A chair for Tania Leon
NewsMessage received:
Brooklyn College and its School of Visual Media and Performing Arts announces the Tania León Chair of Music, their first-ever endowed chair in music. The position was funded by The Tow Foundation and named in honor of León, who taught at Brooklyn College beginning in 1985, became Tow Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College in 2000, and retired as Professor Emeritus in 2019. The inaugural incumbent will be conductor and educator Malcolm J. Merriweather, who has taught at the College since 2015 and will assume the chair position in the Fall of 2024, with the endowment supporting his teaching, research, and mentorship to nurture diverse talent.
Naming chairs and buildings after rich people and their foundations is problematic. As the Financial Times put it (and with a touch of humor): “Poke around long enough — and I speak as a poker — and you will find that one big shot or another was a slave owner, a Nazi sympathiser, a swindler, a slanderer, a deadbeat, a degenerate, a hypocrite, a heartbreaker, a supporter of the New York Yankees baseball club or something similarly despicable.” True. Even many of the USA’s founding “fathers” were slave owners, Washington, Jefferson, and so on. Many rich people today follow the same pattern. It reveals the rot at the heart of our 18th century form of government.
Yes, the TOW Foundation is about creating diversity, but that doesn’t change the problem of giving the rich inordinate power to shape our culture.
Another problem is that the recipient of “the chair” must constantly be mindful that their actions reflect on the rich person (or persons) that endow the chair. They must constantly carry the reputation of the rich on their back in order to enhance the image of the rich. That’s OK if it causes problems for a recipient who is something like a sexual predator in an orchestra (which actually happened not long ago,) but it IS a problem when it serves as a constraint on artists speaking truth to power or even creating art the rich person might strongly dislike. How would TOW have felt about Malcolm X or various leaders of the Black Panthers?
What if the artist wants to speak about the need for public arts funding and the problems with our system of cultural plutocracy? What if the artist tries to raise consciousness about the fact that the USA has killed over 4 million people since WWII in illegal, unjustified wars? What if the artist openly speaks against Trump as a quasi-fascist even if the rich endower of the chair is a Trump supporter–which ain’t exactly unusual among the rich? What is the recipient speaks on the behalf of issues like the Palestinians or US interventions against democratically elected leaders in Latin America?
We see the arts agencies of Europe at times also suppressing freedom of expression, but it does not seem to be as censorious as the US system. Is it time for the USA to enter the 21st century and join every other developed country in the world and let go of its 18th century form of arts funding?
Well, well. Just as I was about to post this, up popped an ad for Hillsdale College…
1) Don’t think too high of yourself. Classical music is so insignificant in today’s landscape you have a better chance at “speaking truth to power” by going to times square and screaming all your grievances at the top of your lungs during a free concert by Shakira than by anything you can produce in this artform.
2) The biggest reason the left fails (and I say so as a progressive, in the same sense as people like Zizek criticizes the left) is that you operate on thin air assumptions about other places. “If only MAC had windows features…it would be a perfect operating system”. No. Theres Mac, theres windows, theres linux, all with problems and advantages. Its laty to simply cherry pick what you like about something as if it existed out of context. The US will NEVER, in your or several generation lifetimes, have public arts funding. Period, end of the story
Accepting that, one can begin to think of ways to improve THIS system rather than making empty wishes.
As little as this chair may impact the overall landscape, its orders of magnitude more than all your complaining that we don’t have X, Y, or Z feature from other places.
Grow up.
Remember Alberto Vilar who gave a ton of money to the Met Opera and had a room and a chair named after him? I think after his fraud conviction, they renamed the principal’s chair “Dewey, Cheetham & Howe chair”.
I find this musical chair business highly amusing.
Why NOT! DEI and BLM and all the other Marxist movements that have taken over the former American progressives and our Former Greatness. I worked with Tania and the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the 80′-90′ and she was a SHAME!! Pure B.S. and her so called works were a tribute to nonsense! Yes, it was just not me but every other person of all colors that were my friends, that agreed, that her Color was Her Protection!! She is a Progressive ( Communist) and is doing All that she is taught to do, to destroy our Heritage as Americans! And I know that you understand that we are “All in Gods Grace, every Man, Women, Race and Gender” and we are NOT to be divided into TRIBES! The DemonRats want that to be, so as to be able to Divide us, the Wonderful Majority. Long Live Democracy of All of US. Together we Prevail! Peter
Please Beware of Fake Profits: The Above!!!
So…Democracy is to literally say that 1 out of 2 existing parties is “the enemy of the people”, stay with 1 party (like China, or Russia….apparently bastions of “democracy”) and “crown” someone who will be “dictator for 1 day”…..only to 20 years later “win” elections with 80-90% of the vote like your posterboy Vlad just did.
Exactly what the founding fathers had it mind, I guess…
What a brilliant parody of a semi-literate MAGA trumpite. Nobody could write this stuff with a straight face.
She has to be near retirement, her career has been going strong since the 1980s. Somehow, these CUNY schools are finding lots of funds for woke hirings.
1) She was not hired, they created an endowed chair in her name
2) Thanks for showing the lazy modus operandi of the alt right zombies: “I read a title….see a photo….assume whatever TF I want…get angry….vote orange”
3) Apparently listening to mozart and beethoven did nothing to improve your reading comprehension skills….Bummer. Maybe try listening to Beyonce and you can do better next time?