariachi groups (with huge demand to get in), and Spanish styled Tuna Ensembles (look it up). And this has been going on for more than 20 years. We have hip hop groups, and put on Broadway shows. A very mixed musical experience and all races participate; we don’t give a $hit about “cultural appropriation” or any of that left wing nonsense.
Mmmmmm, Tuna
“Let’s fight racism by removing composers because of their skin color”
That nails it. Bravo.
I am a migrant myself and I know many of other migrants. One of the reasons why I and my migrant friends moved to the UK was the superiority of the UK in economics, culture, politics and other areas. I definitely didn’t come here to have a better representation of my native culture or traditions! This is actually what I escaped! If the UK want to bring the background that I escaped to the UK, I’ll probably leave and go somewhere else.
Black people in New York city are not migrants.
The majority of black people arrived to the US after slavery was abolished. Immigration from Africa (and from other places as well) is huge.
Not true. Most African Americans are descendants of slaves.
Pretty much every white European is also a descendant of slaves.
I thought that the whole problem is supposed to be that they were uprooted from Africa. Most people would have moved on by now (the British and Germans, and Americans and Japanese get on perfectly well despite having been mortal enemies 75 years ago) but the black population seems to be determined to remain victims for evermore.
No, the whole problem is how African-Americans have been treated within the USA. Slavery (only abolished in 1863), Jim Crow, segregation (separate but equal, what a lie), red-lining … These things have long-lasting effects. You really have no idea, and your comparison to wartime enemies is ridiculous.
‘Slavery (only abolished in 1863)’
1863 was a long time ago.
New Jersey was the last state to abolish slavery in 1866. Sorry about nitpicking there. If all you say is true, how is it that before the welfare state, blacks tended to have better education (compared to now) in lower levels of education than now? How is it that blacks had MUCH lower out of wedlock births than now? Was there less racism back then? This was back during segregation. It’s not just black people but there are white people in the UK that are caught in this same viscous downward spiral.
Wouldn’t there be a connection with still ongoing discrimination?
He was not talking about white people:)
There is a big difference between being at war with another nation and being enslaved. To be at war is to recognize your opponent as an equal. But to enslave people requires dehumanizing them. I would think that this is obvious.
Um…I don’t think the Germans in the second world war recognised the Russians as “an equal”. They quite clearly thought of them as “sub-human, not fully human”.
This week I watched a program called “Surgeons at the Edge of Life” from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the UK. A superbly capable team of doctors and surgical innovation in spades. I said to the spouse, “this is why people want to live in the UK; it’s ahead of the medical pack”. (Along with the USA, of course.)
What an incredible country with magnificent medical training!! What’s not to love?
And in a couple of hundred years, future musicologists can rediscover the Baroque, Classical and Romantic works and say “My God! Why was this fabulous music ever banned?!”
And in a dozen years, future musicologists can look upon this kind of mendacious nonsense and say “My God! Didn’t they have an ounce of intellectual honesty and self-respect in the Twenties?”
“the repertoire deeply embedded into American popular culture that has caused and continues to cause harm to Black and Brown students”
Classical music isn’t the problem, sir. It does no harm to anyone. Do a better job of teaching concert programming. Stop blaming composers.
Beside, the whims of academia is a lousy barometer. They teach to resent, not to improve.
So, in short, get out of my classroom. I know better than you what my students need.
Who is blaming composers? It is not Johann Strauss’ fault that he was a white Austrian, and that his music does not reflect Black American experience and music-making, for instance. Just like Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” plainly affirms that it is meant to reflect a certain perspective. To “decolonise” music means to recognise that art is produced in a certain political, geographical, social setting, and therefore that any artistic perspective is by definition incomplete. That’s not because composers are morons – that’s because they’re human.
Note that we do that all the time with other aspects: The fact that Haydn wrote for the Imperial Court is important to understand his music, we say that Brahms couldn’t have written what he did without Beethoven before him, or Beethoven without Haydn, the Ode to Joy (and much more Beethoven) is embedded in the European political liberation movements, so much of Mahler/Brahms/Schumann’s music is biographical, Wagner is part of the constitution of a new German nationalism, etc. We always appraise music in its social and personal contexts. But suddenly, you pull the handbrake at race or colonialism?
Either music is objective, and then it’s nothing more than notes on a page of music. Or it’s so much more than that, and it is personal, political, social, and race (and gender) touches on all those dynamics.
And music/art is not received in an objective fashion, but in intensely personal ways (your parents listened to it, you heard it at your church, it speaks to your self-identity, etc.). And that is also racially conditioned.
Haydn didn’t write for the Imperial Court. Apart from that pedantic quibble, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
‘Who is blaming composers?’
A white composer born tomorrow will apparently be guilty as a result of white privilege.
‘To “decolonise” music means to recognise that art is produced in a certain political, geographical, social setting, and therefore that any artistic perspective is by definition incomplete’
Only if you’re obsessed with race.
I almost feel sorry for you; you’re prepared to deny yourself so much pleasure.
I don’t feel sorry for you though because you’re dangerous and destructive and will deny that pleasure to others.
“Only if you’re obsessed with race.”
The people obsessed with race here are the ones who misinterpret everything they read as an extreme attack on ‘white culture’.
I enjoy listening to classical music of all periods. I don’t deny myself or anybody else that pleasure. I also enjoy finding out about the social, political and everyday realities of composers’ lives, and I think that can enhance my appreciation and understanding of their music. How on earth can acknowledging that black composers and musicians are also part of that cultural continuum be dangerous and destructive?
Sorry, what am I denying? And how?
“This includes unrooting [sic] the repertoire deeply embedded into American popular culture that has caused and continues to cause harm to Black and Brown students. We have done this in part by removing some music from our repertoire…”
A failed house-painter called Adolf with a chip on his shoulder did the same thing with cultures he didn’t like. He founded what was effectively a GLM movement. His henchmen smashed up statues and torched buildings too. Another guy called Josef did it too. Both exercised cancel culture – book bannings, imprisonment of those who questioned the official line (and those who looked as though they might), show trials and mass murders.
Still, there is a gruesome symmetry at work here. In a country where the Ku Klux Klan is accepted as a part of the nation’s culture, then it’s only natural that there should be a counterbalance in the form of a black power movement that is equally extreme.
‘A failed house-painter called Adolf’
House-painter?
[House-painter?]
It’s an error of over-literal translation, and not as bad as it sounds.
*sight*
*eyes rolling*
…
“We have done this in part by removing some music from our repertoire”. Not good. Which pieces have they removed, I wonder? Boring old white Mozart?
Evidently, the music of Hindemith and Grainger are causing a great deal of harm in formative music education. It’s about time it all got replaced anyway, am I right? It’s really beginning to feel like the fundamental transformation we all voted for is finally coming to fruition and not a moment too soon.
What is the “harm” being done?
I have the same question. And also: what scores were removed? This is all so vague. And thus also menacing and ominous.
Anybody told these crackpots that people listen to music with their ears and not their eyes. When I listen to Bach or Mozart, or Duke Ellington or Earl Hines, it is because I enjoy their music not because of the colour of their skin.
Sure, the music Duke Ellington wrote and played had nothing to do with him being Black. Nothing Black about Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess either. Nothing Chinese about Tan Dun’s music. Strauss’s music is Austrian and was written for an emperor, but nothing white about writing for an Austrian emperor, or about writing for the Emperor of the Indies like British composers did. Nothing white about an Italian writing an orientalising opera to celebrate the opening of a canal controlled by Western powers in a British colony in Africa, or about another Italian writing an opera about the exploitation of Japanese women by conquering American soldiers.
Come on, seriously. You’re literally like the fish who doesn’t know what water is despite swimming in it all day.
‘had nothing to do with… was written…’
It was in the past. Eventually the music survives with a life of its own and what matters about a work is rarely anything to do with the circumstances of its composition or performance.
You have learnt to synthesize emotion about something that happened long ago (and are apparently exhorting others to do so). Does it never occur to you as odd that few people now seem to have any great antipathy towards the Germans, Italians, and Japanese even though Britain and America were at war with them only 75 years ago? What’s to be gained by trying to maintain that white people are repressive and black people oppressed?
It was in the past, and it matters today. Gary Younge, this week, noted that the British love to say that ‘we’ won two world wars, but that colonialism was ‘in the past’ (a comment that applies to Americans as well). It was in the past. It still impacts the world today. That’s literally why history exists.
I do not synthesise emotion about the past. I care about understanding the world I live in. And the past matters, as it is quite literally not past.
‘the past matters, as it is quite literally not past’
Er…
Use a bit of intelligence with my comment. I do happen to know Ellington and Hines were black and their music is a reflection of their culture. What I was saying was that I do not apply CRT to my enjoyment of music. If you do, it’s your problem.
Aida was commissioned by an Egyptian for any one of three European composers to write and with the express stipulation that the opera had to be on an Egyptian subject with an Egyptian setting. Quit trying to falsify history. You only expose your intellectual dishonesty.
‘Sure, the music Duke Ellington wrote and played had nothing to do with him being Black.’
If it did, that hasn’t been consequential. Who were Ellington’s audiences? Who plays the music now?
‘Nothing Black about Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess either’
Written by three white men. Can it be tolerated? What about Zemlinsky’s Symphonische Gesänge? Jonny spielt auf?
‘Strauss’s music is Austrian and was written for an emperor, but nothing white about writing for an Austrian emperor’
Presumably you mean Johann Strauss I or II (they would normally be differentiated from the German Richard Strauss with their Christian name). There was indeed nothing ‘white’ about their work. It was innocent and written without reference to anything exotic.
‘Nothing white about an Italian writing an orientalising opera to celebrate the opening of a canal controlled by Western powers in a British colony in Africa’
Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire and not a British colony. The canal was built by a private company funded primarily by French and Egyptian investors. Egypt isn’t really very far from Italy (think Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony).
‘another Italian writing an opera about the exploitation of Japanese women by conquering American soldiers’
Pierre Loti -> John Luther Long -> David Belasco -> Puccini/Illica/Giacosa. The Frenchman Loti was writing (in Madame Chrysanthème) about his own experience. What is the problem?
Human beings write music, you write as if music was written by some democratic process akin to a “culture” and how it “voted” what would go into it. That’s often exactly what a composer who wrote music that’s remembered and survived time did not do. And if there’s any connection with a “culture” and the music that has survived, that’s because it speaks about being human, whether it ennobles the culture, and the good that was there, or exposes the faults.
Saying art is a possession of a culture, is pretty much against what it expresses to begin with. And neither is that art. That’s conformity.
Not “the possession of”, but “the product of” a culture, for sure.
Art “speaks about being human”, indeed, but it is all necessarily situated and incomplete perspectives. And by ignoring a number of human perspectives, we are ignoring a large part of what “being human” is (or else, we are redefining “being human” as applying to only a subset of humanity, a redefinition that has been the hallmark of a large number of exclusionary and violent movements and epochs). So “decolonising”, if you want to call it that, is specifically about “being human” and about restoring the full value of that humanity.
In spite of such good intentions, at the heart of such initiatives we see again and again the mistake that music as such is seen as a carrier of ethnic identity:
“Historically, white Western European and American music, narratives, and practices have dominated music classrooms.”
But music only carries cultural identity and culture is colourless and entirely accessible to anyone with enough interest and perception. This is a truth too difficult for colour warriors and without knowing, they are destroying what they are supposed to love and to share. Music cannot be racist.
And “good intentions” are what the road to hell is paved with.
This is about teaching music to underprivileged inner-city kids – often in predominantly black areas.
If ‘white’ were deleted from the sentence you quote, would you agree with it?
I have yet to come across a black classical musician who refuses to perform music of the classical European canon. Perhaps some exist.
Certainly ‘culture’ (I take it you mean high culture?) is accessible to anyone *with enough interest and perception*. The need, for the future health of classical music, is to initiate that interest and train that perception in classes of seven- to eight-year-old kids who have never heard, or heard of, Mozart or Mahler, or even Scott Joplin or Louis Armstrong. I have no idea how I would go about that. But if they were black kids, a bad way to start would surely be with the songs of, for instance, Stephen Foster. Nor would it be good for white kids. Music has been used to perpetuate racial stereotypes that are damaging and hurtful, and children need protection until they are old and well enough educated to put that sort of thing into historical perspective.
‘I have yet to come across a black classical musician who refuses to perform music of the classical European canon’
It’s being displaced all the time by rubbish by black and/or female composers.
‘children need protection until they are old and well enough educated to put that sort of thing into historical perspective’
You mean until they’ve been taught to feel offended.
Bach, Beethoven, Mozart et al. are in absolutely no danger of being displaced. There is plenty of room.
Is there anything by a black and/or female composer that you do not think is rubbish? I would be interested to know.
Your last sentence is just the sort of twisted misinterpretation that makes me despair of this site.
‘The need for future health of classical music is to initiate that interest and train that perception…’
“But if they were black kids, a bad way to start would surely be with the songs of, for instance, Stephen Foster. Nor would it be good for white kids. Music has been used to perpetuate racial stereotypes that are damaging and hurtful, and children need protection until they are old and well enough educated to put that sort of thing into historical perspective.”
Change ‘black’ to ‘yellow’ and this would look like a manifesto from the Minister of Cultural Administration in China.
It’s just arrant nonsense. Who are you to pontificate on ‘the future health of classical music’? It’s in phenomenally good health and will be for generations. Covid 19 has presented a challenge but there are concert halls, orchestras, opera houses, ensembles, soloists, CD companies and radio stations all over the world dispensing western classical music to huge audiences, and the artists who provide this western music are of every colour on earth.
Neither do we need anyone to pontificate on what repertoire children should be presented with and what should be withheld from them. How dare anyone tell us what music is good or bad for them.
Stephen Foster was one of the greatest songwriters of his age; he wrote dozens of wonderful songs, only a few of which are connected with Afro-Americans, and many of these portray the sadness of their lot – particularly ‘Poor Old Joe’. Foster was a staunch Unionist, supporter of Abraham Lincoln and detester of the Confederacy – listen to ‘That’s what’s the matter’ and ‘We’re coming, father Abra’am’. There was no more fervent champion of black rights than Paul Robeson, who made deeply moving recordings of ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, ‘Poor Old Joe’ and ‘Hard Times’. I was lucky enough to be among the audience in the packed square outside Vienna’s Town Hall in the 1960s to hear Robeson live, and I shall never forget it. I’d rather hear his voice for twelve hours than spend two minutes reading your posting.
Let’s make a deal. We won’t advise you what to do to ensure the survival of your music if you don’t advise us how to administer ours.
This is to further dumbing of the American children, American future, altering American and World History. In a word: producing more IDIOTS into the world!
“… black musicians accounted for only 1.8 percent of the country’s orchestra players in 2014.”
Any data about how many black Americans regularly listen to Classical Music? Is 1.8% over- or under-representation?
“This includes unrooting the repertoire deeply embedded into American popular culture that has caused and continues to cause harm to Black and Brown students.”
“American _popular_ culture”, you’ll notice, not “classical music culture” or anything like that. Remember, he’s talking about music in the American high school. My guess is that he’s referring to 19th- and early 20th-century popular song, minstrel songs and the like, which do contain generous amounts of racial stereotyping.
Exactly
“More on this topic from a recent podcast here.”
That podcast (which I listened to) says absolutely nothing about ‘decolonising’ music in High School. It does say a lot of sensible and interesting things about the importance of music in education, especially early education, preK and elementary to junior high.
There is nothing in the quotes given by SD to suggest that Dr. Johnson aims to remove all white composers from the repertoire. He merely points out the truth that “Historically, white Western European and American music, narratives, and practices have dominated music classrooms”, and seeks to redress the balance by “engaging our students with the full breadth of Black and American Music History” – which does not mean eliminating Mozart and Beethoven!
I don’t like his face
Too black?
So when are the book and score burnings scheduled? Just asking.
In addition to being wrong – this is a deeply unhappy and mean person. Enjoy the cultural revolution folks.
Black musicians are 1.8% of the orchestra musicians and Black patrons are 0.01%, if that of the audience. I’m more concerned with the latter.
The problem is that some people are too worried about races and sexes, and do not stop to think that [in the US – the origin of all this BS] the problem is the income inequality, and the fact that education and culture (and healthcare) is not accessible to most people. If they want to have more “black” people in orchestras, perhaps they should take care that those who are talented (of any race and sex) but have not means have access to education and don’t need to have rich parents to attend university, that the price of arts and culture is truly accessible (concert prices in the US are too expensive when compared to Europe, for instance), that people don’t need to get a mortgage on their house to pay for medical treatment… it is not a problem of racism or sexism, but of poverty. Want a % of patrons of different races that match the % of races in the US? Make sure that everyone has access to education and culture, gets educated, gets jobs, then slowly and organically things will fall into place.
Classical music is indeed a Europe-rooted art form, and Europe has been for a long time what US-Americans like to call “white”. So what? Does it mean it does not appeal to non-whites? Can’t black musicians play Beethoven? Why do you think Beethoven does not “belong” to a black pianist because he/she is black. Is jazz a black US-American art form? It is, am I not allowed to enjoy it and play it because I am not black? Do we need more “white jazz”? Can’t Karate appeal to me because I am not Japanese and I don’t feel represented the martial arts because there is no white-martial art?
These artificial measures will never have a long-lasting effect, and are just cosmetic changes.
Now, please, get back in the teaching room, and teach your students theory, singing, rhythm, about Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin… that’s how you can make a difference, not with this BS.
Dr. Johnson apparently doesn’t realize that there are almost no school music programs left in US public schools. His thesis is rather like having a discussion with a homeless person about the proper way to prepare eggs Benedict.
Of course he realizes it! That is exactly why he works for Education Through Music.
From ETM’s website: “Founded in 1991, Education through Music (ETM) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes the use of music in under-resourced schools and schools in disadvantaged areas, as a means of enhancing students’ academic performance and general development. By providing year-long, in-school music education programs, ETM makes music education a reality for thousands of children who would otherwise have limited or no exposure to the arts. Our current activities focus on elementary, middle and K-8 schools.”
https://etmonline.org/30years/
” Dr. Kevin Johnson is working to comb through school K-12 music libraries in New York City.”
No, he isn’t. Your subeditor should at least read the quote before attempting to summarize it.
I’m an elementary school music teacher in the U.S. South (Georgia), and many of my colleagues and I agree with removing songs with racist history from our curriculum. These songs in question are typically minstrel songs and some children’s rhymes. See the site Decolonizing The Music Room for more info. For the record, I personally don’t know any music teacher trying to cancel Mozart.
Your loss. You will stop listening to so much good music. Remember: you start like this, then you decide what is acceptable and what isn’t (never mind what other think!), then you burn books of those you don’t agree with, then you forbid artist, then evil breaks. Enjoy it while things are still more or less civilised.
It is so dispiriting to read Slipped Disc these days. I come here for the latest about my profession but it seems that the site is now more or less dedicated to finding easily-misconstrued stories about moves in the direction of diversity that are thrown like steaks to the lions so that hordes (of, I confidently conclude, mostly angry, white, middle-aged men) can snarl at the collapse of civilization. I understand that the instinct is to ask: “what’s wrong? what did I ever do to discriminate?”. That’s not the point. We live at a moment of reckoning and in a time of reflection. As a white man whose path to professional success was hard-won but also paved with advantage, I believe there are important lessons to learn from people like Kevin Johnson. This comment went more or less ignored and was left anonymously: “If they can find some fault with white/European culture (the intellectual high water mark), it lets them (collectively) off the hook for always being behind.” Seriously? That’s more or less as pure an ideologically racist statement as was ever left on a public forum. At the time of leaving my comment, sixteen people had liked this comment, to three who disliked it. That’s profoundly demoralizing. Frankly, Norman Lebrecht is going out of his way to make his site a safe space for such outrageous rants. It’s incredibly sad. I realise that the obvious response is: don’t read the blog anymore, and I won’t (reluctantly, after several years following it) and doubt I’ll be missed. Unfortunately, Slipped Disc has become a bit like my local sports bar at 1am.
You may leave now.
Exactly.
It is incredibly sad. SD provides pointers to so much interesting, stimulating information, and I have learnt much. But it is increasingly vitiated by provocative and inaccurate headlines, amounting often (as in this case) to fake news. It seems to want to attract irrational, frankly hateful comments, from people merely airing their own prejudice and ignorance, contributing nothing to the debate. It is becoming toxic, and like you, reluctantly, I will stop visiting it.
You just don’t like losing the argument.
I think Slipped Disc is admirably open and pretty civilized. Long may it remain so.
One really would think that it should be critical to give people voice that haven’t had one. But what about what’s already there, and what’s neglected. I don’t hear about any revivals for the music of Scott Joplin, or introducing it more into performance, say in recital. Music of such quality which you can’t dismiss, to begin with. Or his opera.
And if you REALLY look at much of this repertoire that’s listed as by white men, you might see that it’s not about them being white men, but they experienced serious persecution as well, and the music is about surviving that, NOT about being white and male. Where THEY supposed to play games with political correct trends in order to avoid being truly controversial beyond moral fashion?
Can this be about people that survived persecution, and did something against common discriminatory beliefs, to begin with!? As if no one can make change from the inside, and the countries where classical music came from are supposed to have a completely demographic the whole time!? There are other genres of music that are more from different countries, different demographics, are THEY supposed to be seen as not giving people a voice from someplace else, who have a DIFFERENT history and thus aren’t included as “race”!?
Sorry, with all of the missed words, and miss-spellings it’s too obvious this gets to me.
When a composer like Scott Joplin does something completely charming and happy (seemingly from nowhere) without all of the whining, and all of the political excuses, this is hardly mentioned, someone who completely represents a whole genre: Ragtime.” Instead people who supposedly represent diversity are pushed in the front of the line. Scott Joplin again left out. I heard Winton Marsalis actually state that he didn’t like Louis Armstrong at first because Louis wasn’t rebellious enough (or who knows what he was supposed to do to be accepted as representing what it is to be black). It wasn’t enough that he was simply as human as can be, showing what music is for that condition (of being human), and that it made no difference if you were black or from outer space!? And everyone could see, if they had a speck of honesty in their bones, that being black was as human as any other variant, and had as much genius, integrity, whit, creativity as any other “race.”
And what gets to me is that music makes changes where politics NEVER can, and Louis Armstrong did more for black people than all of the political demands that dismiss him again.
And you CREATE such a mob of having to be demanding, and political, that people who simply want to appreciate art for it’s own sake aren’t going to be part of it. And you lose the very people that would represent the human part of any such….
Here’s my prior post, with hopefully correction:
“One really would think that it should be critical to give people voice that haven’t had one. But what about what’s already there, and what’s neglected. I don’t hear about any revivals for the music of Scott Joplin, or introducing it more into performance, say in recital. Music of such quality which you can’t dismiss, to begin with. Or his opera.
And if you REALLY look at much of this repertoire that’s listed as by white men, you might see that it’s not about them being white men, but they experienced serious persecution as well, and the music is about surviving that, NOT about being white and male. Were THEY supposed to play games with political correct trends in order to avoid being truly controversial beyond moral fashion?
Can this be about people that survived persecution, and did something against common discriminatory beliefs, to begin with!? As if no one can make change from the inside, and the countries where classical music came from are supposed to have a completely different demographic the whole time!? There are other genres of music that are more from different countries, different demographics, are THEY supposed to be seen as not giving people a voice from someplace else, who have a DIFFERENT history and thus aren’t included as “race”!?
This is the world we live in: if you are a minor league singer without a real music career, holding a doctoral degree from a University (Catholic University of America) that is widely accepted as one of the worst places to study musician the East Coast, and working as a teacher, the only way to get public momentum is to use race (and gender, nevermind how ridiculous the topic) and discrimination and make noise, obtaining momentarily the attention that for artistic and real research merits would not obtain.
I agree 100%. There is no need for this, it is just a way to do “something” other than teaching 13 year olds (probably gets too tiring and repetitive) and draw atention to himself. If he had a terrific artistic career he would not be wasting any time on this nonsense.
Aaaah good old book-burning.
Reminds me of some evil german-austrian guy with a moustache, can’t remember the name though
…And what about the musical instruments…piano..strings…woodwinds…all white European…should these be cancelled as well?