Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2)

City Journal ^ | Summer 2021 | Heather Mac Donald

[karpov]

Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting, and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa I Due Figaro showed her influence in some stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.

Vaughn was committed to championing minority musicians—so much so that she endowed a scholarship for them at her alma mater, Brevard College in North Carolina. “In all my years of teaching,” she said at the time, “I often have wished that more minority members were encouraged to pursue a music profession.” Besides the classics, she produced socially conscious contemporary works, giving the first professional staging, for example, at the Fort Worth Opera Festival of a feminist opera about a seventeenth-century nun.

The mob cares nothing for facts, though. On June 17, 2020, Vaughn was teaching a class on opera dramaturgy to high school students via Zoom. An unidentified participant, whose name and image were blacked out (very likely a plant), asked her, out of the blue, how she could justify having produced Franz Lehár’s allegedly racist (in this case, allegedly anti-Asian) operetta Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles) several years earlier. Vaughn cut the questioner off for raising a warmed-over issue irrelevant to the current discussion.

The fuse was lit. A Manhattan School of Music student petition was immediately forthcoming. Vaughn must be fired because she is a “danger to the arts community,” it thundered. The petition resurrected a meme from the time of the Lehár production—that Vaughn had cast a black singer as a butler character, thus proving her racism.

[ClearCase_guy]

They see racism everywhere.

I increasingly believe that the only way to fight this is for more people to be openly and explicitly racist in their every day lives. For real. Just so that these losers can understand what it really looks like.

[cuban leaf]

I’m a big fan of Classical music of all types. Heck, I like Herb Alpert AND The Beatles. And even Strawberry Alarm Clock!

[HighSierra5]

1984 ain’t got nothin on 2021.

[Cecily]

Why are minorities who are not of European descent involving themselves in European classical music and opera? Isn’t that cultural appropriation, and isn’t that a big no-no in Wokeistan?

[Sans-Culotte]

Seeking to make classical music politically acceptable, orchestras and conservatories are resurrecting lesser-known black composers from the past.

I notice this a lot on the Sirius XM Symphony Hall channel. It's mainly the over-rated Florence Price they play. I change the channel as soon as they start with one of her pieces. She's not a terrible composer; just not all that good.

Even though most of the music I listen to is classical, I do not attend concerts. I mainly listen to CDs (of which I have a ton). My wife and I used to attend opera performances regularly but stopped when opera became dominated by modern directors who want to set everything in modern times with little or no relation to the actual opera plots.

I will probably keep buying classical CDs while I can before Mozart and Beethoven are banned for their whiteness. The article makes it clear the just as math is racist, so is classical music.

[Tench_Coxe]

"I increasingly believe that the only way to fight this is for more people to be openly and explicitly racist in their every day lives"

I've long thought this is where things could be headed, and its unfortunate.

Booker T. Washington had the instigators nailed:

“There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. … Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.”

He excoriates the Jesse Jackson, Ak Sharpton, and Obama types, but there is no lack of white counterparts that engage in the same.

[bigfootbob]

It’s on display every day in every city in America. If you’re an evil or hell, not so evil whitey, take a walk in any residential urban area, like Harlem, Oakland and Beacon Hill in Seattle and you will see example after example of racist behavior. Not much racism on college campuses or in the symphony. Time to get out of your comfort zone, babe (subject of the story) and see the real America.

[Mr. K]

Malcolm X was saying the same things.

That is why they had him killed. Also Martin Luther King.

If you listen to old interviews with MX he sounds like Rush Limbaugh. He talks about how the “White liberal” is the biggest enemy of the Black people.

[Bon of Babble]

From the article:

At a Peabody Institute conference in February 2021, the League of American Orchestras’ Simon Woods voiced his dread at seeing the “whiteness” on the stage and in the audience, once concerts resume.

This is one more example of the left trying to erase Classical Western Music (described as "too white") and replace it with something far inferior.

As the article states: "the irrelevant lens of race will drive desperately needed new audiences out of, not into, the concert hall."

It will drive out the older aficionados as well.

[mjp]

When one is a marxist, everything is determined by the development of forces of production. So the forces of production that make rich white capitalists into oppressors also create the dominant oppressive institutions such as, in art, white music and white literature.

[MrBambaLaMamba]

If I were the artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music I would promote and cast morbidly obese, scratchy voiced, tone deaf BIPOC peoples and no talent over the top homosexuals in key roles while relegating true talent to secondary and chorus roles.

If and when critics or performers complained I would simply identify them as racist homophobes and continue with my agenda to bring about bizarro world.

[Rennes Templar]

Here, Wokism is an excuse for more dumbing down of America.

It can be argued that classical music elevates society, not the other way around.

The Wokes can’t or won’t ascend to the inspirational heights of classicism, so by Jove they don’t want others to.

Dumbing down to the lowest common cultural denominator. Just another tool in the liberal movement to third worldism.

[PapaBear3625]

Alternately, to become completely indifferent to racism charges, and to defend anybody charged with racism.

I’m not saying defend racist serial killers, but just focus on the serial killing.

[Stravinsky]

They are going after all areas of western civilization. Erase the past, destroy the present, and make the future a Marxist dystopia. And many people still won’t admit that’s what is happening.

[Varda]

That will do nothing as long as it's the Marxist paradigm in action.
There are no wrong actions only wrong people.

It's why the Marxists can murder 100's of millions of people and call American soldiers "baby murderers".
So being openly racist will only provide these people with a propaganda tool.
The key is to openly defend American ideals which are explicitly anti-racist. Marxists are obvious racists. Why aren't people pointing this out?

[Stravinsky]

I agree. The best defense to absurd accusations of racism designed to divide and destroy is to call it out for what it is.

[ml/nj]

If you want to see real racism in action, check out the Metropolitan Opera's plans for Opening Night.

The opera is: Fire Shut Up in My Bones. I'll let the Met's own website give some details:

Opening Night of the 2021–22 season will be a historic occasion—the Met's first performance of an opera by a Black composer. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Grammy Award–winning jazz musician and composer Terence Blanchard’s adaptation of Charles M. Blow’s moving memoir, which The New York Times praised after its 2019 world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis as “bold and affecting” and “subtly powerful.” Featuring a libretto by filmmaker Kasi Lemmons, the opera tells a poignant and profound story about a young man’s journey to overcome a life of trauma and hardship. James Robinson and Camille A. Brown—two of the creators of the Met’s sensational recent production of Porgy and Bess—co-direct this new staging; Brown, who is also the production’s choreographer, becomes the first Black director to create a mainstage Met production. Baritone Will Liverman, one of opera’s most exciting young artists, stars as Charles, alongside sopranos Angel Blue as Destiny/Loneliness/Greta and Latonia Moore as Billie.

I still don't believe that the Met will reopen this fall. But if it does, it will be interesting to see how many tickets they have to give away so that it doesn't appear that regular opera-goers aren't interested in such cr@p.

ML/NJ

[Dr. Sivana]

Heck, I like Herb Alpert AND The Beatles. And even Strawberry Alarm Clock!

How about Percy Faith?

[DeFault User]

Here, Wokism is an excuse for more dumbing down of America. It can be argued that classical music elevates society, not the other way around.

Growing up in the 50s in a small city in Texas, I was fortunate that my elementary school principal at the beginning of every day played over the loudspeaker selections from Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Mozart, Debussy and Bach (among others). When you hear music of that quality, you develop an appreciation and a love for it. The unawakened School Board arranged for the local symphony orchestra to do a concert annually for all the school children. In preparation for the event we had lessons on the instruments of the orchestra and what to listen for during the performance.

In contrast--several years ago I got a call from a young man selling season tickets for the symphony. They were quite expensive so I asked him what works would be performed during the season. He seemed a bit confused so I asked him, "Do you have a list of the composers?"

Struggling with the words he tried his best, "uhhh Back, Beat-Hoven, uhhh Choppin'". I forget how he butchered Tchaikovsky, but I held back and did not laugh at him. It wasn't his fault that he didn't know the most famous composers of all time.

Anyway, that's my screed against the assault on civilization and the dumbing down of our successors.