However, Tippett\u2019s use of spirituals seems to me to be very much part of the long tradition of quotation and reference that is part of what makes music such a rich and interesting art-form. While the most obvious comparison to the Tippett is Bach\u2019s inclusion of Lutheran chorales in his Passions, references to vernacular and sacred music are an important part of art music of all kinds. Mahler\u2019s music literally overflows with references, quotations and pastiches of other genres and musics, from Klezmer and Bohemian band music to operetta and waltzes. Mahler\u2019s use of vernacular music was, and remains, controversial and was often part of the criticism levied against him in the anti-Semitic part of the Viennese press in his lifetime. A common argument was that the \u201cJewish Mahler\u201d was cheapening the \u201cGerman Symphony\u201d by his inclusion of non-German musics like Klezmer, in doing so, desecrating the genre perfected by Beethoven. These critics forget that Beethoven\u2019s symphonies are full of quotes and references to Turkish marches and French Revolutionary songs, bits of Bach Passions. and quotes from Mozart. To these same critics, if Mahler quoted from Bach, he was desecrating or ‘appropriating’ Bach by putting it alongside kitsch..<\/p>\n
Shostakovich is a composer whose output cries out for a major English-language study of his use of quotation, which is far more varied and extensive than almost any Western listener realises. His music quotes obsessively from the great works of the Western canon (Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler and Bruckner) alongside jazz, Orthodox chant, Russian and Eastern European folk music and more. The Russian folk, religious and popular references in particular are so pervasive and wide-ranging that\u2019s not hard to make the case that Western listeners can\u2019t hope to comprehend a huge proportion of what his music says, as popular as it is. Does this mean we shouldn’t play his music?<\/p>\n
The argument I hear most often against the sort of thing Tippett has done in A Child of Our Time is that borrowing the music of another culture for a new piece is no different, and is possibly worse than the examples of Liszt and Dvorak I gave above being used in \u2018manipulative exploitation.\u2019 Many contend this is the exploitation of the cultural legacy of a disadvantaged group of people by the dominant culture. I\u2019ve heard it described as the perpetuation of the legacy of colonialism or slavery.<\/p>\n
While I understand that argument, I strongly disagree with it.<\/p>\n
Music belongs to everyone<\/h2>\n
First, I don\u2019t believe any person has a right to tell another person they can\u2019t, or shouldn\u2019t, engage with, perform, study, quote or re-compose another piece of music. The arguments I hear against what Tippett has done are essentially the same ones one can see used against jazz musicians of the mid 20th<\/sup> Century referencing the music of Ravel, Bart\u00f3k and Stravinsky in their music. There is a long, dark history of racism in classical music that says Asian (particularly Japanese, Chinese and Korean) musicians are \u201ctoo obsessed with technical\u00a0 perfection and don\u2019t play with emotion\u201d or that black musicians don\u2019t understand classical music\u2019s European roots. It was once assumed that women musicians couldn’t play ‘big’ works with the same power and intensity as men. You are surely aware of the long history of racist comments about Jewish musicians, including figures as important as Mendelssohn and Mahler. Wagner was by no means the only major musician to put his racist beliefs about Jewish artists’ musical performance into the historical record. I don\u2019t think any reasonable person can argue that the Jews have ever been a dominant culture in Europe. Saying a white musician can\u2019t do justice to or should play jazz or spirituals automatically gives a perfect argument to those who would keep people of non-European descent, and women, from playing classical music. Music belongs to whoever loves it, treats it with respect and does it justice. Any musical person can learn, and do justice to, the musical language of another culture, just as belonging to a given culture doesn\u2019t in anyway mean you understand or can replicate the music of that culture. Most white Europeans know next to nothing about Beethoven and Wagner and couldn\u2019t play a note of it if they tried, while there are fantastic orchestras of people of all colours and backgrounds all over the world who play European music with consummate skill and understanding. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of examples of people desecrating and degrading the music of other cultures. I often feel very uncomfortable listening to all-white choirs in all-white churches in all-white suburbs in America singing ‘African’ music. Engaging with the music of another culture means really engaging, and most times I see these kind of performances I just find it totally wrong musically and culturally.\u00a0 A lazy or superficial or insincere engagement with any music, from any culture, will always yield a cringe-worthy result. When it is music from a culture you don’t understand, the result is likely to be doubly awful<\/p>\n My own love of jazz and blues music and my desire to transcend the whiteness of my own guitar playing taught me a lot. I can remember being in a jam session in my late teens and suddenly, painfully realising how incredibly inauthentic and white I sounded. My response was not to leave jazz and blues to black musicians, but to really study the music and the culture it came from much, much more deeply. I learned an enormous amount about all music as a result. I passionately believe that anyone who loves music should be able to study it and try to do it justice, no matter who they are or what they look like. Miles Davis said that, as a rule, “white guys can’t play jazz,” but then went on immediately to point out that Gill Evans and Bill Evans (both white, no relation) were two of his most important collaborators. Most white guys can’t play jazz because most white guys don’t try hard enough. But most white guys can’t play Mozart, either.<\/p>\n And that brings me to my second point. A Child of Our Time is a great work of art by a musician of great seriousness of both artistic and moral purpose. Assessing whether or not Tippett\u2019s approach is \u201cright\u201d requires us to engage directly with the quality and importance of what he has done. Does he do justice to his materials, to his subject matter and to his aims in this piece? Surely he does.<\/p>\n True musical and cultural criticism is something of a dying art these days. Instead, we live in a cultural of equivalence. A generation ago, art and entertainment were accepted as being very different things. Both had merit, but it was generally uncontroversial that art had greater value than entertainment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This has had the lamentable side effect that many works of art that emerged from within the entertainment industry took a long time to be taken seriously on their artistic merits. Also, art that emerged through unconventional genres, cultures or traditions was often overlooked. Whether it was the Beatles, Robert Johnson or Henry Darger, it has taken time for much music, literature and visual art from outside the mainstream artistic traditions to be assessed with the seriousness it deserved. On the other hand, there are fundamental differences between art, entertainment, marketing and politicking, and within each of those areas there are huge varieties of quality and what, for lack of a better word, I will call \u2018justifyability.\u2019<\/p>\n I would contend that the justifyability of Tippett\u2019s approach is in the quality and importance of the art that came out of it. To those who ask \u201cwho gets to decide what is or isn\u2019t artistically worthwhile?\u201d I would say that nobody<\/strong> gets to decide. The value of a work of art, both aesthetic and moral, is intrinsic. It’s either worthwhile or it isn’t. Tippett\u2019s music is worthwhile not because I say it is, but because it is. Criticism, at its best, is the art of recognition, not of definition. Once created, art may come in and out of fashion. People may try to ban it or burn it. People may denounce it or extol it. They may completely forget it. But the actual value, quality and importance of the work of art itself cannot be changed. Whether any one listener or commentator recognises the value of work of a work of art or understands a work of art it is a question of the perceptive abilities and prejudices of that audience member. But this doesn\u2019t mean that the value of art is all subjective and a matter of opinion. Absolutely the opposite. \u00a0The value of a single work of art is just as specific and unchanging as the number of grains of sand on a given beech at a given moment, and perhaps just as hard to measure with certainty.<\/p>\n Duke Ellington said it well \u2013 \u201cThere are two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind.\u201d Ellington\u2019s arrangement of The Nutcracker offended many purists when it came out, and I am sure it would still raise hackles in the right wing of Russian society. Tchaikovsky’s original Nutcracker has endlessly been exploited in advertisements -such use is rarely considered controversial, but I would argue that using Tchaikovsky\u2019s music to sell aftershave is far more questionable than Tippett\u2019s use of spirituals in an important piece of music. Ellington and Billy Strayhorn\u2019s Nutcracker is a wonderful and important work of re-composition, and I am grateful that they did it. To those who would say it is a different thing when a black composer re-uses European music than when a white European composer, as part of a dominant and historically oppressive culture, exploits black music, I would say a few things. First, Tchaikovsky was, as you know, a minority figure- he was gay in a religious and patriarchal society. Second, what do we make of Tchaikovsky’s original? Most composers were or are outsiders in their own cultures (do you know Mahler’s quote “I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed”) Finally, how does one even define where one musical tradition ends and another begins. \u00a0Nobody questions whether it is okay for Tchaikovsky to write a Russian dance, but what about the Arab Dance or the Chinese Dance? And when Ellington and Strayhorn re-work them, would they have been appropriating Tchaikovsky,\u00a0 or Arab and Chinese music?<\/p>\n To come back to Tippett, as you are aware, he was hardly part of the oppressive power structures of Western society. Rather the opposite. He was a pacifist who did prison time for his opposition to military service and, as a gay man, his very existence was illegal in the country of his birth until 1967. If ever any white artist had the moral right to use spirituals in his music, it was Tippett.<\/p>\n Finally, let me come back to the use of the word \u2018Negro.\u2019<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s6RU8z1HErE<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s not a word one hears much today, but I have vivid memories of its use in my childhood, both among elders of both races and in movies and on TV. I tend to associate it most powerfully with Martin Luther King and the American Civil Rights movement. For me, it is a word of a bygone time. With that in mind, I think removing the word from the Tippett\u2019s piece eliminates an element of historical placement from Tippett\u2019s work. Yes, one could call them simply \u201cSpirituals\u201d but that runs the risk that their proper attribution becomes lost. Please see my essay on Dvorak\u2019s American Quartet<\/a> for an example of how the roots of music used in a very famous piece can be completely forgotten in a couple of generations. The Dvorak poses a special challenge because its original nickname is truly unacceptable in modern discourse and needed to change, but I think it\u2019s important that the memory of the original title not be lost.<\/p>\n One could now call them African-American spirituals, but that robs Tippett\u2019s work of some of its sense of moment, and it is a piece that is, as the title reminds us, of its time. It seems to me that to use the language of the 1990\u2019s to describe a work of the 1940\u2019s is unfair to both the composer and the audience. And, to the extent that the word \u2018Negro\u2019 makes modern people uncomfortable, isn\u2019t part of the purpose of engagement with a work like this to create discomfort? I would contend that sanitising art works of the past is a very slippery slope. Why should we let Wagner off the hook for his anti-Semitic tropes? I think it is highly questionable to attempt to clean up the record of a dead artist, to make them more acceptable to us than they would have been. There were, of course, real arguments over which Jewish artists could be claimed as Aryan. Both Mendelssohn and Mahler considered themselves both Christian and Jewish at times. What would it mean if history robbed them of either part of their identity, regardless of their motives?<\/p>\n Allow me to come back to Dr. King and his generation. Should we rewrite King\u2019s speeches? Should we replace the word \u2018negro\u2019 in Malcom X\u2019s \u201cHouse negro and field negro\u2019 parable? Should we change the title of William Grant Still’s ‘Afro-American’ Symphony to ‘African-American’ even though he was black? Surely the words of the dead belong to the dead. Be they black or white, Jewish or Aryan, gay or straight. It\u2019s not for us, certainly not for me, to try to posthumously improve them or sanitise, update or improve their work for modern mores. I don’t think it’s right or helpful to put new and improved words in the mouths of people who are no longer with us.<\/p>\n Let the dead speak for themselves and their times.<\/p>\n\n
![\"Hans](\"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/Gal-Four-Symphonies.jpg\")
<\/span><\/span>Hans G\u00e1l- The Four Symphonies<\/h2>\n\t£<\/span>18.00<\/bdi><\/span><\/span>\n<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n
It’s not what you borrow, it’s what you borrow it for<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/venn-fixed-744x374.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nArt’s intrinsic value<\/h3>\n
Should we erase certain words from history?<\/h3>\n