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Hey Doug, First, let me hope that you and your loved ones are unscathed from the tornadoes. Second, let me suggest you would really enjoy meeting the cellist Jon Silpayamanant of Louisville and his blog Mae Mai, which exposes many of the non-Western orchestra traditions to American audiences.

Third, I think one can take this argument too far that "orchestras are a tool of white [and male?] supremacy." While the community I grew up in certainly saw it that way, my family and I as an independent individual certainly did not. And we're black. It's a matter of choice... or perhaps luck that I turned out to be very good at classical music, that I embraced it and made a strong career of it. Clearly, most kids don't have this luck or choice. But rejecting classical music as "the best music in the world" is a bit like rejecting English as "the best language in the world." On the basis it became dominant (lingua franca) over French, Farsi and Cantonese doesn't actually make it "the best," but simply the most practical language to communicate worldwide. We generally don't reject it AS "the language of the oppressors Britain and United States."

I have learned not to use superlatives with respect to classical music, realizing how alienating and arrogant this seems to other musicians. Esp. when I would never want to be without the other musics that also keep me sane; blues, songs, jazz, folk, jujuka, etc.. The industry has tried to teach how classical music can be a "universal tool," but only to those who've already self-selected. We've insulated ourselves from contamination of other ideas, except in small, measurable doses such as my own hybrid compositions. Classical music has and can be employed to serve political causes, but really only stands for the cause of preserving classical music itself. It has been very exclusive and we can feel/be very hurt by that (that tells me we want to be insiders), but the standards by which the industry maintains very high qualities are worth both preserving as well as circumventing with new ensembles, concert series and musicians that can truly serve, welcome and include a broader public.

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