Via Marginal Revolution we learn that Art Garfunkle has been keeping a record of what he has been reading since 1968. Looking at the list for recent years I am abashed. And I thought I was a reader!
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From Slipped Disc, this item: CANADA WILL CENSOR USE OF INDIGENOUS MUSIC.
The Canadian Music Centre (CMC) has authorised an indigenous panel to permit or ban use of indigenous material in new compositions.
Composers have contacted us in alarm.
Read the new censorship rule:
The Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) serves at arm’s length from the CMC on matters related to cultural appropriation and misuse of Indigenous songs, story, and culture. The IAC is a group of Indigenous folks from across Canada with a broad range of expertise in music, curation, museology, performance, and repatriation. Its mandate is to provide recommendations to CMC for appropriately redressing instances of misuse in compositions on an ongoing, case-by-case basis.
This work is made possible with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Canadian Heritage to support thinking about these issues in a large-scale policy basis. It is a major priority for the CMC to work with Indigenous leaders “to examine and search for resolutions to the use of Indigenous Song and Story in the works of Canadian Composition past, present and future; [to establish] protocols for composers and performers when composing and performing works influenced or based on Indigenous materials” (Goal #1, current 2019-2024 Strategic Plan). Having been part of the cause of injury, CMC has to be part of the healing and the solution and take leadership in the healing.
I believe that my Four Pieces for Violin and Guitar are now archived at the CMC. One of them uses an Irish folk tune. Which is not a censorable item. YET! The idea that the Canadian government, through some sort of advisory council, has the right or mandate to tell composers what materials they are and are not allowed to use is just one small instance of appalling governmental overreach. The others are much worse, but we notice this one because it affects musical creativity. The question arises does this policy just affect things like what is available in the CMC and what is funded by the Canada Council? But as classical music is more and more funded by government, that would still result in a blanket ban on the use of indigenous music by composers. Reading this, wouldn't any composer worth their salt immediately start writing a piece satirizing policies like this in the most blatant way?
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Ludwigvan has something to say about Music and the Quest for Innovation.
Composers and new music groups make innovation their raison d’être. Their marketing paraphernalia is replete with language suggesting excellence and innovation. The publicity material of the well-known Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring informs us the ensemble is “dedicated to the performance of innovative new music” and “pursues an agenda of directly shaping the music of our future”.
These groups may indeed be performing the most innovative composers. But what is also emerging is a much more heightened gravitational pull of music to money. This has meant that for composers to survive they’ve become much more fiercely competitive.
They woo contemporary performing ensembles, hoping for commissions. And they spend excessive amounts of time filling out funding applications and writing up reports at the conclusion of projects, no doubt explaining they were successful in the innovative stakes.
But it seems that even the composer who does not care what the masses think has exhausted the repertoire of possibility for the new. This is due, in part, to the heightened relationship of music with money and to the intensified competition this sets up among individuals. It seems that nowadays so-called “innovative” composers are searching for ways to out-innovate their competition.
These are just a few quotes from an interesting essay by Sally Macarthur that raises a lot of different questions and issues.
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Wenatchee the Hatchet commemorates guitar composer Angelo Gilardino on his blog by posting a clip devoted to his Sonata Mediterranea:
I am only familiar with a tiny part of this prolific composer's output, a lot of which was written after I retired as a concert artist. But I have played his etudes with pleasure for years. His writing for guitar is always utterly idiomatic, something less common than you would think.
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Over at the Violin Channel, Maxim Vengerov talks about the value of storytelling in teaching music:
Instrumental music is without words, and usually, there is not a specific image or association suggested by the composer. However, this does not mean the music is abstract or remote; it is up to us as performers to discover and communicate the story behind it.
The beauty is that there can be different stories, different interpretations. This is what keeps the music alive. As performers, we try to faithfully follow the composer's wishes, but we also bring our own heart and soul to every performance. We can think of ourselves as a window illuminating the painting of an old master - every window will refract light slightly differently, bringing into relief different subtleties in the work.
The only guitar maestro that used this method that I know of was Oscar Ghiglia--and each time he worked on a particular piece with a different student he would tell a different story. But the purpose was always to activate the student's engagement with the music, to get beyond the notes to the expression.
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Now let's have some envois! First up, just for the heck of it, a young Hélène Grimaud playing the Piano Concerto No. 4 by Beethoven:
Arthur Rubinstein playing the Nocturne Op. 55, No. 1 by Chopin:
We seem to be developing a French theme here (Chopin lived most of his life in Paris) so let's end with harpist Héloïse de Jenlis playing the Two Arabesques by Debussy:
14 comments:
I find it hard to write idiomatically for guitar -- and I play the blooming thing! It is very pleasing to play through Gilardino's sonatas. One day I will properly learn one. They're among the best of their kind. I hope Wenatchee does find the time to write about them.
That nocturne is so beautifully simple!
I find it hard to write idiomatically for guitar, too! I really prefer to write chamber music with guitar.
Yes, now I want to get the scores to the Gilardino sonatas.
As usual, Slipped Disc is hysterically overreacting to something through their ideological predispositions. When you go to the source, you learn that nothing is being censored at all.
https://cmccanada.org/indigenous-advisory-council/
The key passage is here: "In addition to the IAC sharing its findings and recommendations with the Canada Council for the Arts and Department of Canadian Heritage, it will also disseminate this information in public biannual reports." In other words, this commission will tell the CMC which works it thinks are harmful, and the CMC will issue a report, and... that's about it. Maybe the CMC will make funding decisions on that basis? Aren't they allowed to make funding decisions on whatever basis they think is reasonable? Their declining to fund music that makes disrespectful use of Indigenous culture is a pretty long distance from censorship. Unless you think that Canadian composers have some sort of right to get funded no matter what they do or why they do it? That has never been the case.
I can't really speak with any competency on First Nations stuff but among Native American/American Indian tribes here in the U.S. a lot of music has ritual associations or links to spirits that gift songs such that a fair amount of tribal songs are not on offer to be used outside the tribal communities unless they're gifted as such. For people who have no religious inclinations at all that might seem ridiculous but part of respecting Native cultures is factoring in that you can't just go use songs without regard for things like social and ritual use.
Having said all that clearly Dr. Ida Halpern got permission to record piles of traditional PNW tribal songs that the Canadian government now has. I've read some articles over the years about how specialists in aboriginal musicology have pointed out Halpern did everything above board and in respectful ways but the way the Canadian government made use of her work was the bad part.
So I get this inkling there's a ton of Canadian government screwing-over-tribes that may be a big part of the background of the recent announcement.
And it may be the flip side of Canadian arts patronage giving more people opportunities than in the DIY US, maybe?
I DO want to get to blogging about Gilardino's sonatas but IRL 2022 has kinda sucked in long stretches! The scores for his sonatas can be alternately easy to find or impossible to find depending on which ones you're looking for. Had the composer himself not reached out to me with a couple of scores I wouldn't have some of the ones I have. So I REALLY feel I need to blog about his sonata cycle at some point but this year has not turned out to be the year. :( Regular readers may infer why I haven't had the cognitive bandwith I thought I'd have in light of other stuff mentioned at WtH.
Oh yes, Slipped Disc can always be counted on to sensationalize everything and I agree that "censorship" is probably the wrong word. But isn't this a conflict between the right to practice traditional religion and the right to free speech? Canada does not have strong legal protections for free speech as the US does, and the relationship between the First Nations and the Canadian government has always been complex, but once traditional indigenous music has entered the public sphere, it seems to me that it becomes material that anyone can use. Music with ritual associations should probably be kept out of the public sphere.
yep, which is why in the US the tribes do police that stuff. Halpern's precedent was considered unique not just because of how well she did her work but because she noted that the singers shared the songs because they believed that if they didn't record the songs for posterity too few young people (in the mid-20th c) were interested in the songs to preserve the songs in any other way.
Btw, it was through this blog I learned of Halpern's work in ethnomusicology.
I have a giant guitar sonata based on the very public domain melodies from Indian Melodies by Thomas Commuck I finished a few years back. For those unfamiliar with him Commuck was the first Native American to publish a musical work using Western notation and Indian Melodies is a hymnal in the shape note tradition. Because I'm a practicing Christian and my dad was Native American (and also a Christian) I don't think any case could be made that drawing on Commuck's shape note hymnal would be some kind of unwarranted cultural appropriation. On the other hand I have made a point of NOT using Native American songs that have had more traditional uses that are not in some way part of the public realm.
In an era where copyright is extended so far after the death of performers and composers and so much material is available I think the situation may be more fraught now than it was in earlier periods when copyright didn't last more than 24 years. I don't think anyone should hammer William Grant Still for having used Native American melodies in the mid-20th century in some of his chamber music, for instance. Scholars also tend to go easy on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha cantata while tending, I think, to be a bit too unforgiving to Arthur Farwell. Farwell had relationships with the people in the tribes whose music he adapted but the whole Indianist movement fell afoul of reception history. I think Joe Horowitz has oversold Farwell a bit but I do think the Polyphonic Studies are worth hearing and there are, as he's noted, some Native American musicians who believe Farwell acted in good faith and shouldn't be consigned to oblivion in the current cultural context.
Thanks, Wenatchee for these sage comments. You seem well-placed to have good insights into these issues!
I don't have any particular insight into Native American issues in Canada or anywhere else, but I do follow free speech issues. No one's free speech is being abridged here. The only issue at stake is what is going to receive funding from the CMC. People who appropriate Native American music for their compositions might well be upset that they are less likely to get funded now, but they can still write whatever they want. It's like someone complaining they are being "censored" when some particular book publisher doesn't want to offer them a book deal. It makes me sad when this generally excellent and worthwhile blog uncritically echoes Slipped Disc's nonsense.
Ethan, I saw a commenter point out that Canadians can still self-publish
The Canadian Music Centre does not actually fund anyone to my knowledge. They are rather a library of scores by Canadian composers. So I think that one of the results of the work of this Council might well be to discourage the CMC from distributing scores that "misuse" indigenous music. They have branches across Canada so performers can easily access music by Canadian composers.
So, it will be mildly inconvenient to find someone's score if it uses Indigenous music disrespectfully? Why does anyone even read Slipped Disc?
one of my musician friends put it roughly as follows, Lebrecht is catty and biased but he does try to keep track of graft in competitions and among conductors. He even has a history of championing some women composers (Grażyna Bacewicz). I tend to read Slipped Disc in case there are obituaries of musicians or composers I know of.
But he's lurched into what for me seems too much of a neo-con ranter stance over the last thirty years. The Norman Lebrecht I remember from the, ahem, 20th century, didn't seem so keyed up all the time in the same way.
Perhaps an analogy could be made to Gregorian chant, which has no secular origins or context and emerged not as pure music but integral to Catholic liturgy. To anyone who knows that about Gregorian chant, any adaption of it to secular music would carry that liturgical connotation. But to someone from a non-western culture who didn't know any ot that context and came upon a recording of chant and subsequently incorporated it into new music in another culture, would that actually be considered offensive? Not by me at least, but it would make me wonder if the composer was a bit of a dope for invoking sacred sounds in inappropriate media and contexts.
Potentially, these issues can be very complicated. Of course a host of composers in the West have taken melodies from Gregorian chant and used them in a variety of contexts because of their liturgical associations. The Dies Irae has been particularly singled out. I don't know if non-Western composers have done the same, but it wouldn't surprise me. Especially Japanese composers. The question might arise, would the atmosphere of the chant also be adopted or would it simply be a case of using the pitches?
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