Saturday, May 11, 2019

The Composer Narrative

As a composer myself, I am intrigued by how composers are portrayed in the mass media. Of course, they aren't given much space these days, but occasionally we get a glimpse. Such was the case this week as Toronto's Globe and Mail published an extensive piece on Andrew Balfour, an up and coming choral composer. Canada has a pretty strong choral tradition, especially in Ontario where the Mendelssohn Choir is well over a century old and a major musical institution.

Journalism has been described as the "first draft of history" and as such it is interesting to have a look at how the story of a composer is told in 21st century Canada (though the narrative is one that certainly is not limited to Canada). Here is the link to the story. If you are blocked for some reason, try searching for the headline: Choral maestro Andrew Balfour pursues his Indigenous identity through music.

Read the whole piece and then let's look for the salient themes. The first paragraph gives us the generic picture of a classical music composer: early signs of talent, exposure to ensemble playing and devotion to classical rather than popular music. This is just to set up the ways that Mr. Balfour departs from the generic picture. He is of Cree descent and as part of a government policy referred to as the "Sixties Scoop" was removed from his indigenous family and raised in a middle-class family of Scottish descent.
The Sixties Scoop refers to a practice that occurred in Canada of taking, or "scooping up", Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes or adoption. Despite the reference to one decade, the Sixties Scoop began in the late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s. It is estimated that a total of 20,000 aboriginal children were taken from their families and fostered or adopted out to primarily white middle-class families as part of the Sixties Scoop.
This controversial policy, along with the residential school system, abandoned in the 80s, was designed to "educate Aboriginal children in Euro-Canadian and Christian values so they could become part of mainstream society." Perhaps one should note that living conditions on indigenous reserve communities are often very poor and certainly offer little or no opportunities for education or advancement, which goes some way to explaining why these kinds of policies were instituted.

Balfour says:
As a child of the Sixties Scoop, he considered himself lucky. He’d been adopted when he was six months old by a family with Scottish roots that he describes as loving and supportive. His parents shared their passion for music with him – his father, the minister at All Saints’ Anglican Church in Winnipeg, encouraged his choral singing, and played trombone. His mother was a violist.
But as Balfour grew older, he’d struggled, and become conflicted and confused about his identity. Attention-deficit disorder made focusing on schoolwork difficult. He dropped out of Brandon University after a year, plagued by growing pangs of isolation. His parents had relocated to British Columbia, and the move intensified feelings of abandonment that gnawed at him when he thought about his Cree background and his separation from his birth mother.
So his musical gifts likely were fostered and developed as a result of his adoption. But he increasingly felt deracinated from his core identity. As a result he went through a difficult period of drug and alcohol abuse, part of which was spent in jail. As a result of exploring his identity as an indigenous person he experienced a vision:
It felt like a near-death experience, he says, in which he was visited by people he’d known throughout his life, who spoke to him. None of it made sense at the time, and he still struggles to articulate what transpired exactly, but he’s certain about this: “It was another power, another spirit … something telling me that life was going to be okay. And from then on, that’s how I felt. And I knew that I wanted to pursue my identity through music.”
The article recounts the kind of compositions and performances that were a result of this pursuit. Occasionally we read pro forma digs at classical music and its sinning, racist past:
Balfour’s versatility has made it easier for him to breach the staunchly white bastions of the classical-music scene, which has been slower to embrace Indigenous artists than literature, film and even pop music have. 
For now, at least, there’s no getting around the fact that when Balfour writes a choral work, the sea of faces that ultimately performs it will likely be white. And so, too, will the audience that listens to it.
Well, yes, Canada does still have an inconveniently large number of white people. But doesn't anyone notice how astonishingly racist comments like these are?

The issues surrounding identity bring with them consequences regarding agency:
Arts organizations that want to perform music with Indigenous themes and content need to be true collaborators, Balfour says. “They need to reach out, talk to elders, do a lot of listening; not just take a work and perform it however they want to.”
This makes the claim that if you write music that stems from your identity as an indigenous person, this gives you all the agency. The institutions and performers who realize the work have to follow your requirements. What makes me uneasy about this is that it implies a lot more than just singing the right notes with the right phrasing. Somehow the performance has to carry with it the ideology of identity.
At a recent gathering in Banff, Alta., of the tiny community of classically trained Indigenous musicians in Canada, Balfour and nine other artists signed a manifesto in support of “musical sovereignty” that called for arts organizations to involve Indigenous artists in every step of the creative process.
Musical sovereignty is an interesting concept, not least because it has more political and ideological aspects than merely aesthetic ones.

I think what we see here are a number of conflicting currents. One of them is simply the excellence of a musical talent able to realize his gifts and have them recognized by the Canadian arts community. Another is the relating of his work to his rediscovered indigenous identity. Still another is the musical context of Canada at large, which has its roots in European music. We see all these currents in his piece Qaumaniq for choir, cello, percussion, narrator and vocal soloists.


There are elements derived from traditional indigenous music, from European tonal traditions and from the contemporary avant garde. The effect is sometimes uncomfortably diverse.

One can see the appeal of this kind of journey for an artist like Andrew Balfour for whom it offers a kind of ready-made authenticity. But it is a bit disconcerting to realize that, for that sea of white faces that the Canadian performing and listening community consists in, the focus on and validation of his identity implies a deprecation of their identity. True, there is a certain moral satisfaction coming from displaying one's appreciation of Indigenous art, but the price is a tendency to reduce one's own authentic identity. The embedding of identity within aesthetics has a number of unfortunate consequences, not the least of which is that it tends to divide a society into identity groups in conflict with one another.

5 comments:

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

since 20th and 21st century choral music was one of my wheelhouses I've skipped around a bit and this choral work has lots of elements that remind me of things I've heard in choral works by Giles Swayne, Messiaen, Xenakis, and, yes, in some Native American traditional music ... and ... bits of Penderecki, too. Or maybe Edwin Fissinger's Lux Aeterna even.

It seems indicative of a kind of journalistic torpor to describe classical music as somehow staunchly white and there's a good deal that could be asked about what that is even supposed to mean. I've seen complaints that Wonder Woman, for instance, is played by a "white woman" even though there's little reason to think that fifty years ago anyone in Anglo-American journalism would have called Gal Gadot a white woman.

Over at New Music Box there's no shortage of people writing concert music who describe how the music they aspire to is beyond style or genre. There is a type of formal commitment to pluralism that makes it hard to argue that whatever classical music is now can be thought of as "staunchly white" in an Anglo-Saxon or even a Germanic sense. Do we regard Spanish music as "staunchly white" in connection to Native American traditions? I mean, I could since half my lineage is Native American but this gets at something that can be skimmed over if discussed at all, that a Spanish or Latin legacy that a progressive journalist might regard as sidelined by Saxon or Teutonic preferences would be seen as more associated with brutally repressive legacies by a Native American perspective. To translate that a bit, I'm more sympathetic to Bohemian and Russian and Japanese classical guitar music sometimes not because I dislike Spanish music but because Spanish guitar music gets overplayed and because there's sometimes a sense I have that there's an overly-dominant influence of Spanish musical norms in the guitar literature. On the other hand, I like that Spanish traditions of guitar music are more pragmatic about the relationship between high and low styles.

And yet for a lazy journalist writing about music none of that can be considered in some lazy phrase like "staunchly white". Even on matters such as British ethnic mistrust of Poles there's a LOT that could be discussed, or Polish history in connection to Russian and Ukrainian groups or in relationship to the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

I was planning on listening to chamber music by Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, a student of Charles Stanford, who would seem like a case study of how classical music has not been "staunchly white" ...

but if we're talking about a legacy of racist and ethnocentric music journalism and music criticism then, sure. I didn't land any gainful employment in journalism with my degree but I did manage to learn enough about music and music journalism after years of reading to be able to say that Eric Nissenson was on to something pointing out that most journalists who write about music are really musically illiterate at a practical level and were often English majors.

And Raymond Knapp's monograph on Haydn and camp that I read a couple of years back went so far as to propose that what happened in music journalism and criticism was that advocates of jazz and blues basically flipped the script of "authenticity" from German idealism and instead of white symphonists of aristocratic means just labeled "authentic" whatever music was composed by urban or rural black en but, crucially in Knapp's observation, not really dropping "authenticity" as a criteria.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Since half my lineage is Native American and half is white I have found that journalistic tropes of musicians "finding" themselves by getting in touch with whatever they regard as their real ethnic heritage hard to relate to. I can't think of myself as strictly white or strictly Native American because I'm not purely either. There are things I respect about both legacies and things I consider bad about both legacies so I don't feel a sense of obligation to think of myself as one or the other.

But there's a trope in music journalism where doubling down on whatever ethnic or social or sexual or religious identity makes a composer or musician uniquely marketable, particularly if it's possible to tie the personal narrative to a narrative of ethnic repression or political conflict, is a fad right now. I wouldn't say it's necessarily bad. Weinberg's travails being of Jewish descent in the Soviet Union is important as an element in understanding and appreciating his music. But ... and this is something I have been thinking about since I read the article you linked to ... you can read one of these features on a composer like Balfour and learn almost nothing about the music itself when the narrative threads of the journalistic work are about identity and identity in connection to social and political issues.

It seems to be a fad within an INDUSTRY is what I'm trying to get at. If Balfour were not a bankable artistic commodity there'd be no coverage of what he's doing. Even though I've found that there's half a dozen cycles of preludes and fugues that have been composed for solo guitar in the last thirty years none of them have been discussed that I'm aware of Anglo-American journalism. To give another for instance, British journalists don't discuss the string quartets of Ben Johnston while American journalists have. There's a set of biases that permeate regional music journalism that music journalists impute to the rest of musical writing that, if you're widely read enough, you realize is not really a good presentation of what's being written and read.

In many a tribal context younger Native Americans don't really even want to learn or preserve the older ways, which can mean that those who DO want to learn and preserve tribal musical and linguistic idioms are doing so for what could paradoxically or ironically be considered fairly mundane middle class/bourgeois reasons, despite a lot of rhetoric and posturing that affects otherwise. It's possible that cashing in on ethnic identities can play to narratives about identity as defined in ethnic terms as a way to sidestep the extent to which anyone who can monetize their chamber music through performances and publications can do so because of, well, class privilege, to use a term that left and progressive writers use regularly lately.

Bryan Townsend said...

One of the unexpected delights of blogging is that occasionally you put up a post that provokes a comment that transcends the post itself! Thanks Wenatchee for this!

I think that this comment is particularly a propos: "what happened in music journalism and criticism was that advocates of jazz and blues basically flipped the script of "authenticity" from German idealism and instead of white symphonists of aristocratic means just labeled "authentic" whatever music was composed by urban or rural black en but, crucially in Knapp's observation, not really dropping "authenticity" as a criteria."

Taruskin long ago tore a strip off the "authenticity" racket, but most journalists haven't noticed. I used the word a couple of times but when I referred to a "ready-made authenticity" that was intended to imply the shallowness of that concept.

What you do in your writing and I think I do in mine is make what we hope are well-considered value judgements. What the popular culture and journalists in particular avoid at all costs are, yes, value judgements. All musical traditions are equally valuable and those that have been neglected or come from neglected or "oppressed" groups are more valuable because of it! That's a nice logical twist, isn't it!

My view is that aesthetic traditions and techniques are valuable only in terms of how successful they are aesthetically. Creative artists are free to steal materials and methods from wherever they like. This is certainly what Balfour has done. As you say, there are elements from Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, Anglican hymns and Native American (what we call in Canada, "First Nations" or Indigenous music. Cultural appropriation all over the place. To me the obvious over-arching influence and frame is European modernism. The whole conception of the piece is founded on that with indigenous elements mixed in.

Wenatchee, could you flesh out a bit your last sentence which was slightly obscure to me?

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Agree a bit about the frame being European modernism but appropriation and assimilation of "ethnic" elements has been going on in European literate musical traditions for centuries. I'm slowly getting through a monograph on the use of Native American themes in classical music and it's interesting just how far back the tradition goes. It tends to get criticized as a kind of "orientalism" when European composers make use of actually or purportedly "Indian" (first nation or east asian or aboriginal to where ever) music. Yet as recent music journalism shows, when people who can claim a non-white ethnic heritage employ the same kind of appropriation of ethnic or folk music traditions into their new concert music this is praised. That seems like a double standard to me and I think Charles Ives made a good point in saying that what we now call "cultural appropriation" or is called that by way of condemnation among musicologists, that appropriation can be good or bad in Ives'estimation depending on whether you really respect the group whose music you are using. He gave an example, if a white composer uses themes from black music but has no regard for the liberty, freedom, and dignity of black people that's an illegitimate appropriation. If you love the music and are in support of the people themselves then Ives considers that an acceptable appropriation.

The thing I'm noticing about privilege, which is generally an outcome of class, is that contemporary writers and composers tend to double down on ethnic identity narratives rather than spend time examining class issues. "privilege" tends to be deployed as an accusation in social media and online debate, a kind of shibboleth or dog whistle that someone should not be paid attention to because they were born into too much privilege by way of skin color or economic well-being. But ... and this is where I've been thinking about this for a few years, that kind of canard skips past the fact that the people who are making these sorts of allegations insulate themselves from being a "one percent" by treating the only possible "one percent" as a financial one percent caste; they exclude altogether the fact that they are people who, by way of being able to write as arts critics and participate economically in the arts scenes through which their music gets write ups in publications, are a cognitive "one percent" and at least a culture upper ten percent. There's a certain amount of sophistry involved, I believe, in artists who are able to get graduate degrees complaining about the privilege of people in high finance because there can be more than one kind of elite caste. A lot of "privilege" discourse and polemic tends to skip past that. A Ta-nehisi Coates who can write for the Atlantic Monthly and write comics for Marvel is part of a cultural elite even if people might not want to consider writing for Marvel comics to be any kind of high art. It might not be but that's not really what I'm getting at, it's that you have to be so well-established as a writer to even get a foot in the door writing for Marvel and having your story adapted into a Black Panther movie that the idea that Coates has not become part of a privilege elite can't be taken seriously. So it's something I can't ignore in reading his case for explicitly race-based reparations. I don't think his proposal is good policy. Reparations may be popular but this is another way in which being half Native American I would say a problem with the way a Coates broaches race is he has cast it in such a literally and figuratively black and white narrative it's hard to get a clear sense that he has thought about Native American issues at all.

Bryan Townsend said...

Well said. What I want to insist on, and it is ironic that this is necessary, is that music, all music, be judged on its own merits whatever they may be.

It seems that most societies, as they age, develop class structures that were not originally present. Certain groups discover ways to gather resources to themselves that they have not strictly earned and they discover ways to pass these resources on to their descendants. On the one hand, I think that this is natural and even laudable, but on the other hand, equality of opportunity is a fundamental good in any society.

Pretty much everything that Coates has written seems to me to be some variety of special pleading. Imagine what public discourse would be like if we just ignored all cases of special pleading!