About two months ago, I wrote a friend to tell her how lost I felt after Vanderbilt closed on March 11. Nashville had been hit by tornadoes the week before. One of my department colleagues had lost her house to a fire. Our water heater blew a gasket and flooded. My dad was finishing a round of chemo.
Before the virus hit, I was already “upset” that I had lost a lot of research time to onerous committee work that soaked up a ton of mental energy. By the second week of the shutdown, Every. Little. Thing. Felt. Heavy.
In the coming days, I accumulated an embarrassing amount of work debt—deadlines missed, e-mails not answered, and so on. The only things keeping me grounded professionally were this newsletter and the Music Scholarship at a Distance presentations. Teaching was non-negotiable, but even that was hard.
Then something happened. Around the first week of April, I committed to paying off at least one piece of accumulated work debt per day with the hope that the days would eventually overtake the debt. E-mail I didn’t want to open? It got opened and addressed. Deadline I missed? I was working on it until it got done.
And sure enough, in about two weeks, I felt like I had it under control—I wasn’t caught up, but I didn’t feel buried. I’m still not 100% where I want to be with non-urgent debt, but I’m moving in the right direction. As someone who is prone to episodes of depressive anxiety, I teetered on moving in the wrong direction but had good encouragement from family, friends, and colleagues—and also daily reminders that many people in the world are experiencing far worse.
My last post—Part 2 of a series on American musical identity—got me thinking about a wild episode in my book Orchestrating the Nation: a giant feud between a couple of American composers (William Henry Fry and George Frederick Bristow), the New York Philharmonic, and a couple of critics in the year 1853. They were fighting about a piece of music called Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony. Stupid, right?
Actually, no!
This brouhaha had several layers. One of them involved the diversification of the Philharmonic’s repertoire. Clearly orchestras still have major problems in this area.
So I started to think about how the New York Philharmonic launched a new initiative to commission women composers to honor the centennial of the nineteenth amendment, and how initiatives like this wouldn’t be necessary if the Philharmonic had lived up to its founding mandate to expand the repertoire in the first place!
Did you know the Philharmonic had this mandate???
I pitched a story to the New York Times about it, and they went with it!
The article is in this morning’s paper, or you can read it online:
“When the New York Philharmonic Fought Over Santa Claus”
The piece is about 1,000 words, so it barely captures the nuance of this debate. I’ve covered it in more detail in Orchestrating the Nation and in a scholarly article called “How Santa Claus became a Slave Driver.” I requested that the article be taken outside of its paywall for a few weeks so that my newsletter subscribers and social media connections can access it for free. (I’ll send the link in a separate post.)
Next week I’ll write a follow-up that brings in some “never-before-seen” details. These will shed new light on the entire story. I’ve come to believe that this conflict is essential for understanding American classical music today, and I hope you’ll come to agree with me.
In the coming weeks, I’ll also continue my series on American musical identity and start a new series on Dvořák’s New World Symphony, the subject of my next book.
Finally, I’m planning to return to some topics that got sidelined because of the pandemic, especially Prof. Rachel Beckles Willson’s and Gabriela Lena Frank’s work on classical music and climate change.
Stay tuned, folks! I’ve got a lot of juicy stuff on the way!
Music City Spotlight: Colleen Phelps at 91Classical crushing this essay on Beethoven and Glenn Gould.
In the queue: THE SANTA CLAUS DEBATE
Content fueled by Badbeard’s Microroastery (Portland, OR).
If you like what you read here: