The Classical Alternative is Back
The Classical Alternative is Back
Time to Reboot
Happy new year, everyone! I know I’m glad to put 2020 behind me. And yet the hits just keep on coming, don’t they?
I’ve been quiet over the last several months, but with light peeping out at the end of a dark, dark tunnel, it feels like time to renew this space, especially after seeing many new subscribers join over the last several weeks. Welcome! This issue will be a quick synopsis of the past few months along with some teasers for the next few.
As for most academics, the fall semester was one of the most challenging of my career. At Vanderbilt, we taught most of our undergraduate students on campus—an effort aided by massive testing, contact tracing performed by nursing students, and a culture of shared responsibility. Not being able to lead in-person small-group work disrupted much of my typical teaching style, and using remote technologies to serve students in quarantine/isolation (along with those who chose to stay at home) led to a few other “creative decisions” about how to execute lessons. But we made it through, and I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to engage with students face-to-face despite all the challenges, real and potential.
Some of you also know that I lost my father to pancreatic cancer in late September, which turned much of my life upside down for several weeks. I was fortunate enough to be able to say good-bye to him at home in central Arkansas, but, like hundreds of thousands of other American families, we weren’t able to celebrate his life with friends and extended family because of the pandemic.
Now, at the beginning of a new year, I’d like to rejuvenate this newsletter so that it lives up to the too-kind Steve Smith’s endorsement last month:
That description certainly captures what I had in mind during the first half of last year, so now it’s time to deliver again!
Research: My New Book!
As I announced in my last post, I wrote a new book last spring and submitted the final manuscript in July. Here’s the super cool front cover:
Long-time subscribers will be pleased to know that the book expands on the themes I explored in my series of posts about national musical identity and American music. I’ll say much more about it (and related content) in future posts, but I’m happy to tease a bit from the preface:
The typical concert hall experience is designed to remove music from the messiness of politics, as if it occupies a space outside time and lived history. But how can a piece of music so deeply entangled in racial politics ever be grasped with a frame that doesn’t account for the exploitation of Black labor? The erasure of Black history? The relative absence of Black music and musicians in those very concert halls? This book argues that the New World Symphony crystallized the racialization of American classical music that has marked its history for nearly two centuries.
The book is my most accessible published writing yet. It’s divided into eight chapters over about 160 pages and could be read in a single afternoon. (My friends Leah Broad and Pat Warfield have confirmed this for me!)
Most of all, I’m grateful that two powerhouses in the classical music business I’ve long admired, Aaron Dworkin and Anne Midgette, found it worthy of advance praise.
Here’s Dworkin:
A fascinating journey into the historical and racial context surrounding an extraordinary composer and musical work that not only provides a window into the intent behind the composition but also insight into its musical complexities and the resulting reflection of who we were... and who we are, as a nation. I found it an informative and engaging read while conveying a sense of the power and impact that a single composer or a single work of music can have on our society.
And Midgette:
Can you talk about the New World Symphony without talking about race, cultural appropriation, and the challenges of defining “American” classical music? Douglas Shadle's book, equally valuable for newcomers and for those who think they already know all about Dvorak's most popular work, views the genesis and reception of the piece through a new, clear lens that brings into focus some of the challenging questions that it continues to raise and that remain, in this field, too little discussed.
After going over the proofs last month, I’m very happy with the way this book turned out, and I hope you will be too. It can be pre-ordered through the Oxford University Press website or anywhere else books are sold.
BONUS: If you’d like a sneak preview of some of the main ideas, please sign up for a soft launch event on the afternoon of January 18th, generously hosted by the Dvořák American Heritage Association, where I’ll be joining Michael Beckerman and Marcus R. Pyle to discuss the question,
Would Dvořák Have Wanted the Music of African American Composers Programmed Instead of the “New World” Symphony?
Feel free to sign up and share the link to the remote event!
Teaching: Thank You!
As I was going over the metrics for this newsletter a few days ago, I noticed that several thousand people have read my piece called, “What I Wish Everyone Knew About Florence Price.” Since I have a far fewer regular subscribers, this number must mean that students were reading it for classes this fall. I’m thrilled that my thoughts about Price have gained enough momentum to enter teaching and learning spaces.
Since I’m able to go over my ideas in class without having students read my own work, I want to encourage anyone who uses this piece to consider asking students to read it alongside Alisha Lola Jones’s outstanding piece for NPR that explores Price’s relationships with the famous contralto Marian Anderson and/or Samantha Ege’s probing autobiographical piece, “Fantasie Nègre: Realization of a Black Girl’s Fantasy.”
My research on Price has tended to focus more on historiography and knowledge transmission, whereas Jones’s work, while making significant historiographical interventions, offers new interpretations of Price’s biography and modes of musical expression. Ege’s piece takes a different approach still by emphasizing performativity and the power of representation. These complementary pieces (among many others) allow students to encounter multiple points of view on a complex topic.
If you’re teaching a class where you could use long-form peer-reviewed work as well, definitely aim for Samantha Ege’s recent article in Women and Music, “Composing a Symphonist: Florence Price and the Hand of Black Women’s Fellowship.” Building on a theme found in Jones’s work, Ege demonstrates how a network of Black women musicians coalesced in Chicago at around the time Price moved there in 1927. In turn, she offers a new account of the famous 1933 premiere of Price’s First Symphony given by Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (This article is behind a paywall. If your institution doesn’t have access, you can request it through interlibrary loan, and if you aren’t affiliated with an institution, I can help you get a copy.)
To close a small loop here, I should add that Lucy Caplan has just published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of the Society for American Music called “‘Strange What Cosmopolites Music Makes of Us’: Classical Music, the Black Press, and Nora Douglas Holt's Black Feminist Audiotopia.” Holt was a member of Price’s network (as Ege shows), and Caplan is following a separate line of thought about Black women’s intellectual work as writers for the musical press. (Ditto paywall issue.)
And here’s Holt!!—
Price and Holt both make brief appearances in my New World Symphony book, so I was furiously adding citations to the final versions when these articles came out. Ege’s and Caplan’s articles are must-reads.
One more note about the potential for this newsletter to be used for teaching—
My two-part series on William Henry Fry’s “Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony” formed the basis of an extended unit in my program music seminar this past semester, and I’ve finally come up with a way to tie it all together around the theme of classical music and politics with a follow-up third post. Stay tuned for that.
If anyone would like to incorporate the extraordinarily rich and colorful primary source documents in these pieces to design your own lessons, I’ve uploaded all of them to this website for you:
The debate between William Henry Fry and Richard Storrs Willis
The programs (real and fictional) affiliated with “Santa Claus” (please note the content warning at the beginning of this post)
(A classical music bigwig—name redacted to protect the innocent—told me a few weeks ago that she’s “into” Fry’s “Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony” and that it could easily find a place on any winter orchestra program. Can’t say I disagree!!)
In any case, I hope to write more standalone essays suitable for classroom use in this space, so please keep checking your inboxes. And if it’s not too much trouble, I’d love to hear from you if you’ve already incorporated my work into your classes somehow!
A Final Note: Beethoven 2020
Everyone knows that I’m the last person to recommend literature on Beethoven, BUT…
Now that the anniversary year has come and gone, I feel good about saying that a new book by Mark Evan Bonds, Beethoven: Variations on a Life, is the Beethoven biography that needed to be written decades ago.
Rather than following Beethoven’s life chronologically, Bonds takes a kaleidoscopic approach to various themes across Beethoven’s career—as he argues, much like Beethoven himself approached almost everything he encountered.
At 113 pages of prose, it’s a quick and easy read but packed with fresh (and teachable!) insights on virtually every page.
Outside of the Beethoven-specific content, I’m also going to start recommending it as one of the absolute best introductions to Western/European classical music on the market because it addresses fundamental ideas with none of the “greatness” pretense that has permeated writing for the general public for the past 200 years.
Postscript: Merry Christmas, Daddy
As my first Christmas without my father came and went, my brother found this photo of him taken not long after his polio diagnosis in 1949, when he was six years old.
My dad’s early career was in journalism for a couple of Arkansas newspapers, and he wrote for enjoyment throughout his life. His pieces ranged from poetry and fiction to the occasional serious piece about social issues, such as this 2015 op-ed about vaccine denial, which seems especially prescient today. This is one of my favorites—
I sit at the finish line
As the runners come by,
Some collapsing as they cross,
Others raising their arms in joy,
And I yell, “How does it feel?”
The girl on the water skis
Flies across the froth of waves,
Her legs bouncing,
She crosses the boat’s wake
And slips into the air,
And I yell, “How does it feel?”
A couple dances, bodies held close,
Touching faces, holding hands,
Feet slowly moving to the beat
Of an old love song,
And I ask, “How does it feel?”
The first baseman runs,
Makes a leaping catch
Of the bouncing ball
And like a white streak
Leaps to the base,
“Out!”
And the crowd hears me yell,
“How does it feel?”
A shy little girl peeks
From behind her mother’s
Skirt, slowly reaches out
And touches the wheel
Of the old man’s chair,
And asks,
“How does it feel?”
Music City Spotlight: I sound like a broken record with this recommendation, but check out more recent episodes of Colleen Phelps’s “Classically Speaking” podcast, especially those with Jennifer Higdon, “three superconductors,” and Lara Downes. I play to write more about the pedagogical potential of these episodes!
In the queue: Who knows?? But I hope it will be good!
Content fueled by Badbeard’s Microroastery (Portland, OR).
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