Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Alex Ross and Politics

As many of my readers know, I have taken a solemn vow to keep this blog as free of politics as possible. What I mean by that is that I will only write about a political issue if the classical music world is being subjected to an attack from that quarter. This does happen and I see no reason to ignore it.

But let's have a look at some other blogs and see what their policy is. Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker and music blogger, seems to have no compunctions whatsoever. Let's have a look at some of his recent posts:
One mark of the dishonor that has fallen on this country in the wake of Donald Trump's morally repugnant, profoundly un-American actions as President is that the brilliant Syrian-born clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh does not know whether he will be able to return to his Brooklyn home. I wrote about him in 2013, when he appeared in conjunction with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
That seems fair enough in that it talks about the potential consequences of a political decision on a musician. The only thing I would have done differently is give some reasons for thinking that President Trump is "morally repugnant" instead of just asserting it. I don't think it is enough to simply utter a thought that is the received wisdom in your social group--that is mere virtue signaling. To be taken seriously as a thinker, I think you need to think! That means that you should especially evaluate everything that seems to be received or accepted wisdom or truth. Otherwise you are not a thinker, but only a groupthinker.

On the plus side, in an issue of the New Yorker that seems to be almost entirely devoted to articles on the theme "Donald Trump: Threat or Menace?" Ross has an interesting piece on Julius Eastman, a somewhat forgotten minimalist composer and performer.
The major revelation, though, has been the brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman, who was all but forgotten at century’s end. Eastman found a degree of fame in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, mainly as a singer: he performed the uproarious role of George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” in the company of Pierre Boulez, and toured with Meredith Monk. He achieved more limited notoriety for works that defiantly affirmed his identity as an African-American and as a gay man. (One was called “Nigger Faggot.”) As the eighties went on, he slipped from view, his behavior increasingly erratic. When he died, in 1990, at the age of forty-nine, months passed before Gann broke the news, in the Village Voice.

This is a performance of Eastman's "Gay Guerilla" at Boston University in 2013:

2 comments:

Marc in Eugene said...

I stumbled upon an essay at ARTnews in which Mary Jane Leach explains the debacle at the OBEY conference in June-- she is the woman/composer responsible for most/much of the work that's been done to preserve Julius Eastman's legacy-- & was kicked off of the program because she used Eastman's own idiosyncratic titles etc. I remember going on about this and it must have been here, somewhere, because I wasn't scribbling on my own blog at that point; now that I think about it, probably on one of the Friday Miscellanea posts. So far as I can tell I have no appreciation for Eastman's music but it certainly has proved to be the occasion of an useful controversy anent identity politics etc and so forth.

Bryan Townsend said...

Yes, Marc, I'm pretty sure we had a discussion here about that debacle. Thanks for this essay. i'm glad she got a proper forum to tell the story from her point of view. The sad truth is that many of the leaders and administrators of cultural institutions are either marching for identity politics or are, as in this case, simply pusillanimous.