It's some ungodly hour in the morning, I'm jetlagged and in an airport hotel in Frankfurt, but it's Friday, so I guess it's time for the Friday Miscellanea. Don't expect too much! Usually I would have worked something up a couple of days ago, but just too many little errands before my trip.
First up, The Guardian has a tribute to under-rated French composer Camille Saint-Saëns who died one hundred years ago: Saint-Saëns: unfashionable, underrated – and overdue for reappraisal.
Too facile? Too prolific? Too tasteful? Whatever the objections to Camille Saint-Saëns’s music, the French composer is shamefully neglected and overlooked. This year marks the centenary of his death, and is a good moment to plead the case for someone who, while he may not be quite in the Premier League of composers, is certainly top of the Championship and may well be worthy of promotion. Brentford, if not quite Beethoven.
This summer’s Proms are giving him what might be called a modest push, programming his great Organ Symphony, the much-loved Carnival of the Animals, his first cello concerto, his engagingly sunny late oboe sonata (composed in the year of his death) and the Fantaisie in E Flat Major for organ.
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This article over at City Journal is hard to ignore: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 1), In this lengthy article Heather MacDonald attempts an overview of the situation of black classical musicians. She lists the numerous recent complaints, offers a compendium of contrasting views and attempts an objective analysis:
If institutional support and encouragement of black musicians have been unequivocal for decades, why has their percentage in orchestras barely budged? Because over the last 60 years, two of the three main sources for exposing a child to classical music—circumambient culture and music education—have dried up. Violinist Joseph Striplin had a “classic inner-city mother,” he says, but he had the good fortune to come of age in the 1940s and 1950s, when “music was vibrant in the country and at school.” Classical music themes were ubiquitous on television shows and in the movies. Every junior high and high school in Detroit had its own orchestra; students were taken to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Young People’s concerts at the Masonic Temple and the Ford Auditorium. “We heard and we saw; the orchestra was massive to my young eyes,” he says. Striplin attended the prestigious Cass Technical High School and played in its orchestra with students who had had lessons since they were young. “I loved this music and knew I needed to find out how to play like that,” he says.
Since then, music education has been decimated, and classical music has disappeared from the public sphere. From 1962 to 1989, the percentage of high schools with orchestras fell from 67 percent to 17 percent, according to Billboard. Seventy-seven percent of schools polled in a University of Illinois study dropped piano instruction; 40 percent dropped string instruction. If a child’s home is not exposing him to classical music, he is likely not being exposed at all.
This is the kind of article that will inspire a lot of pushback simply because it questions the prevailing narrative. Does it do so successfully?
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The Most Popular Opera Composer of Our Time on Why His Work Resonates:
Jake Heggie: I’m drawn to big human themes. Big, transformative events that we can all connect with in some way. Things that feel very much of our time and yet are timeless. Things that feel—because I was born and raised in this country—very American, and yet are universal. I can’t write a piece about the death penalty. I can’t write a piece about domestic violence. But I can write a piece about people who are experiencing that. That’s the line for me: big transformative events, intimate stories with large forces at work that are beyond our control. I find those very, very inspiring and certainly operatic. Also, when I’m writing—especially because I write a lot for singers—I want things that would make sense to be sung, and where the emotion is big enough to fill an opera house, or to fill a concert hall.
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Here is a review of The World According to Colour: A Cultural History which makes the interesting point that there are far more colors than we actually have words for. The situation is even worse in music. One of the most powerful aspects of music is timbre and we hardly have two words for it: nasal and dull?
Never mind the physics and the biology and the chemistry. Forget all about the rods and cones and the mysterious workings of the cerebral cortex. Colour, says James Fox, is primarily a cultural construct, ‘a pigment of our imaginations that we paint all over the world’. The Tiv people of West Africa get by perfectly happily with just three basic colour terms: black, white and red. Mursi cattle farmers in Ethiopia have eleven colour terms for cows, but they have none for anything else. At the other end of the spectrum, the Optical Society of America lists 2,755 primary colours, while paint manufacturers now offer more than 40,000 dyes and pigments, so many, says Fox, that they have run out of sensible names for them. ‘Dead Salmon’ and ‘Churlish Green’ are two of the more outlandish mentioned in his entertaining new book.
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The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done:
There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.
As I've written before, it's positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn't just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point).
I think this is true. I certainly tend to work in fairly short bursts of activity.
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We obviously need some Saint-Saëns. This is his famous Organ Symphony with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons:
Heather MacDonald is writing with an ideological agenda. She's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a former employee of Jeff Sessions, and a Fox News regular. She wrote a book called The Diversity Delusion, and many of her publications are devoted to the idea that racism is not a real thing. That doesn't make her arguments here automatically wrong, but it's worth considering her clear preconceptions in examining them.
ReplyDeleteDoes Heather MacDonald imagine that there was some golden age when Black people were not oppressed and excluded from classical music? Does she imagine that this time when Detroit's schools had orchestras (the 1940s and 50s) was a better one for racial equality? Does she imagine that classical music's cultural marginalization and its financial woes were caused by their very recent halting efforts to overcome their lopsided whiteness? Does she seriously imagine that the slight increase in Asian performers in orchestras negates the existence of anti-Black racism? Has she ever wondered why music programs got cut in Detroit's schools at the same time that the city's population became majority Black? Does she think that the existence of a few prominent Black performers now overcomes centuries of oppression?
MacDonald writes well and convincingly, so this article seems like a rhetorical slam dunk. But I beg of you, read some less biased and more scholarly sources. MacDonald sneers at Phil Ewell, but she doesn't actually refute (or try to refute) any of his arguments (aside from making clear her dislike of Esperanza Spalding.) She brushes off the idea that Handel's profiting from slavery makes him problematic, but doesn't actually engage the question. She decries racial essentialism when talking about Black people but then uses lazy racial essentialist tropes when talking about Asians and Jews. I haven't had a chance to go through this carefully, but it's a familiar litany of cherry-picked anecdotes and motivated reasoning. Be skeptical.
By the way, it's fine to have political biases when you're writing about society and culture. It's inevitable! In my corner of the academic world, one of the core responsibilities that authors have is to be transparent about their biases, and to be self-critical about them. Heather MacDonald is neither.
ReplyDeleteThere is a semi local string quartet I know with members between 26 and 31 years of age. One is half Asian, one is Anglo Saxon and two are Hispanic. So I would have to agree that there is a specific problem regarding African Americans and I fear they are falling more behind as a social cultural group relatively speaking; although all groups are somewhat better off economically speaking at present. The one area of classical music that they have enjoyed some limited success is as opera singers, so it the instrumentalists where the problem is most evident.
ReplyDeleteHowever African Americans have a strong presence in the popular arts so it is not that they are formally excluded or even discouraged from artistic endeavors. But the popular arts make a few people rich and the rest on very low wages. Classical music or other so-called high arts offers few examples of riches to motivate children but it does provide important social cultural education and sophistication which helps unsuccessful classical musicians moving into something else. Popular arts by definition do not raise anyone socio-culturally since they are of the mass.
Other groups move into fall back careers when their arts ambitions don't succeed but African Americans are less successful in doing this than almost any other social cultural group except possibly for the small American Indian population. They seem to be ignored when they are not exploited by the entire political class left to right.So the prospects for both groups are poor on the face of it.
And I think biases (as distinct from preferences)are something to be removed once identified.
So I've read the Mac Donald two-parter and, meh, it seems overblown in several respects. The start and finish seem too eager to stoke panic as though the woke are out to dismantle the Western tradition as a whole. But I don't see how classical guitarists or anyone with a choral background has any real incentive to see the sky as falling. I will grant that in the era of covid-19 things are not ideal for pushing for more racial representation in an era in which people wonder whether orchestras will survive the covid-19 era but 1) they probably will but 2) we don't have to keep thinking of classical music in terms of living or dying by the survival of the norms established in the long 19th century.
ReplyDelete