White composers are ‘more neglected’ than black
NewsIn the second part of her sweeping survey of classical music’s complicity with ‘woke’ tendencies, Heather Mac Donald touches on a painful issue – the current revival of works by neglected non-white composers.
She writes:
Perhaps 98 percent of all composers in the classical tradition are not listened to or even recognized today. Those forgotten artists were almost all white males. It is the sad fate of most composers to recede into obscurity, if they were even lucky enough to have had their music performed during their lifetime. To charge history with racism for having allowed black composers as well to have fallen into obscurity requires proof of overwhelming merit strong enough to overcome the usual oblivion meted out to everyone else. That high burden of proof is not always met.
The composers enjoying the greatest prominence at the moment are Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–99), and Florence Price (1887–1953, pictured). The hyperbole surrounding their works is astonishing.
Bologne was the son of a Guadeloupe plantation owner and a slave; Joseph spent most of his life in Parisian court society. Throughout his twenties, he enjoyed an annuity from his father’s estate, but he has not been canceled for having profited from slave labor.
Bologne is commonly referred to today as the “black Mozart.” That comparison is laughable enough in its own right. Bologne is fluent in the Classical style, with a pleasing capacity for forward momentum. His works are recognizable on the radio for their simple construction. They possess none of the melodic gift and emotional depths that have led the world’s greatest composers to bow down before Mozart in dazed and loving gratitude….
Excellent – if depressing – piece. Couldn’t agree more.
What’s depressing, too, is how free of us on the left are willing to raise our voices against these things. Desire the desire to do so, the fear is overwhelming
The power of the nitwits is everywhere. I could only escape incarceration for not liking modernist aesthetics by threatening them with sending my PA to their home.
Florence Price may not be equal to Beethoven and Mozart, but promoting some black role models in classical music is a worthy endeavor, no?
If you had read the paper, you’d realize that she agrees on that point.
She says so in the article. Not a matter of race or gender – it’s a matter of the quality of the music.
Not because they are black.
Yes, a very worthy endeavor.
Up to a point, yes, but I think my problem is that the music is being over-hyped. Florence Price is a good example. Instead of being introduced as a pleasant, interesting by-way, her music is being pushed as undiscovered masterpieces, and in the long-run this is potentially counter-productive. I think Grant Still is a much more interesting figure, but then with him you don’t get the two-for-the-price-of-one intersectionality!
I was at SPAC for the Philadelphia Orchestra last night and YNS was praising Price’s 1st Symphony as a masterpiece. Not many people there though. Get woke go broke. It’s a nice piece but it’s not Brahms’ 4th or Dvorak’s 9th – real E minor masterpieces.
“…but promoting some black role models in classical music is a worthy endeavor, no?” Um, because it is condescending?
No, not if they are being promoted because of their skin color. Or in other words, it doesn’t make sense to give their music more publicity than it would’ve received if it was written by a white composer. (If any composer is receiving less attention due to skin, then by all means this needs to be addressed.)
Here’s a wild thought: is it possible that even in a world of full racial equality, the proportions of races in different musical fields will vary? Isn’t it actually demeaning to other cultures to suggest that they need to increase their involvement in a predominately European tradition?
Florence Price was an American citizen like any other, black or otherwise – she wasn’t from “another culture”. Nobody, however, need pretend that her works are the equal of Mozart. The point is that they are good, interesting works and that these contributions have been overlooked for racial reasons; and that giving them exposure gives young black musicians a role model that they may aspire to. That is a worthwhile social and musical goal.
For those who imagine that Beethoven, Mozart etc can somehow be appreciated and heard without reference to race, I do wonder where they think their authority and objectivity as listeners comes from. Racial politics are a pervasive fact of modern society. Would it not be extraordinary indeed if they didn’t affect our aesthetic value judgments? I adore the classical western canon and have made it my life’s work, but if scholars can shed light on its formation then I believe we should all be grateful for the insights we can gain
You can’t argue that Price was excluded from recognition because of her race and then turn around and say she “was an American citizen like any other.” No, it’s not clear that Price’s works have been overlooked for racial reasons. That’s the whole point. Most classical composers are “overlooked,” even if their music is mildly interesting.
Man, the idea that you need to listen to Beethoven and Mozart in reference to race is just another example of how absurdly obsessed with race some people have become. How is this obsession possibly helping anyone? It’s all so grossly simplistic and tiring.
“The point is that they are good, interesting works and that these contributions have been overlooked for racial reasons;”
That point is wrong.
Thing is, Price undeniably lost opportunities and didn’t get the recognition she deserved because of both her race and gender. That much is simply historic fact.
Composers loose opportunities and don’t get the recognition they deserve because of a whole list of nonsensical reasons, race and gender are just two of them. And any of these reasons deserves to be reversed so that the music itself becomes the focus of attention.
In music life, it is hardly ever the content, but almost always the wrapping paper which define program decisions of new music, for the simple reason that hardly anybody is capable of making an assessment of a piece that has as yet not been tried-out in performance. It’s circular: if not played, people can’t assess, and to be assessed it has to be played first.
Hence the many advantages of having a tradition, which offers some grip onto what you see on the music paper.
That may be so. But it would be interesting to research the 100 or so American composers active up to about 1940, born roughly 20 years before and after Florence Price, and compare her career with the careers of her contemporaries. There is a helpful Chronological list of American classical composers in Wikipedia. Would she necessarily have been better recognized then, and today, if she had been white and male? (Money and class count too, of course.)
Of course that is a worthy endeavor, but not because they are black…. it should be because they are excellent. The confusion of merit and race merely pours oil on the fires.
Yes, provided that other composers aren’t being subordinated or “canceled” as a result.
Let’s keep a sense of proportion here: The Bill Barclay quote in the article about Mozart is ludicrous on its face. As well, the Philadelphia Orchestra presenting all of Florence Price’s symphonies and concertante works in a single concert season is laughable.
I’m sure young black teenagers everywhere are following Florence Price and Joseph Bologne–NOT!
You mean it is an endeavor of white upper middle-class people to virtual signal to other white people.
When I performed a work of Florence Price to a full auditorium of students at an all-Black school in Chicago, Florence Price got an enthusiastic ovation the likes of which I’ve never heard. So, respectfully, I think your comment is based in ignorance.
Thank you. Celebrating black composers is not an affront to whiteness. Nor is it “woke”, the new term along with “Marxist” that curmudgeonly right-wingers toss at everything and hope it sticks. The point is to inspire a new generation of black kids to see that the orchestra has a place for them too. Unlock the door, extend our hand, and invite them into the classical music world.
Revolutionary Marxism is foundational to Critical Theory. Start with the wiki article and move on to the collected writings of Herbert Marcuse which were so influential in the 1960s student movements. The term is entirely appropriate here, and in no way arbitrarily applied. Critical theorists have no problem in admitting their indebtedness to Marx.
Marx beat-up his wife and refused to comb his hair and shave, and thought that people were mere representations of social class. Don’t believe him.
https://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Karl_Marx
Ryan writes: “Celebrating black composers…to inspire a new generation of black kids”
There are two problems with this. First, why should “a black composer” inspire the black kid more than, say, Beethoven or Brahms?
Second, if you are arguing that race matters, then do you also believe that a white composer in America would be more inspired by Beethoven than by a contemporary black composer from the US. The black composer from the US, I would maintain, is “closer culturally” to a white US composer than Beethoven or Bach is. That black composer is probably also closer to a contemporary German composer than Bach. But is “cultural closeness” (whatever that means) a pre-requisate for the composer to inspire them.
The problem isn’t that Price isn’t the equal of Mozart or Beethoven. It’s the hundreds of other composers that Price is at best equal to. And there are many better composers whose works are never heard.
Given the infrequency and ticket cost of high-level orchestral performances, there at least several dozen pieces I would love to hear in concert but probably never will. Every piece played for some reason other than its musical value reduces those odds even more.
There are several reasons composers get scheduled by major orchestras. High among them are 1. The composer is great, and 2. Their music will sell tickets and bring in funding. In the short term, Price will fit the latter. But slotting composers into schedules just to provide role models will produce a slide into mediocrity.
I think a far better tactic to induce diversity would be to fund programs to provide instruments, lessons, and concert access to disadvantaged students. But the current tendency to disparage anything perceived as privileged would probably doom that to failure.
There are lots of changes in fashion in terms of programming and “absolute quality” has never been the only criterion. How much by Saint-Saens has been played by the Philadelphia Orchestra– how often has Carnegie Hall hosted boring works by Mozart and/or Schubert? To say that Florence Price is not one of the 5 greatest composers is one thing, but we play ‘lesser works’ by ‘lesser composers’ all the time. A number of these works and composers being programmed now were never given a chance to prove themselves in front of audiences. If we took 10 percent of performances of “The New World” Symphony and replaced them with “Gaelic Symphony” audiences wouldn’t mind a bit. Not to mention Snowflake Heather MacDonald and her grievance business is based on fundamental dishonesty– good work to get money from conservative “thinktanks” though. I don’t know why Mr. Lebrecht continues to give a platform for such grifting animosity.
ALL pieces by this Mozart are boring, just rambling on and on with scales and triads. What we need is a boulezbian revolution!!
Sally
Also this 2nd part is shocking reading.
The woke mvt is a form of psychopathy, ignorance-driven paranoia like fascism and communism, and the collective superstitions of witch hunting and antisemitism.
But it is also a result from postmodernism been taught at universities, where every curriculum is seen as a political instrument of a social class and territories of knowledge and understanding have to be ‘deconstructed’. Change ‘class’ by ‘race’ and you get this crazy cocktail of ignorant nonsense, like this Ewell character spreads around.
The comparison of musical hierarchies with racial suppression stems from the ‘thinking’ of Michel Foucault, who compared learning to write between two lines to achieve motoric control to the training of young males in the military (and gave pictures to show how ‘similar’ they were). From this to say that the regular row of columns in a Greek temple was a reflection of Greek military prowess, where soldiers were set-up in rows, by the British historian Mary Beard, is a ‘logical’ step. Further down the line it will appear that using knife and fork at the dinner table are a forced separation as a result from white purematist hierarchical thinking, until thinking itself will have to be cancelled and we have to return to our natural state on fours.
The silence of leaders in the musical world is as shocking as the nonsense listed by MacDonald. But they are anxious to loose their job, facing a mob of woke warriors. This is the most sorry aspect of the story.
We are basically reliving China’s Cultural Revolution, but since we don’t teach actual history in schools anymore, people don’t recognize the signs. History has been weaponized by the Left, who use it to prop up boogeymen like fascism and white supremacism while distracting from the real monster in the room, which is Communism and leftwing extremism.
If people actually took the time to read up on Mao’s Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution, they would see that we are on the verge of repeating one of the worst mistakes in world history. But since every Western institution has been captured by leftwing extremists, the Left is basically free to operate under total cover from their collaborators in the media and academia.
50 years from now, we will study this period and marvel at how easily people were abused and manipulated, just as they were abused and manipulated during the 1930s in Nazi Germany. Assuming sense is ever restored to Western people, which it may not be. As long as the Left maintains its iron-clad grip on power, things are only going to get worse.
I thought I was the only one who had noticed. I hadn’t really thought about it until a couple chapters into reading “The Three Body Problem”.
Those types like Mao proclaimed that by obeying the Zeitgeist to be liberated you would be free, exactly as you are told.
“leaders in the musical world”
Did you just say “leaders in the musical world”?
Yes I guess you did. Tells me a lot about you.
Please excuse me, while a go and vomit, due to the “leaders in the musical world”, those media-pushed lovable nobodies with their no-where words and no-where purposes of sweet nothingness.
Yes it’s difficult isn’t it? I merely quoted MacDonald.
So true. Thank God this would never happen in the fields of science and medicine:)
That is, quite simply, BS. As if there are no Black composers, women composers, Asian composers, etc. who are equally “not listened to or even recognized today.” It takes one or two Black composers and white composers of arguably meritorious stature, and alleges that the playing of the former explains the obscurity of the latter.
It’s quite simply the ‘great replacement theory’ applied to music.
I have news for both sides of this conversation….
We’re all going to go down together.
You are ripe for the Despair Hotline:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/347
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs
You know what? The only people that “need” “classical” music are musicians. ima go listen to birds and wind. Good luck with all that.
I’m not a professional musician and I need classical music. You can keep to birds and wind, nothing wrong with that.
you only THINK you need “classical” music
Some people ‘think’ wrong.
Saint-Georges outlived Mozart too. Was HE really Mozart’s killer and not Salieri? Isn’t making Salieri the bad guy anti-Italian? You see we can play games like this all day. Mac Donald is 100% correct. I can think of dozen’s of good composers who almost never get heard like Clementi, Raff, Krommer, Hummel, Taneyev, Svendsen, Stenhammar, Glazunov…
Russian late-Romantcis are the best! May I add Reinhold Gliere to your list?
Gliere – of course! And Vasily Kalinnikov who died way too young. Rimsky-Korsakov is known but still vastly under preformed and underrated.
Give me the Ilya Muromets symphony over Florence Price any day!
I got to hear Ily Muromets at Bard before the pandemic. They did Price’s 1st Symphony too.
And some of these, like Taneyev and Glazunov, had an astonishing mental capacity that put them well into the genius category, demonstrating just how formidable the figures representing the second tier canon could be.
I would strenuously argue that Glazunov was “second-tier”. I consider him a composer of the first rank but discussions like that are actually fun.
“Perhaps 98 percent of all composers in the classical tradition are not listened to or even recognized today. Those forgotten artists were almost all white males.”
But because they were white, they at least had a chance to make it.
Black composers didn’t have that chance. At least not in a sustained way. Maybe they had a champion who found their music worthy of performance early on (e.g., as Florence Price or William Dawson had), but their race soon got in the way. That Price’s invisibility “was not because of a racial lockout” is simply not true.
Also, MacDonald says “hey that black composer is no Mozart!” Okay cool.
“Here are things that I don’t like about black composers” does not make journalism.
What about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor? He certainly “made it” into the musical establishment with some big hits (most notably, The Song of Hiawatha) and prestigious conservatoire teaching posts (professor of composition at GSMD and Trinity Laban).
The race issue for composers was mainly a US issue. In Europe someone like Saint-Georges was given a fair crack at success, and had quite a lot in his lifetime.
I’ve been avoiding writing this, but now I feel I must.
I can never take anything written by this person seriously.
Sometime in the early years of this century, one of my editors tapped me to represent the publication in a piece on Regietheater by speaking with the person in question.
While I disparaged some of the excesses of Regietheater, I very seriously stood my ground on how it can be done well and illuminate a work with a less-than-glorious story otherwise difficult to translate to 21st century audiences (I recall I had recently seen the revelatory Morabito/Wieler „Norma“ at Stuttgart and Konwitschny’s heart-stopping „Eugene Onegin“ at Bratislava). I know I gave several detailed examples of how some operas had clearly benefited from Regietheater productions.
We had at least one lengthy telephone conversation, and she acted like she was my new best friend. I was soon sending her daily clips of Mozart, a composer with whose work she was admittedly unfamiliar.
Her published piece was unabashedly one-sided, fiendishly in defence of conservative traditional productions (paging Zeffirelli), and gave not one example – not one word! – suggesting that Regietheater could be legitimate.
While she chose to briefly quote me with some bland non-committal statement, she totally ignored all of the positive examples I gave her. In retrospect, she was kind to me, which she certainly was not to my colleagues whom she quoted at greater length. (I suppose the daily infusions of Mozart helped her from damning me as she did others.)
She is clearly writing for an audience which worships an ultra-conservative agenda. I find her to be as „fair and balanced“ as much as Fox „News“.
I take full blame: I should have done more research on her before agreeing to participate in her article, and not simply trust the referral from my editor.
If common sense and the defense of classical music as it is, is only taken-up by people who are considered ‘conservative’, does this make classical music conservative? Does a correct explication of the pythagorean theorem by a criminal disgrace the theorem? If Hitler and Stalin liked classical music, does this make classical music guilty by association?
And then: it is quite possible that there are Regietheater productions which do NOT damage the work in question too much. But the idea of Regietheater, the heart of its philosophy, is plain stupid and a sign of contempt for the work of art, as any person with a remnant of intelligence and culture can see. Operas are NOT meant to be brought up-to-date to make them ‘more understandable’ for contemporary audiences, this is an arrogant, patronizing and totalitarian attitude, which damages the work. We also don’t change the Mona Lisa’s clothes and give her a jogging suit to make her better understandable for contemporary audiences. People who don’t understand the Mona Lisa’s clothing and 18C and 19C operas, should simply read about them before visiting a museum or attending a performance.
She appears frequently on Fox with the likes of Tucker Calson and Laura Ingraham as well as on Newsmax. Now she made it to Slipped Disc.
If I was running things my preferences would likely be to program more William Grant Still and less Florence Price, but I would point out that the problems that all composers have in getting performances clearly were made worse for Black composers for a variety of obvious reasons, so a certain amount of affirmative action/tipping the scales is OK with me as warranted. As MLK Jr said if you have a footrace where some competitors have weights on their ankles it doesn’t become a fair race just by removing those weights part way through the race.
But it also doesn’t help to inflate the accomplishments because sooner or later the proof is in the playing and listening, and there is a reason why once-loved composers disappear from the repertoire.
I have read a good deal of excessive praise for the music of Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and none of it seems to exhibit any awareness of the actual context of the French violin concerto in his time (Gaviniès, Leduc, and others; you could add Viotti in there, and for that matter look back to Leclair and Mondonville). Thus he becomes the greatest by default because he seems to be the only one known about, and is the only one known about because currently he is the only one getting any attention. A tight little circle.
He was prolific and there is no question about the virtuosity of the writing, but as so often happens the violin virtuoso writing for his own instrument (for his own performances) has certain priorities other than composing great and lasting music; often the LAST thing they wanted was for anyone else to perform their stuff!
Nothing shameful about that, it is just that this is music for a specific purpose: to make the jaw drop during the performance (who cares if the jaw drops when reading the music in your study, as you do with Mozart). Viotti came far closer to doing so than did most, certainly more than did Chevalier de Saint-Georges, which is why even a non-violinist such as Brahms could issue such extravagant praise for Viotti’s Concerto No. 22. So, sing or play for me the main themes from, say, three Viotti concertos and then we’ll talk about Chevalier de Saint-Georges. But not until.
He (Chevalier de Saint-Georges) is I think given his fair due, which is considerable, in Chappell White’s survey “From Vivaldi to Viotti” about the early classical violin concerto. But White’s evaluation is fair because he knows the entire context, far more than I do.
Thanks for your informative comment and for mentioning Viotti et al.
Who is this Heather Mac Donald and what are her musical credentials?
Mac Donald is a right-wing commentator and a female and more articulated version of Tucker Calson. She has as much musical credentials as her friends at American Renaissance who often claim to be intense admirers of classical music, although I suspect the reason for the admiration is because the music is supposedly white, not because it’s classical.
ALL things classical are white male patriarchal fascists! They don’t want other people than themselves enjoy what THEY enjoy! They don’t want them to be accessible! The want to preserve them for themselves and their damned offspring! Proof: the term ‘classic’ was invented by the white Greeks 2000 years ago and see what terrible things they did & inventing suppressing science and all, and gay things, and bloody dramas where the suppressed got killed, etc. etc. so we’ve to get rid of Mozart & Beethoven & stuff & replace it with something better!
Sally
You may as well drop the “Sally” bit. It’s not nearly as funny as you seem to think it is.
Works for me:)
Thank you, Sally.
‘When the Phantom speaks, the tiger gets cardiac arrest.’
– Old Bengali motto of wisdom
It makes me think of the famous Cinese saying:
‘When you hear your neighbours scream, bring them tea and tell them that the path to Heaven is paved with violence’. To-Fu, 9th century AD.
(But there is some disagreement over translations.)
As I thought. A know-nothing who has found a niche she can exploit.
Seems to me this “know nothing” has struck a nerve.
Absolutely ridiculous how you keep on giving a platform to this alt-right moron. Wonder if her think tank is paying you in the first place, the quality of the output is not worth bothering with. A useful idiot for the “anti-woke” brigade. Maybe you’ll have your own show on GBNews next.
Can you not have a cogent argument?
I think you should read the articles first, before making a fool of yourself.
Hi Gunther,
“alt-right moron” is not an argument.
Best of luck,
Peter
I’m told often enough I’m an alt-left moron but I don’t know if that exists.
Sally
So we should only give a platform to alt-left morons?
Not enough space.
Your headline makes it seem that you have have missed her point. Composers are not neglected because of their ethnicity, but rather because their work is not deemed as good as works by other composers. You make it sound like its a racial thing.
To the contrary, composers have often been ignored and purposely neglected precisely for their ethnicity or race. Does the term “Berufsverbot” mean anything to you? It did to Weigl, Korngold, Zemlinsky, and it killed Schreker. There is zero doubt that William Grant Still, Florence Price, and others, experienced rejection and neglect solely because of their race without any consideration of their music. Their race was used to justify the conclusion that their music could not possibly be any good.
Recommended reading: Judith Still’s “Just Tell the Story – Troubled Island: A Collection of Documents, Previously Published and Unpublished, Pertaining to the First Significant Afro-American Grand Opera, “Troubled Island” by William Grant Still with Librettists Langston Hughes & Verna Arvey”. It laboriously documents the efforts to prevent and ultimately wreck the premiere of Still’s second opera (Ultimately premiered at City Opera in 1949). It is eye-opening.
And don’t get Judith Still started about the origins of “I got Rhythm”. It didn’t get lifted because it sucked.
Cancel culture has obviously invaded classical music as well, it’s warmed over cultural Marxism, the granddaddy of all other divisive, insane and undernourished “isms”. It’s all about instigating racial division and subversion of western culture by the promotion of political correctness & anti white propaganda. Censorship is the first stage, the real goal is destruction, cancellation. Whites shouldn’t change anything. After all the historical masterpieces and accomplishments they produced in music, literature, theater, philosophy, sculpture, painting, architecture, physics, astronomy, medicine etc etc, which remain unsurpassed, why should whites change their works of art and inventions to accommodate the woke mob mentality? People should accept that whites didn’t choose supremacy. Supremacy chose them.
If anyone is offended, stay home. Create your own culture. Create your own art form, your own opera, novel, poem, statue, film. You have the option of not buying the ticket to a show or a book that you don’t approve. White culture doesn’t need your approval or your business or your attendance. The arrogance of suggesting to change the text that Wagner wrote for Meistersinger or Parsifal, for instance. Why can’t *your* culture create a masterpiece like Parsifal? Try. Then you can portray white people any way you want. Instead of trying to change words or plots of Aida, Turandot or Butterfly, create your own operas with your own music and libretti. Let’s see how they compare to the sublime art of Verdi, Puccini and Wagner.
Or again, stay home, you don’t need to attend opera by whites in theaters designed by white architects. It’s high time people under 30 (yes, you zombified millennials) learn how Cultural Marxism started and under which historical circumstances. It started out of ENVY of Russia and Germany (then economic envy of the US) in the late 1880s. It remains so today, they realize they still can’t create anything near the genius or the brilliance of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Socrates, Plato, Da Vinci, Renoir, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Newton, Tesla, Hawking etc. so they have to *cancel* it, destroy it. But their efforts are always hilarious and always fail.
It was not ‘white people’ who created all those things that the whole world benefits from still today. It were PEOPLE who created them. Their skin colour is entirely irrelevant and in theory, it could have been Africans, creating all those things in the steppes under the tropical sun. But it did not happen that way and since the works are entirely colourless, they are there for everybody to enjoy. Don’t divide people in terms of race, that is racist and playing into the hands of the nitwits.
You totally miss the point. Read David K Nelson’s post to gain some insight. Your many posts here are preachy and reveal much more about you than I think you know.
I entirely agree. We should stop it.
Sally
“Your many posts here are preachy and reveal much more about you than I think you know.” What a very kind and generous comment! I think Mr. Borstlap would appreciate that.
John Borstlap, BIPOC/female artists are the ones making it about race and gender, so let’s make it about race and gender. And let’s be clear, the art form was invented by white males. If BIPOC/female artists are equal then they should be able to shine on their own, which means they must create their own art form, their own musical notes system, their own alphabet, their own written language and their own musical instruments. The oldest-known musical instrument by the way is the flute, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, found in a cave in southern Germany, inhabited by Caucasians since pre-historic times.
BIPOC/female artists can also build their own theaters since all architects of all major opera houses were white males.
Musical notes were invented by a white male. The first Western system of functional names for the musical notes was introduced by Guido of Arezzo (white male), using the beginning syllables of the first six musical lines of the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis. Latin was also invented by white males (Romans). So was English. English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxons (whites) from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. By the way, the first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets. The Phoenicians were white.
Classical music was also invented by white males. Bach and Gluck are considered founders of the Classical style. The first great master of the style was Joseph Haydn. In the late 1750s he began composing symphonies, and by 1761 he had composed a triptych (Morning, Noon, and Evening) solidly in the contemporary mode.
Opera is an art form invented by white males, it originated in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, produced in Florence in 1598) especially from works by Claudio Monteverdi, notably L’Orfeo, and later spread through Europe: Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England, all white males. All masters of opera are male and white, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, Rossini, Bellini, etc.
BIPOC and female companies can commission works by their own BIPOC and female composers and hire their own BIPOC and female singers *ONLY*. But stop leeching off creations, masterworks, accomplishments or inventions by white males, shine *on your own*.
Wow, Alex. Your little screed here reads like it was lifted straight from a white supremacist’s manifesto. Also, you should know that defensiveness is a sure sign of white male fragility, so don’t even think of mounting a rebuttal.
Curvy Honk Glove, whites didn’t choose supremacy. Supremacy chose them.
I like wordy comments that start out with references to Marxism. Then I know to leapfrog across without reading.
You must bot be aware: Blacks have created their own culture in music and it being celebrated non-stop.
Is it art? Well, I’ll leave that for the great debaters here. But I certainly wouldn’t expect a Black artist to believe white contributions to jazz or rap are of any great significance…kind of like the Black contributions to Western Art (classical) music.
Your statement is jaw-droppingly ignorant, dripping with condescension.
The artists I’ve known are about as colorblind as it gets as long as you can play. Miles Davis put it best saying “I don’t care his color if he can blow like an MFer.” So I definitely disagree with your last statement. It tends to be the fans that are so quick to put people into boxes.
But here’s the fundamental rub on all this. Classical music is heavily subsidized and given a lot of support, even down to it being the system of music we put into music education. Jazz, blues, rock, and now rap pay their own way in the free market. As an American, I could see the argument of why shouldn’t public education teach kids music forms they might enjoy more as the primary music system and leave classical and orchestra as an elective? Certainly there is a lot of development virtue in teaching them jazz improvisation skills focusing more on chords. Maybe we just focus on marching band since that’s popular and important for football. As a company why should I sponsor something that would intentionally not try to reach a broader audience? That’s just bad business. And that’s important to a lot of donors as well. If I’m running for office, certainly tax money taken from everyone shouldn’t go to arts organizations or concert halls that aren’t meant for a wider audience.
If you don’t like it, fine. Do your own thing. Country western music and heavy metal are incredibly white, and that’s fine. Not everyone has to like every type of art or music. But country music can pay its own way. As someone who loves classical music and thinks it is worthy of public support, I fully recognize it does have a responsibility to be more open and speak to more people. Sure I roll my eyes at some of the hamfisted efforts on that front, but I recognize the need.
It’s subsidized by rich white and rich asian people. Many of them are Republicans, and many of them voted for Trump. I did not vote for Trump. But it now feels like we’re a few steps away from Snowball and Napoleon tearing everything down.
Beyond the many problems in your above comment that would take too long to dissect, I just have one question to ask about all the great achievements you tout. What is the name of the numerical system we all use?
Bonus question! Can you tell me where the first university in the world was founded?
[What is the name of the numerical system we all use?]
It’s actually a misnomer, since it indisputably originated in India – a fact acknowledged by the Arabic name for it – and only came to be known as Arabic in Europe because the Arabs were the most immediate link in the chain of cultural transmission. But as you suggest, this screed displays such a pathetic ignorance of the history of civilization that it is pointless to engage with it, beyond pointing out the absurdity of its fundamental assumptions, and even that is time wasted on such a convinced bigot.
Music history: Discuss, giving reasons and examples:
a) “Opera seria legitimated absolute rule while also trying to nudge its royal attendees closer to Enlightenment ideals of tolerance and justice.”
b) “With the arguable exception of opera seria, music written for wealthy patrons—whether Telemann’s Tafelmusik or Haydn’s symphonies—is not about class but about the abstract logic of musical expression. ”
c) “Most canonical composers were at odds, quietly or vociferously, with their respective governments.”
Museum culture: Assess the accuracy and bias of the first quotation (8 August 2021) in light of the second (22 March 2021).
“Bedford has been on a deaccessioning craze to rid the museum of dead white male artists (modernists and postmodernists all), in order to buy female and minority artists.” (Mac Donald)
“Bedford has remained a kind of lightning rod for more permissive policies on art sales since last October, when he announced a plan to sell three blue-chip postwar works by Andy Warhol, Clyfford Still and Brice Marden. His hope was to raise $65m to finance goals such as raising staff salaries, the top priority; the acquisition of postwar works by men and women of colour; offering free admission to special exhibitions; allowing the museum to remain open until 9 p.m. one weekday per week; and creating a plan to champion racial and gender equity at the museum.”
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/baltimore-museum-of-art-director-defends-diversity-goals-that-his-institution-hoped-to-meet-through-art-sales [Feel free to follow the links in this article to other pages offering further background information.]
Heather MacDonald bringing “All Lives Matter” to classical music. Makes me want to vomit. Look her up on google and see the light that she brings to the world. Luckily the people (qualified and educated musicians) who are programing Price have more expertise and better taste.
I feel badly for Florence Price, who surely would not have elected to have her music finally come to light, 68 years after her death, at the expense of becoming a political punching bag in the culture wars of 2021.
Mac Donald acknowledges that many “lesser-known composers deserve a grateful hearing,” and not just white males. But the salient quote above (“Perhaps 98 percent of all composers in the classical tradition are not listened to or even recognized today. Those forgotten artists were almost all white males.”) is probably accurate. There’s no denying that new artists have to struggle to be heard.
But it’s also true that more of those “forgotten” voices have received renewed attention in recent years than ever before (even if that attention is often posthumous, and as Mac Donald notes, the objects of that attention tend to be male and white). Our concert hall programming could be more diverse, but intrepidly curious performers have done yeoman’s work to uncover buried treasures and commit those works to audio and video recordings (Ivan Ilić’s explorations of Anton Reicha’s music come to mind).
Speaking of nationality and ethnicity, we might care to remember that Western classical music gave a musical voice to oppressed cultures long before they gained their own political states. Speaking of inclusion, it’s worth mentioning that classical music’s essential composer had an agonizing disability. Yes, we realize he was deaf, but we don’t think of him as a deaf composer. As Gustavo Dudamel says of him in Mac Donald’s piece, “He is not just the reference point of classical music; he is the master of us all.”
Since the rise of historically informed performance movement, numerous minor or previously overlooked composers have become better known, and the great majority of them are (unsurprisingly and necessarily) white. The two or three minority composers Mac Donald complains about are not much more than part of this trend. No one is claiming any of these composers is greater than Mozart or Salieri. They may occupy more radio time than before when their music was not played at all, but one can easily turn your radio off to listen to your favourite performance of Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
Sometimes it’s not what is being said that matters but who is saying it and why – but the so-called classical music is such a niche cause for Mac Donald whose early projects seem to be far more important, such as defending Donald Trump, calling COVID just another flue, claiming falsely that illegal immigrants are the main cause of the rise of crime.
Anyone who fails or refuses to recognize the striking, chilling similarities to Stalinist Soviet Union or Mao’s China is deaf, blind or extremely naive.
As a Western classical musician who’s devoted my professional life to diversity and inclusion in our art, I find this entire article ignorant, racist, unsupported, and at times simply absurd. I would love to challenge Mac Donald to a debate on these issues, because she doesn’t seem to know a thing about them.
I really, really hope you get this opportunity.
I will bring an ample supply of popcorn!
[I will bring an ample supply of popcorn!]
You’ll find yourself having to take most of it back home with you.
In Mac Donald’s article, I experience whiplash reading “The mob cares nothing for facts, though,” and then, a sentence or two later, that a Zoom participant was “very likely a plant,” an assertion without any factual basis.
Mac Donald writes “Ewell had failed to mention Schenker’s outsider status as an Austrian Jew…” So Jews can’t be racist? Are you going to tell me that people in wheelchairs can’t be homophobic, or Muslims can’t be sexist? This is an absurd argument.
To imagine, as Mac Donald does, that an analytic framework developed by a white supremacist designed to show the superiority of Western music and the White race can’t be racist is wrong, but it’s also absurd to imagine that an analytic framework that is completely incapable of effectively analyzing music of most non-Western traditions is universal rather than Eurocentric.
It has been ‘Eurocentricity’ that has studied, and make accessible, almost ALL of the planet’s musical traditions, so that anybody can take notice of them whoever and wherever they are.
Good grief, you are insufferable.
Mac Donald conveniently ignores the incredible racism and sexism Florence Price faced. Sure, her symphony was performed by the Chicago Symphony, but only alongside the work of a well-known eugenicist. And at that time that was the only time in the existence of the planet that a major orchestra had played a work by a Black woman. That hardly counts as a race-blind and inclusive environment.
Totally flabbergasting to hear Mac Donald complain about narcissism in Western classical music but not direct her complaint to, say, Wagner, or any number of narcissistic performers, but rather to those who wish to make Western classical music more inclusive.
The point is, that arguments are used by the wokes which have nothing to do with the music.
“Though the keepers of our tradition know that classical music is a priceless inheritance, fear paralyzes them as that legacy goes down. Among the leaders contacted for this article were conductors Daniel Barenboim, Dudamel himself, Riccardo Muti, Franz Welser-Möst, Valery Gergiev, Gianandrea Noseda, Charles Dutoit, James Conlon, Neeme Järvi, and Masaaki Suzuki; pianists András Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Lang Lang, Evgeny Kissin, and Richard Goode; singers Anna Netrebko, James Morris, and Angel Blue; and composers John Harbison and Wynton Marsalis. All either declined to comment or ignored the query.”
Or, they just don’t have any respect for Mac Donald and her rants complaining about all the Black folks she sees in Western classical music.
No. People get called out thousands of times on social media and canceled, if they slip up by saying anything that might possibly offend the woke. The article gave two examples of that.
This makes it impossible to have any sort of open, meaningful discussion pertaining to the subject.
That’s most likely why hardly anyone wants to talk about it.
Mac Donald writes “The distinguishing feature of Western classical music, which allowed an unparalleled transformation of style over seven centuries, is that it is written down, unlike other world musics.” Mac Donald is apparently ignorant of North Indian classical music, which uses a notation system. So too Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia…
But nobody can read it, so?
Sally
It is truly disheartening to hear Mac Donald refer to “Balinese gamelan music, the Chinese opera, Indian classical music, and the Nigerian talking drum” while considering those as separate genres from “classical” music, rather than in fact being classical music genres themselves. Or does Mac Donald believe only White people can have a classical music tradition?
She obviously merely wants to state that these traditions are fundamentally diffferent. And that is a fact, not an opinion.
This article really brings out all the White racists’ comments!
Also the poorly-named White Knighting wok waters such as yourself.
Important to remember is that:
– There are hundreds or thousands of worthy Black composers. Anyone who pretends they know all their hundreds of thousands of compositions and dismisses them all in a single sentence is lying to you.
– Black composers have been systematically neglected by a White-favoring system for centuries. The current movement introduces worthy composers of the past because their awesome music has been unjustly neglected.
– If you disagree with me, do a blind listening test with the music of Ludovic Lamothe and Antonin Dvorak (or another composer whose piano music and style you’re unfamiliar with and wouldn’t necessarily recognize). Have a friend play pieces of both back to back, and see which you prefer. Are you brave enough to take this blind challenge?!
The word isn’t “brave”, it’s “curious”.
True, Ludovic Lamothe deserves more attention, but not in comparison to Dvorak or anyone else. In my opinion, his style is not particularly distinctive. He certainly is no Chopin, if that even matters. That said, his story is compelling and, for that reason, he should be more widely performed. Are there curious pianists out there?
Billy: ‘No, it is not so!’
Billy’s argument seems to be as good as yours.
Mac Donald says that “to equate tonal hierarchies with racial hierarchies is lunatic.” It’s not. Schenker himself was a well-known white supremacist; his views of the supremacy of Western tonal harmony were an outgrowth of his views of Western racial superiority.
It was rather the other way around: the ‘superiority’ of systems with a tonal hierarchy proved for him the superiority of European music and if Europeans happen to white, so be it.
Is European tonal music with its deep tonal structure superior to any other musical culture, i.e. a culture that does not have such deep tonal structural complexity? Probably it is. But that does not automatically mean that other musical cultures need to be looked-down upon. Something great does not automatically mean something else is bad. That is the fallacy of the null sum: my misery is the result of someone else’s success.
If you believe that European tonal music is superior to any other musical culture, it follows that you are looking down on those other cultures – unless of course you don’t know what superior means.
Hierarchies are not the only way to organize material, but the vocabulary of the western classical tradition is deeply rooted in hierarchical modes of thought. The analogy with supremacist (Aryan, White) ideologies is a fair one. It is one Schenker himself made explicit.
To loose sight of special qualities is to egalize everything so that nothing can stand out – a fashionable trope of the wokes.
If you select the quality by which you judge superiority (“deep tonal structural complexity”), and that quality happens to be the one that characterizes your own preferred musical tradition, your argument is circular and subjective. In terms of, for instance, rhythmic complexity, other traditions could claim ‘superiority’. We could then enter a pointless argument about whether pitch or rhythm is primary in music.
A fresh egg is better than a rotten egg — unless you want to throw it at an opponent, in which case I would recommend the rotten one.
Isn’t it time, by the way, to retire that lazy and exhausted cliché ‘woke’?
As an antidote to all this heat without light, I have just finished reading, for the first time, Maurice Peress: From Dvorak to Duke Ellington (OUP 2004). I recommend it to anybody who wants to comment meaningfully on the interaction between European and African/Black musical traditions. I wonder if Ms Mac Donald knows it?
Joseph Bologne composed entirely within the European fashion of his time, with no trace of his influence from his mother’s side. The present craze for him will fade, though it may help to popularize other more interesting composers of the period. Coleridge Taylor, over 100 years later, was a British composer who composed in the European tradition, but also engaged with the Black American tradition (though he dismissed Ragtime as ‘rot’). Here is a good summary of his life and work: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/pdf/coleridge.pdf
“my misery is the result of someone else’s success.”
That is the definition of envy.
“Is European tonal music with its deep tonal structure superior to any other musical culture, i.e. a culture that does not have such deep tonal structural complexity? Probably it is.”
I have to agree, but we live in an age where equality must be assumed, otherwise you will attract heaps of opprobium. Is German engineering superior to xxxx? In most instances, yes, it’s just something that people in xxxx have to live with. People familiar with engineering understand this perfectly, people in the arts are unable to cope with it.
[Is European tonal music with its deep tonal structure superior to any other musical culture]
I gather from what seems to be your enlightened thinking in these matters that you would not be reluctant to admit that Western music does not stand at the top of such a hierarchy.
Mac Donald writes “A hierarchy of keys and of harmonies within those keys is constitutive of Western tonal music and of some non-Western music as well. It has nothing to do with alleged racial hierarchy.” You know who would disagree with this statement? Schenker himself, the man who created this system of tonal analysis, and a well-known white supremacist.
http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2018/08/entartete-kunst.html
Clowes is cross-posting here the comments he made verbatim on the article’s page. He has an agenda and the patience to copy and endlessly paste his tiresome and misplaced objections. If he’s a pro, he’s not the one you want to share a stand with.
Mac Donald feels it’s important to acknowledge anti-Semitism in rap, but ignores anti-Semitism in Bach and Wagner. There must be some difference between rap artists and classical composers that accounts for Mac Donald’s differential treatment; I’m just not sure what it could be. I’ll have to come black to this.
“…acknowledge anti-Semitism in rap, but ignores anti-Semitism in Bach…”
I don’t know why I’m bothering with this, but here goes anyway: rap is being written and performed NOW, 80 years after the well documented murder of millions of Jews. Some people haven’t learnt a damn thing.
Well documented? There’s no forensic evidence. About 250,000 Jews died during WW2 in work camps (not death camps) mostly of starvation and typhus. There’s no footage or photographic evidence of people being taken into or dragged out of gas chambers. There weren’t anywhere near 6 million Jews in Nazi controlled territory at the time. And even if there were, it would take 68 years to cremate 6 millions bodies.
Maybe this will help:
There is no antisemitism in Bach or in his music. Quasi-negative comments about Jews in the texts of the passions are taken from the bible.
There is no antisemitism in Wagner’s operas. It is in his writings, not in his music. And the antisemitism in his writings were a cultural critique clothed in racist terms.
The piece goes on way too long, and conflates all sorts of things into some grand polemic. Firing the seemingly fair-minded MSM opera director is ridiculous, and I hope she sues and gets a big settlement. Also absurd is treating every little racial microaggression as if it’s the George Floyd murder, or equating St. Georges to Mozart.
And yes, there are a lot of neglected White composers, too – I still want to hear more of Harold Shapero, Peter Mennin, William Schuman (those two having been big movers/shakers in the music world at one time, so definitely not victims), and even John Knowles Paine. At the same time, it’s not a stretch to imagine that Florence Price and other black musicians faced discrimination in their day – whether it involved music. That was America, to our everlasting shame.
At the same time everyone is decrying this “wokeness,” for the past 20-odd years there have been many efforts to unearth and revive any number of composers killed or marginalized by the Nazis – Hans Krasa, Hannes Eisler, Berthold Goldschmidt, etc.. Some of their music is terrific, some not. Is it worth giving much of it a spin because of their status as victims of the Nazis? Sure, why not? Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s a product of its time and circumstances.
The Musicologist Research Team of the Texas Institute of Technology under the enlightened leadership of Dr W. Hofstadter has begun, after their disastrous trip to China to count the Chinese people who did not understand Western classical music, to count the reasons why composers are not performed by symphony orchestras in the West. After 3 weeks of study of the available sources, they started with defining the different categories:
A. Racist reasons.
B. Supposed quality reasons of the music offered.
C. Supposed quality reasons of the composers in question.
D. Suspicious of progressive ideas.
E. Suspicions of not having progressive ideas.
F. Suspicions of being a female.
G. Suspicions of being an idiot.
H. Acknowledgement of not being part of an academic network of vested interests.
I. Fear of having to assess something outside an academic network of vested interests.
J. Sheer exhaustion in the face of the pile of scores sent-in.
K. Knowing the composer had ties with Pierre Boulez and is still alive.
L. Fear that players and audiences might actually like the music.
M. Deep disappointment that the scores offered don’t reflect the burning concerns of modern times.
N. Shock on seeing the music was written traditionally correctly and without a foreword with manuals for handling percussion.
O. Music that needed more than one rehearsel.
P. Composer did not know the staff personally.
Q. Composer knows his craft.
R. Composer is white and male and the only minority he does belong to, is to the group of rejected composers who actually are talented.
By the letter S the team gave-up, acknowledging that taking the alhabet in the first place was an idea much too optimistic.
The team will begin to count the cases of A tonight after dinner – they work overtime because of being pressed by the current authorian female director of TIT who doesn’t accept any excuse on the basis of emancipation.
Our listening will only be deepened when we familiarize ourselves with more literature. For something to be worthy listening to it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. In fact, we can appreciate masterpieces better when we are familiar with what we would call “lesser works”, but were considered at the time average good works. I believe that there are too many masterpieces repeated endlessly in concert halls nowadays, and concerts resemble “Intro to Music” college courses too much. Maybe that’s just the US. As different races and ethnicities were part of the American society but their talents were continuously ignored it is time to learn about their contribution. What can be wrong with that. I also don’t see a problem with debates in the halls of academia on all topics, however controversial or ridiculous. It’s good to ask uncomfortable questions, that’s what academia is for.
Indeed.
And the most uncomfortable question is: shall we discuss something that is clearly entirely idiotic? Shall there be a filter of material to be discussed? And who is to decide on the basis of what, which are the standards?
Since postmodern deconstruction has become acceptable in academia, in spite of its obvious flaws, everything is possible.
I think the current discussion is just “the academic flavor of the month”. It will pass.
“It’s good to ask uncomfortable questions, that’s what academia is for.”
That there is funny, I don’t care who you are!
I don’t get the purpose of this article. There are probably like 3-5 black classical composers that are played semi-regularly, and that offends you because there are white composers who are largely ignored? How many hundreds of white composers are regularly played? Please spare me.
The article is in two parts and more than 10,000 words. The excerpted section in this post is not the point of the article.
The theme of the article is set forth in the first paragraph:
“Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.”
The author argues that is is not true, and that classical music and it’s institutions have always been about excellence and quality. Besides classical not being racist, it should not be viewed through a racial lens.
Let’s be clear – racism is not an issue that is unique to classical music, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist here, as the article claims.
Nobody can deny that historically, the classical music scene has been exclusive to women & African-Americans. All you have to look at a list of classical music composers and count the proportion of white men. I believe the author admits this point.
True, in an ideal world, nothing would be viewed through a racial lens, because in such a world, racism wouldn’t exist & people would be treated equally regardless. In that case, we could just care about “excellence”. But that’s not the world we live in.
The definition of “excellence”, in some people’s minds (such as the author’s), appears to be dependent on a person’s race. At nearly every turn, she goes out of her way to imply that black musicians are not as good as white or Asian musicians. Well, maybe that’s exactly proving the point that the author is trying to counter, and that the culture of classical music is not as welcoming as it should be.
Classical music was invented by white males. Bach and Gluck are considered founders of the Classical style. The first great master of the style was Joseph Haydn. If women & African-Americans think they’re being overlooked, they can start shining by inventing their own art form, their own system of functional names for the musical notes, their own concept of an orchestra, their own written language, their own alphabet, their own musical instruments and perform their works in their own theaters. They should stop leeching off elements of white culture invented by white males and try to *shine on their own*.
Musicologists know as much about what it means to be a musician as ornithologists know about what it is to be a bird.
In my ten plus years studying and teaching music in 4 separate institutions I’ve only met one or two musicologists who were not also highly competent musicians. I’ve met hundreds of musicians however who learn only how to play the notes and don’t apply any more thought to it than that.