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.
Rick, thanks for this great commentary and for your kind words about the tornado. We're OK. We actually live in Louisville and I was home for spring break when they hit. I know Jon through the internet, incidentally, but not offline. Since I'm in Nashville a lot of the time, we haven't had a chance to connect.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with everything you're saying here, including the point about how black individuals often perceive (and have perceived) classical music differently from one another. When people who don't know much about the topic ask me about the relationship between race and classical music, the first thing I always say is, "Wow, it's complicated!" The biggest barrier I've encountered to deeper understanding is precisely this issue--that individuals typically have a narrow or even stereotyped perception of what it means to be black (or another race), which limits how they can imagine someone's relationship to classical music.
Along those lines, I would only add that the art never exists independently from the institutions that make it, so if the institutions themselves are exclusionary or discriminatory, the experience of the art will have some of that negative residue. If the art is to have a meaningful, positive future, I think it's imperative for *institutions* (through the individuals who govern them and participate in them) to resist these past institutional practices and make the art into something better. That requires deep thinking about how institutions relate to (a) its supporters/audiences, (b) the creative artists who provide the music, and (c) the people who make up the institutions. As my friend Aubrey Bergauer says, "It's about people." The notion that an institution functions within a "transactional reality" seems like the definition of dehumanization, which then leads to reinforcing exclusionary or harmful behaviors.
In any case, thanks again! There's a lot of work to be done to maintain the high level of performance, as you said, in addition to making the institutions more sensitive to the radical humanity of the enterprise.
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.
Rick, thanks for this great commentary and for your kind words about the tornado. We're OK. We actually live in Louisville and I was home for spring break when they hit. I know Jon through the internet, incidentally, but not offline. Since I'm in Nashville a lot of the time, we haven't had a chance to connect.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with everything you're saying here, including the point about how black individuals often perceive (and have perceived) classical music differently from one another. When people who don't know much about the topic ask me about the relationship between race and classical music, the first thing I always say is, "Wow, it's complicated!" The biggest barrier I've encountered to deeper understanding is precisely this issue--that individuals typically have a narrow or even stereotyped perception of what it means to be black (or another race), which limits how they can imagine someone's relationship to classical music.
Along those lines, I would only add that the art never exists independently from the institutions that make it, so if the institutions themselves are exclusionary or discriminatory, the experience of the art will have some of that negative residue. If the art is to have a meaningful, positive future, I think it's imperative for *institutions* (through the individuals who govern them and participate in them) to resist these past institutional practices and make the art into something better. That requires deep thinking about how institutions relate to (a) its supporters/audiences, (b) the creative artists who provide the music, and (c) the people who make up the institutions. As my friend Aubrey Bergauer says, "It's about people." The notion that an institution functions within a "transactional reality" seems like the definition of dehumanization, which then leads to reinforcing exclusionary or harmful behaviors.
In any case, thanks again! There's a lot of work to be done to maintain the high level of performance, as you said, in addition to making the institutions more sensitive to the radical humanity of the enterprise.