Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Treason

One of the odder aspects of the near-total politicization of life in advanced societies these days is the notion of "cultural appropriation." There have been a lot of strange cases lately: open a taco shop in a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles and if you are not Hispanic you can be accused of cultural appropriation and demonstrators might force you to shut the business. Wear an antique Chinese dress to a graduation if you are not Chinese and you get condemned on social media for cultural appropriation. Lots of other examples.

In the area of music it is even more absurd. I think we talked about this before. Just about everyone on earth has appropriated ideas about intervals and scales from the ancient Greeks and most musicians use the staff notation that can be traced back to Guido of Arezzo, an Italian monk living around the year 1,000 AD. Music is all about appropriating everything that has been done up to now and then coming up with something new.

But I have a more horrendous case to reveal: just about my whole career has been, not just a case of cultural appropriation, but of actual cultural treason! Yes, I have never had much interest in authentic Canadian music (which largely is based on English, Scottish and Irish folk music) and got my basic grounding in musical techniques and aesthetic values while studying in Spain. I have long been a fan of the music of the great Viennese masters, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and even made a pilgrimage to Bach's grave in the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Lately I have been most influenced by a quartet of Russian (or Soviet!) composers: Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Sofia Gubaidulina. Could anything be more treasonous? There is even a quite significant Asian influence on my composition.

Lock me up and throw away the key, or write a nasty comment at least!