I'm starting to think that diversity may not be our strength after all. We tried the E Pluribus Unum thing and DEI turns that on its head. Meanwhile, Finland is once more rated as the world's happiest country. For anyone keeping score, the population is 93% Finns and 6% Swedes, the antithesis of the diversity that allegedly makes us so powerful. Diversity CAN be an asset but not in its current deployment, where it ruins everything it touches, to include classical music with this nonsensical push for "proportional" representation.
Are we going to do that with jazz, too, or country music, blues, rock, and other genres where one demographic has a clear majority? And why would we want to? Diversity is the variety of musical choices that are available. I don't really care about the violinist's race or the guitar player's gender or the singer's sexual orientation. I doubt anyone cares about those things. They care about whether the person is good at his/her craft or not, very much like sports, which for some reason escapes all talk of proportional representation. The worst part is that reconfiguring the numbers typically involves a watering down of standards, which is a horrible message to send to minorities and it does them no favors among peers who hardly see them as equals.
Let people pursue their own interests. It is a concept so simple that no wonder it eludes the equity police. If a black musician likes classical and a white one likes jazz, good for both of them but it needs to be a decision each makes as an individual, not something forced on the rest of us by some outside head-counting group. Some people might recall that our country had a dalliance in which a lot of things were racialized. How'd that work out, and why would anyone want to do that again?
Two words about the African-American tradition and rhythms you can bop your head to: free jazz. Which by the way is still a vital and exciting genre that has been taken up by creative people all over the world.
There's quite a bit of repitition in classical music as well, especially in the earlier eras (take any Telemann Sonata), in part because the composition wasn't being recorded and many of the pieces were disposable.
What makes a canon of this kind - and was unexplored here - is the aspects of withstanding the test of time. Modern compositions - experimental and avant garde, all - are being tested on the audience. It's not surprising that audiences don't like them as much - in the orchestral symphonic space, we have largely distilled 350 years of compositions down to a few hundred pieces that get almost all of the play. Even within that long period, there is a heavy emphasis on the 19th century which corresponds to the Romantic period and also the industrial revolution - when it became possible for music to be written and performed on large scale. But of the thousands and thousands of 19th century compositions, only some many dozens are played with any regularity - time has filtered out the dross.
Modern compositions haven't had that filter and modern compositions also have considerable commercial competition with pop music. Orchestral compositions aren't the route to riches if you are a talented musician, so it isn't clear that modern composers of orchetral works are the best on offer.
What is irritating, of course, is that there is a smarmy smugness by the orchestral administration to pretend that rather than conducting (ahem) an experiment on the audience, that instead they are educating the benighted rubes who are clinging to Brahms and Mahler out of some character defect. No, it's that those audiences have been engaging with the orchestral repetoire, usually for decades and have come to the not unreasonable conclusion that Mahler really is better than Korngold and Weber, and that Mozart really was better than Salieri and that quality is reflected in the frequency of relative performance.
This is not to say that some of the more fringe things shouldn't be performed - Weber's clarinet concerto or Korngold's trumpet concerto are fine works worth hearing every five years or so. But compared to Titan or the Beethoven's Ninth or Mozart's 40/41st or any of his operas, well. But it is to say that most of the music written in any era is going to be dross. That isn't less true of modern compositions, it's probably moreso, because of competition (e.g. why the USNMT in soccer has such a poor history and the USNWT doesn't - male athletes have many more lucrative options than soccer in the US, options that don't exist so much in other countries).
Sometimes it's easier to think about the difference by changing the framing - think in terms of sports. It's not that Rick Rhoden didn't make some solid plays and get some good outs, but in the highlight reels of baseball in the last 25 years of the 20th century, he's going to be overlooked in favor of Jack Morris, the Atlanta Braves pitching staff of the 1990s, Andy Pettitte, the Big Unit and others who just had more stirling output.
The point I think John is making - that a key factor of human experience, indeed the telos of the humanities is a love of excellence. We love watching great sports performances in part for the surprises, but we love highlight reels because they show people performing at levels that are truly extraordinary. John is looking at it from an Aristotelean perspective - excellent at what it is trying to be - and classical music really is that - and because of it's excellence, it requires hard work to understand it, like the difference between pop science and science. But the point is, audiences and the canon have been selected BECAUSE they have proven to be remarkable and excellent. So much of what is avant garde is just trying to be different (because in almost all cases, it cannot be better. Except in the rare cases when it is, and then there can really be a shift).
So, classical music - if it is to remain excellent - will remain quite exclusive and exclusionary. So what? What we do see today tho, I think is the typical Communist "entryism". Start by reserving one piece for some member of a "marginalized" identity group - modern, woman, non-European - and colonize the entire thing. For awhile, audiences will still attend to get to the main act. But as we have seen in other areas of art - movies for example - that can be carried only so far because there really is a limited amount of time to cover the excellent stuff.
Excellent point, underscored by the importance of early childhood learning as well as socialization and peer group cooperation. The Nazis understood this and formed the Nazi youth. Also, the acquisition of a foreign language is very easy if started early in childhood but becomes more difficult after about the age of eight or nine. This may be the same reason that early exposure to classical music will prime our brain and ears and make them more sensitive to musical themes, skills that make hearing more complex music later in life much easier. On a personal note: I began piano lessons at the age of 10 and played at least one hour a day for seventy more years. During this period I noted that I was able to play more difficult works later in life than I was when I was
still taking lessons and could not do difficult works such as Bach and Brahms. I had probably
absorbed over decades of my life what I learned earlier but was not physically able to play.
If they do lower the standards in order to be more inclusive, you might want to install metal detectors and inform the season ticket holders not to wear jewelry or their good watches.
It bothers no one that Blacks are overrepresented as NBA players. No one suggests there is a problem that requires changing the rules of the gwme. We just enjoy watching basketball played at the highest level. Why can't people who like classical music likewise enjoy hearing it played at its highest level regardless of which races are under or overrepresented among the players?
I find the tall ones to be most inequitable. Perhaps we could shorten their legs to make the game more equable. It's only fair, and would open the game up to many more people that historically have never had this opportunity. With the price of fentynal at historical lows, and the availability of machetes this could really help the game. Instead of the NBA draft being televised, we could have the "Night of Equality," on pay per view, where the new players will be measured and their excess height privileges will be removed. Of course some will complain about losing their privileges, right and left, but as the old saying goes, if you want to make an omelet, you'll have to break a few eggs. In this case legs. This is the only way to make the game equatible. I have this all figured out, except for the screaming.
No no no. You have equity all wrong. It is not about making the competition equal; is about making the outcome equal! So instead we need to have every game everywhere all at once end in a tie (or maybe we should call that a win) 60 to 60. The refs and players will be given strict instructions on how to make this happen. Side games employing competition will be severely penalized.
Excellent observation. I see now we must look at this holistically. If stubbs keeps hitting those 3 pointers, it's going to cost him an eye.
But to keep our carbon footprint down, we will have to dispense with the traditional hot poker and utilize a pointed stick. Size and angle to be determined by a diverse committee.
In the future we might find it necessary to lower the hoop as well. This dimension could be determined by a littler of Leftwaffe harpies, or the panelists from that daytime program, The View.
Again no need to lower the hoop; all scores will be the same. Equity of outcomes. Already well established in public schools and colleges. We’re all winners and we’re all exactly equal in outcomes! Hoorah
Well, you have come up a solution to the screaming problem, but I assume that DEI advocates have no problem with the gross underrepresentation of Whites and Asians on NBA basketball teams. Is your understanding that they are seeing equal outcomes across the board for Whites and Asians too? LeBron would have a problem with that, I am pretty sure.
Joking aside; Equity is truly about equal outcomes as measured in USD. That is, all US dollars are to be distributed equally to every man, woman, and child so that every person is equal in wealth. And that redistribution will reoccur every so often (eg monthly probably) so that the population doesn’t drift in to non-equity. It is explicitly not about equality or equal opportunity; it is about sustained equal outcomes. Ongoing redistribution of wealth. I’m going to laugh when the Left elite really have to go poor to be equal. What a fuckin shock they are in for. Lol.
Check out Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story "Harrison Bergeron" which explored the same theme. In that dystopia, mandatory leg weights were used as a way to equalize for disparate running abilities. That should work for basketball too and thereby solve the screaming problem.
"It bothers no one that Blacks are overrepresented as NBA players."
Oh I'm sure it bothers a few people out there =)
But the difference here is simple: The folks who are bothered by Black overrepresentation in the NBA don't have the power to do anything about it. But the arts & entertainment world is flat-out different. Politically, they (mostly) lean left. So, any groundswell of complaints vis-à-vis social justice are likely to get a fair hearing at some point--it's a sympathetic audience.
Ultimately this is the source of a lot of traditionalist conservative frustration: American pop culture is largely shaped by people who are at least left-of-center.
We’re going to overcome this through equity of outcomes in which each team will always score the same number of points and still call it a win. Equity of outcomes is really quite simple. Anyone wanting to make a poor person’s wealth equal to their own (ie equity) merely has to give that a person their money until the numbers match. But really those rich that want equity are hypocrites because they won’t share half their wealth with the poor. They are Socialists and Communists that want Other People’s (like me who already has paid millions in taxes) money to be taken.
This is all rather strange. The same arguments about how classical music was being dumbed down so it would become more popular could be heard forever, consider the NY Philharmonic's Young People's Concert series, particularly the ones on TV in the 1950s. Consider West Side Story, the music of Gershwin, Copeland, and yes, Anton Dvorzak. Indeed, consider Giuseppe Verdi who was also a ferocious popularizer.
As a beneficiary of the Young People's Concert series who got to hear a bunch of music from Star Wars and walked out with a cassette of Holst's "The Planets," that popularization worked pretty well for me!
So I'm going to push back a bit on John for noting [paraphrasing here] "that some feel black people don't feel welcome at the symphony hall, and it feels good to say that." I worked for a symphony orchestra for a few years, and I can say with certainty over the last three years, they (as in many of the black artists, patrons, etc.) DO NOT feel welcome. After the George Floyd thing happened, a lot of orchestras scrambled to virtue signal their support of black people. So much to the point that many of the black artists, staff members and patrons I interacted with felt deeply uncomfortable. It, unfortunately, pushed a lot of people away from the concert hall rather than drawing them in.
And about representation of black artists within classical music, there are some things that can be done, but as Glenn and John say, it can't be at the cost of the artistic excellence demanded of its artists. I personally would love to see poor communities (not necessarily black or brown ones) have better access to a classical music education because I think it gives them the tools they need to pull themselves out of poverty. As you can imagine, people bristle at that concept.
Scott Joplin was a huge advocate for music education and spent much of his time mentoring and teaching younger musicians. Many of his musical ideals came together in an opera called "Treemonisha," which I think would have a hard time getting staged today. Despite the music being by a black composer, it has heavy themes about what Joplin felt the black community *should* do in order to progress. The music is lovely, and it has great mystical elements, but unfortunately in this political climate, it would probably not get staged.
If I understand you correctly, blacks felt more welcome before the effort to make them feel more welcome (because they saw it as unauthentic and condescending virtue signaling from whites). I appreciate that and it must suck to have people judge you based on the color of your skin; kinda like casting whites as white privileged or oppressor.
My thoughts on Woke classical music. Saw Holst’s The Planets today with the wife. Full house. Show started with two women composers I had never heard of, and I forget their names. Openings was ok, Planets was dope.
Am I a philistine for not knowing Caroline Shaw, and Missy Mazzoli? Probably very respected and I’m just being a jerk.
Actually, I'm a HUGE Caroline Shaw fan, but to be fair, starting off the show with both of them seems heavy-handed to me. Missy Mazzoli is another who is a major darling of the classical music world. Not my favorite, but she's really good.
Because — and I can't believe I'm clearing my throat here — their styles are SO erudite and SO intellectual, that the first half would be hard for most audiences to sit through. It's NOT because they are women.
Ok...back at the symphony...just watched Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha followed by Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. You expect rhythm from Hiawatha because of the meter of Longfellow’s poem, but Taylor gives us melody, peak classical sensibility as opposed to the rhythms of Jazz. Then the rhythm comes in at Gershwin. Nature vs. the city and all that. This is doing woke right. The audience for this is mostly white.
That’s a better way of putting it. I would have liked to have been introduced to those composers in a way that sparked appreciation. Instead they were tokenized and held up alongside the man I was really there to see.
Ok...they did a better job than that. The Caroline Shaw piece they used was The Observatory. The Mazoli piece was the violin concerto Procession. We start with a telescope looking at the planets, proceed to an avant garde ascendance into the heavens, and then Planets just speaks for itself.
My wife and I had fun trying to pick which scifi/fantasy movies had ripped off Planets.
Also remember that the Mahler symphonies that have a chorus/"Das Knaben Wunderhorn" can reach listeners emotionally without their knowing much of anything technical about classical music even if I suppose you cannot hum them.
"Carmina Burana" and "Bolero" don't owe their immense popularity to rhythm!?
The criticism of the whole classical music enterprise from 20 years ago (Christopher Small, Susan McClary) focused not on melody/harmony/symphonic form vs. rhythm but in the narratives that were told implicitly or explicitly by post-Beethoven classical music and the deliberately aristocratic social environments of going to a concert and playing in an orchestra (the immense skill of an instrumentalist who does not have a lot of concerto music to play very rarely gets any recognition for example). These and lack of music education are problems which will hinder classical music getting any kind of large audience of people under 50. Getting a specifically Black audience could simply involve programming the kind of thing that the already existing Black performers who love this art form (some of whom have said on the record that they would like to not have to fall back on "Porgy and Bess" to make a living) would like to do. Giving a hearing to Black composers who are not Florence Price has indeed not been exhausted and the orchestra might simply need to learn more about how to reach Black consumers in order for them to come to the performances.
I personally don't give a damn about European classical music and self-loathing. My priority is that Blacks become more financially literate (capable of hiring a Mozart). Or building a company which hires and manages intelligent people which improves the growth of the company. Did Bob Johnson, who sold BET to a Jewish family for billions of dollars, care about spending more of his time on mentally masturbating on getting more blacks into classical music. Lol!!!!
John and Glenn, I always enjoy your conversations, they do stimulate the brain waves as you come to these discussions with great nuance and perspective.
But at what point are you willing to discuss the source of the racial movements as they are today and how this is a device tailored to keep society segmented?
Often it feels you two approach these subjects as if they are organic growths out of society in general, but in truth they are carefully crafted and constructed social puzzles to keep the 95% chewing on each other's ears.
There is another level there if you want to peel off some layers....
CRT is a misunderstood term that is now being used to block Black students from learning their history. Books about Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, Roberto Clemente are banned. Black parents are paying taxes to fund schools but their children are forced to listen to a history based on the Lost Cause. This dismissal of Black history is coming from social engineers. Most of this social engineering is coming from people who label themselves Conservative.
Actually most conservatives are offended by the CRT rhetoric about White privilege and Whites as oppressors and really aren’t that interested in race politics until they are accused and harassed as being racists and guilty of either things all cultures did at some time or place in the history of man. Conservatives are also tired of having their money go to failed schools with over paid teachers that have failed multiple generations of Blacks. To cities like Philly where we average 10 murders a week and over 2000 black on black shootings a year. CRT is Marxist and Equity is about redistribution of dollars until every person has the same number of dollars.
Conservatives like to bend terms to fit their delusions. Black history is being banned in public schools supported by the tax dollars of Black parents. Hurt feelings are used to ban teaching about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Black students spent decades in the classroom learning the myth of the Lost Cause. The main message was that Blacks were enslaved and had to wait for the white man to rescue them. The so-called education emasculated the men. Then there is surprise when they look for help from without.
The were no lessons about the battles fought against slavery on the continent of Africa. The history of shipboard rebellions were hidden. The history of rebellions by enslaved Black people against the slave holders was kept secret. All of this was done to create a docile population
Now that Blacks demand a true telling of history, it is now magically CRT and Communist. This is the same vile charge leveled against Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Those who argued against Civil Rights in the past are no different than those who whine “Woke, Woke, Woke, Woke, Woke. today
There is a huge difference between wanting equality and wanting equity. You didn’t deny that equity is about equal outcomes. Btw Whites pay taxes to educate black kids too (and I am following your form of capitalizing one race over another and not treating them as equaling deserving of capitalization).
THANK YOU GLENN AND JOHN FOR THE SHOUT OUT! The experience of talking with you and speaking truth inspired me to start my Substack, The Cornfield. And...as a classically trained actor I have always advocated for learning from the classics as a foundation. Certainly every kind of dancer benefits from ballet training; and musicians who've mastered classical techniques can play anything. See: Wynton Marsalis and countless others...how about Misty Copeland? I doubt she feels that the ballet form she has perfected needs watering down for POC.
Inclusion really means exclusion of unapproved ideas. Equity is marxism rebranded for the 21st century. Diversity means minority mascots.
Could you name the Black classical artists you label mascots?
Seems very dishonest of you to claim that that's what I'm referring to.
Who then are the minority mascots?
I'm starting to think that diversity may not be our strength after all. We tried the E Pluribus Unum thing and DEI turns that on its head. Meanwhile, Finland is once more rated as the world's happiest country. For anyone keeping score, the population is 93% Finns and 6% Swedes, the antithesis of the diversity that allegedly makes us so powerful. Diversity CAN be an asset but not in its current deployment, where it ruins everything it touches, to include classical music with this nonsensical push for "proportional" representation.
Are we going to do that with jazz, too, or country music, blues, rock, and other genres where one demographic has a clear majority? And why would we want to? Diversity is the variety of musical choices that are available. I don't really care about the violinist's race or the guitar player's gender or the singer's sexual orientation. I doubt anyone cares about those things. They care about whether the person is good at his/her craft or not, very much like sports, which for some reason escapes all talk of proportional representation. The worst part is that reconfiguring the numbers typically involves a watering down of standards, which is a horrible message to send to minorities and it does them no favors among peers who hardly see them as equals.
Let people pursue their own interests. It is a concept so simple that no wonder it eludes the equity police. If a black musician likes classical and a white one likes jazz, good for both of them but it needs to be a decision each makes as an individual, not something forced on the rest of us by some outside head-counting group. Some people might recall that our country had a dalliance in which a lot of things were racialized. How'd that work out, and why would anyone want to do that again?
Two words about the African-American tradition and rhythms you can bop your head to: free jazz. Which by the way is still a vital and exciting genre that has been taken up by creative people all over the world.
There's quite a bit of repitition in classical music as well, especially in the earlier eras (take any Telemann Sonata), in part because the composition wasn't being recorded and many of the pieces were disposable.
What makes a canon of this kind - and was unexplored here - is the aspects of withstanding the test of time. Modern compositions - experimental and avant garde, all - are being tested on the audience. It's not surprising that audiences don't like them as much - in the orchestral symphonic space, we have largely distilled 350 years of compositions down to a few hundred pieces that get almost all of the play. Even within that long period, there is a heavy emphasis on the 19th century which corresponds to the Romantic period and also the industrial revolution - when it became possible for music to be written and performed on large scale. But of the thousands and thousands of 19th century compositions, only some many dozens are played with any regularity - time has filtered out the dross.
Modern compositions haven't had that filter and modern compositions also have considerable commercial competition with pop music. Orchestral compositions aren't the route to riches if you are a talented musician, so it isn't clear that modern composers of orchetral works are the best on offer.
What is irritating, of course, is that there is a smarmy smugness by the orchestral administration to pretend that rather than conducting (ahem) an experiment on the audience, that instead they are educating the benighted rubes who are clinging to Brahms and Mahler out of some character defect. No, it's that those audiences have been engaging with the orchestral repetoire, usually for decades and have come to the not unreasonable conclusion that Mahler really is better than Korngold and Weber, and that Mozart really was better than Salieri and that quality is reflected in the frequency of relative performance.
This is not to say that some of the more fringe things shouldn't be performed - Weber's clarinet concerto or Korngold's trumpet concerto are fine works worth hearing every five years or so. But compared to Titan or the Beethoven's Ninth or Mozart's 40/41st or any of his operas, well. But it is to say that most of the music written in any era is going to be dross. That isn't less true of modern compositions, it's probably moreso, because of competition (e.g. why the USNMT in soccer has such a poor history and the USNWT doesn't - male athletes have many more lucrative options than soccer in the US, options that don't exist so much in other countries).
Sometimes it's easier to think about the difference by changing the framing - think in terms of sports. It's not that Rick Rhoden didn't make some solid plays and get some good outs, but in the highlight reels of baseball in the last 25 years of the 20th century, he's going to be overlooked in favor of Jack Morris, the Atlanta Braves pitching staff of the 1990s, Andy Pettitte, the Big Unit and others who just had more stirling output.
The point I think John is making - that a key factor of human experience, indeed the telos of the humanities is a love of excellence. We love watching great sports performances in part for the surprises, but we love highlight reels because they show people performing at levels that are truly extraordinary. John is looking at it from an Aristotelean perspective - excellent at what it is trying to be - and classical music really is that - and because of it's excellence, it requires hard work to understand it, like the difference between pop science and science. But the point is, audiences and the canon have been selected BECAUSE they have proven to be remarkable and excellent. So much of what is avant garde is just trying to be different (because in almost all cases, it cannot be better. Except in the rare cases when it is, and then there can really be a shift).
So, classical music - if it is to remain excellent - will remain quite exclusive and exclusionary. So what? What we do see today tho, I think is the typical Communist "entryism". Start by reserving one piece for some member of a "marginalized" identity group - modern, woman, non-European - and colonize the entire thing. For awhile, audiences will still attend to get to the main act. But as we have seen in other areas of art - movies for example - that can be carried only so far because there really is a limited amount of time to cover the excellent stuff.
Excellent point, underscored by the importance of early childhood learning as well as socialization and peer group cooperation. The Nazis understood this and formed the Nazi youth. Also, the acquisition of a foreign language is very easy if started early in childhood but becomes more difficult after about the age of eight or nine. This may be the same reason that early exposure to classical music will prime our brain and ears and make them more sensitive to musical themes, skills that make hearing more complex music later in life much easier. On a personal note: I began piano lessons at the age of 10 and played at least one hour a day for seventy more years. During this period I noted that I was able to play more difficult works later in life than I was when I was
still taking lessons and could not do difficult works such as Bach and Brahms. I had probably
absorbed over decades of my life what I learned earlier but was not physically able to play.
If they do lower the standards in order to be more inclusive, you might want to install metal detectors and inform the season ticket holders not to wear jewelry or their good watches.
That’s rude and doesn’t help the conversation.
It bothers no one that Blacks are overrepresented as NBA players. No one suggests there is a problem that requires changing the rules of the gwme. We just enjoy watching basketball played at the highest level. Why can't people who like classical music likewise enjoy hearing it played at its highest level regardless of which races are under or overrepresented among the players?
I find the tall ones to be most inequitable. Perhaps we could shorten their legs to make the game more equable. It's only fair, and would open the game up to many more people that historically have never had this opportunity. With the price of fentynal at historical lows, and the availability of machetes this could really help the game. Instead of the NBA draft being televised, we could have the "Night of Equality," on pay per view, where the new players will be measured and their excess height privileges will be removed. Of course some will complain about losing their privileges, right and left, but as the old saying goes, if you want to make an omelet, you'll have to break a few eggs. In this case legs. This is the only way to make the game equatible. I have this all figured out, except for the screaming.
No no no. You have equity all wrong. It is not about making the competition equal; is about making the outcome equal! So instead we need to have every game everywhere all at once end in a tie (or maybe we should call that a win) 60 to 60. The refs and players will be given strict instructions on how to make this happen. Side games employing competition will be severely penalized.
Excellent observation. I see now we must look at this holistically. If stubbs keeps hitting those 3 pointers, it's going to cost him an eye.
But to keep our carbon footprint down, we will have to dispense with the traditional hot poker and utilize a pointed stick. Size and angle to be determined by a diverse committee.
In the future we might find it necessary to lower the hoop as well. This dimension could be determined by a littler of Leftwaffe harpies, or the panelists from that daytime program, The View.
Again no need to lower the hoop; all scores will be the same. Equity of outcomes. Already well established in public schools and colleges. We’re all winners and we’re all exactly equal in outcomes! Hoorah
Well, you have come up a solution to the screaming problem, but I assume that DEI advocates have no problem with the gross underrepresentation of Whites and Asians on NBA basketball teams. Is your understanding that they are seeing equal outcomes across the board for Whites and Asians too? LeBron would have a problem with that, I am pretty sure.
Joking aside; Equity is truly about equal outcomes as measured in USD. That is, all US dollars are to be distributed equally to every man, woman, and child so that every person is equal in wealth. And that redistribution will reoccur every so often (eg monthly probably) so that the population doesn’t drift in to non-equity. It is explicitly not about equality or equal opportunity; it is about sustained equal outcomes. Ongoing redistribution of wealth. I’m going to laugh when the Left elite really have to go poor to be equal. What a fuckin shock they are in for. Lol.
Check out Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story "Harrison Bergeron" which explored the same theme. In that dystopia, mandatory leg weights were used as a way to equalize for disparate running abilities. That should work for basketball too and thereby solve the screaming problem.
Excellent idea.
"It bothers no one that Blacks are overrepresented as NBA players."
Oh I'm sure it bothers a few people out there =)
But the difference here is simple: The folks who are bothered by Black overrepresentation in the NBA don't have the power to do anything about it. But the arts & entertainment world is flat-out different. Politically, they (mostly) lean left. So, any groundswell of complaints vis-à-vis social justice are likely to get a fair hearing at some point--it's a sympathetic audience.
Ultimately this is the source of a lot of traditionalist conservative frustration: American pop culture is largely shaped by people who are at least left-of-center.
We’re going to overcome this through equity of outcomes in which each team will always score the same number of points and still call it a win. Equity of outcomes is really quite simple. Anyone wanting to make a poor person’s wealth equal to their own (ie equity) merely has to give that a person their money until the numbers match. But really those rich that want equity are hypocrites because they won’t share half their wealth with the poor. They are Socialists and Communists that want Other People’s (like me who already has paid millions in taxes) money to be taken.
This is all rather strange. The same arguments about how classical music was being dumbed down so it would become more popular could be heard forever, consider the NY Philharmonic's Young People's Concert series, particularly the ones on TV in the 1950s. Consider West Side Story, the music of Gershwin, Copeland, and yes, Anton Dvorzak. Indeed, consider Giuseppe Verdi who was also a ferocious popularizer.
As a beneficiary of the Young People's Concert series who got to hear a bunch of music from Star Wars and walked out with a cassette of Holst's "The Planets," that popularization worked pretty well for me!
I won't even get into Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and Elmer Fudd's Kill Da Wabbit. Too easy.
Interesting points.
John likes to talk about the progressive left as a religion. Yet ironically, he sounds a little doctrinaire on this topic.
So I'm going to push back a bit on John for noting [paraphrasing here] "that some feel black people don't feel welcome at the symphony hall, and it feels good to say that." I worked for a symphony orchestra for a few years, and I can say with certainty over the last three years, they (as in many of the black artists, patrons, etc.) DO NOT feel welcome. After the George Floyd thing happened, a lot of orchestras scrambled to virtue signal their support of black people. So much to the point that many of the black artists, staff members and patrons I interacted with felt deeply uncomfortable. It, unfortunately, pushed a lot of people away from the concert hall rather than drawing them in.
And about representation of black artists within classical music, there are some things that can be done, but as Glenn and John say, it can't be at the cost of the artistic excellence demanded of its artists. I personally would love to see poor communities (not necessarily black or brown ones) have better access to a classical music education because I think it gives them the tools they need to pull themselves out of poverty. As you can imagine, people bristle at that concept.
Scott Joplin was a huge advocate for music education and spent much of his time mentoring and teaching younger musicians. Many of his musical ideals came together in an opera called "Treemonisha," which I think would have a hard time getting staged today. Despite the music being by a black composer, it has heavy themes about what Joplin felt the black community *should* do in order to progress. The music is lovely, and it has great mystical elements, but unfortunately in this political climate, it would probably not get staged.
If I understand you correctly, blacks felt more welcome before the effort to make them feel more welcome (because they saw it as unauthentic and condescending virtue signaling from whites). I appreciate that and it must suck to have people judge you based on the color of your skin; kinda like casting whites as white privileged or oppressor.
Yeah, there were a couple of black artists who felt singled out and asked to be left alone. It makes for a negative workplace.
My thoughts on Woke classical music. Saw Holst’s The Planets today with the wife. Full house. Show started with two women composers I had never heard of, and I forget their names. Openings was ok, Planets was dope.
Am I a philistine for not knowing Caroline Shaw, and Missy Mazzoli? Probably very respected and I’m just being a jerk.
Actually, I'm a HUGE Caroline Shaw fan, but to be fair, starting off the show with both of them seems heavy-handed to me. Missy Mazzoli is another who is a major darling of the classical music world. Not my favorite, but she's really good.
Because — and I can't believe I'm clearing my throat here — their styles are SO erudite and SO intellectual, that the first half would be hard for most audiences to sit through. It's NOT because they are women.
Ok...back at the symphony...just watched Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha followed by Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. You expect rhythm from Hiawatha because of the meter of Longfellow’s poem, but Taylor gives us melody, peak classical sensibility as opposed to the rhythms of Jazz. Then the rhythm comes in at Gershwin. Nature vs. the city and all that. This is doing woke right. The audience for this is mostly white.
Ooooh! Hiawatha is great. Samuel Coleridge Taylor is a wildly underrated composer.
That’s a better way of putting it. I would have liked to have been introduced to those composers in a way that sparked appreciation. Instead they were tokenized and held up alongside the man I was really there to see.
Ok...they did a better job than that. The Caroline Shaw piece they used was The Observatory. The Mazoli piece was the violin concerto Procession. We start with a telescope looking at the planets, proceed to an avant garde ascendance into the heavens, and then Planets just speaks for itself.
My wife and I had fun trying to pick which scifi/fantasy movies had ripped off Planets.
Also remember that the Mahler symphonies that have a chorus/"Das Knaben Wunderhorn" can reach listeners emotionally without their knowing much of anything technical about classical music even if I suppose you cannot hum them.
I remember Glenn Loury mentioning his wife's love for jazz.
"Carmina Burana" and "Bolero" don't owe their immense popularity to rhythm!?
The criticism of the whole classical music enterprise from 20 years ago (Christopher Small, Susan McClary) focused not on melody/harmony/symphonic form vs. rhythm but in the narratives that were told implicitly or explicitly by post-Beethoven classical music and the deliberately aristocratic social environments of going to a concert and playing in an orchestra (the immense skill of an instrumentalist who does not have a lot of concerto music to play very rarely gets any recognition for example). These and lack of music education are problems which will hinder classical music getting any kind of large audience of people under 50. Getting a specifically Black audience could simply involve programming the kind of thing that the already existing Black performers who love this art form (some of whom have said on the record that they would like to not have to fall back on "Porgy and Bess" to make a living) would like to do. Giving a hearing to Black composers who are not Florence Price has indeed not been exhausted and the orchestra might simply need to learn more about how to reach Black consumers in order for them to come to the performances.
I personally don't give a damn about European classical music and self-loathing. My priority is that Blacks become more financially literate (capable of hiring a Mozart). Or building a company which hires and manages intelligent people which improves the growth of the company. Did Bob Johnson, who sold BET to a Jewish family for billions of dollars, care about spending more of his time on mentally masturbating on getting more blacks into classical music. Lol!!!!
John and Glenn, I always enjoy your conversations, they do stimulate the brain waves as you come to these discussions with great nuance and perspective.
But at what point are you willing to discuss the source of the racial movements as they are today and how this is a device tailored to keep society segmented?
Often it feels you two approach these subjects as if they are organic growths out of society in general, but in truth they are carefully crafted and constructed social puzzles to keep the 95% chewing on each other's ears.
There is another level there if you want to peel off some layers....
"they are carefully crafted and constructed social puzzles to keep the 95% chewing on each other's ears"
By whom? And to what end?
Where did CRT come from? Where did this whole trans movement come from? Where did feminism as we know it today come from?
By whom? Social engineers. To what end? To engineer society.
CRT is a misunderstood term that is now being used to block Black students from learning their history. Books about Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, Roberto Clemente are banned. Black parents are paying taxes to fund schools but their children are forced to listen to a history based on the Lost Cause. This dismissal of Black history is coming from social engineers. Most of this social engineering is coming from people who label themselves Conservative.
Actually most conservatives are offended by the CRT rhetoric about White privilege and Whites as oppressors and really aren’t that interested in race politics until they are accused and harassed as being racists and guilty of either things all cultures did at some time or place in the history of man. Conservatives are also tired of having their money go to failed schools with over paid teachers that have failed multiple generations of Blacks. To cities like Philly where we average 10 murders a week and over 2000 black on black shootings a year. CRT is Marxist and Equity is about redistribution of dollars until every person has the same number of dollars.
Conservatives like to bend terms to fit their delusions. Black history is being banned in public schools supported by the tax dollars of Black parents. Hurt feelings are used to ban teaching about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Black students spent decades in the classroom learning the myth of the Lost Cause. The main message was that Blacks were enslaved and had to wait for the white man to rescue them. The so-called education emasculated the men. Then there is surprise when they look for help from without.
The were no lessons about the battles fought against slavery on the continent of Africa. The history of shipboard rebellions were hidden. The history of rebellions by enslaved Black people against the slave holders was kept secret. All of this was done to create a docile population
Now that Blacks demand a true telling of history, it is now magically CRT and Communist. This is the same vile charge leveled against Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Those who argued against Civil Rights in the past are no different than those who whine “Woke, Woke, Woke, Woke, Woke. today
There is a huge difference between wanting equality and wanting equity. You didn’t deny that equity is about equal outcomes. Btw Whites pay taxes to educate black kids too (and I am following your form of capitalizing one race over another and not treating them as equaling deserving of capitalization).
THANK YOU GLENN AND JOHN FOR THE SHOUT OUT! The experience of talking with you and speaking truth inspired me to start my Substack, The Cornfield. And...as a classically trained actor I have always advocated for learning from the classics as a foundation. Certainly every kind of dancer benefits from ballet training; and musicians who've mastered classical techniques can play anything. See: Wynton Marsalis and countless others...how about Misty Copeland? I doubt she feels that the ballet form she has perfected needs watering down for POC.