One of the things a music critic can look forward to, even a bottom-tier one such as yours truly, is finding their e-mail inbox dependably filled with classical music-related concert ticket offers and other assorted marketing each and every morning. This morning was no different. It had been a long while since I last reviewed some of these promoted ensembles, but I recall those occasions well. Not so much for the performances, fine enough though they were, but for the memories of seeing a good part of the audience skimming through their phones, talking with each other, or just plain dozing off. Admittedly, at one of these concerts, I started falling asleep too. When I got home later that afternoon, I sat in front of my keyboard and faced a small crisis. After all, how does one write compellingly about a phoned-in run-through of some warhorse that has been played practically to depletion by everyone else?
I thought about that moment while scanning through press releases promising me “glorious” and “intimate” concerts filled with “magic” and “spectacular journeys”; all of them garlanded with stultifying jargon (e.g. “fresh perspectives,” “advocacy platforms,” “bridges of understanding,” etc.). That, in turn, called to mind a guide on “diversifying orchestra audiences” that was published in January by the League of American Orchestras.[1] Being the first-born child of South American immigrants myself, it was hard for me not to be personally insulted by its rhetoric of infantilization (and implied racism) meant to placate people such as myself; a lecture made all the more infuriating by the fact that the born scolds wagging their fingers were hardly representative of American diversity themselves. The fusion of trendy politicking with the usual marketing hokum only serves to confirm that those who hold the purse strings in classical music will ensure that the same works are trudged through again and again, that any new works that may appear will—despite pleading to the contrary—likely be stylistically dead-on-arrival, fated to be played but once, and will only ever of be interest to other highly-specialized academics; and that, in general, no constructive change, much less revival will ever come.
Present-day unease and hostility to classical music is fundamentally predicated on the notion that the genre is entirely a European and Anglo-American phenomenon—which is a lie. Western classical music eked out an existence in Spanish and Portuguese America long before the establishment of the United States. Since the turn of the 20th century it lives and sometimes has thrived in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. What prevents the wider dissemination of this history and music is ignorance, the timidity of performers and donors to committedly champion anything remotely unfamiliar, and the ideological inflexibility of professional “allies” whose paychecks depend on propagating grievances. Racism by subterfuge, in other words.
As I mentioned in another post, my contact with classical music was pretty much zero prior to my discovery of it at age 12. More juvenile prison than place of learning, the junior high school I attended at the time was a poor place to develop an appreciation for the life of the mind. My father had a limited appreciation of classical music, although like a lot of parents, he believed its main purpose was to serve as a high-brow performance enhancer for improving children’s test scores. (When I unexpectedly fell in love with it, particularly with modern music, he was not pleased.) There were countless reasons why this music could have eluded me forever. Moreover, it quickly became apparent as I pored through Eric Salzman’s Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, which was my guide in that first year I listened to music, that very few composers in it (or anywhere else, for that matter) looked much like me or were even tangentially connected to Latin America. But it never mattered. That this music could (or should) be inaccessible to me because my race/ethnicity/religion differed from these composers never occurred to me. A short time passed, though, when I began to discover that Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world in general had not only quite a few great composers, but also its own fascinating and ongoing classical music history. Even Chile, where my parents came from, had a few distinguished composers including Pedro Humberto Allende, Alfonso Leng, and Domingo Santa Cruz Wilson.
Decades later, I discovered Japanese music of the interwar period. Earlier this week, I was a sobbing mess listening to Uehara Bin and Yūki Michiko in their bittersweet 1937 song, Uramachi jinsei (Backstreet Life). I am not Japanese, have no Japanese ancestry, and aside from my maternal grandfather, who was stationed on a Chilean hospital ship docked in Nagasaki after the war, have no connection to Japan. That never impeded me from enjoying this music, wanting to learn more about it, learning the Japanese language as a result, and loving it as if it were part of my own cultural patrimony. Yet it is the same gatekeepers—whose platitudes about “representation” drip with paternalism that infers non-whites are intellectual inferiors—who choke off wider exploration of the life of the mind; or, worse, instill in the young hostility to art that they have yet to experience and make up their minds about for themselves. How can such malicious deception be tolerated, let alone encouraged?
It brough to mind something that Doris Lessing told Michael Dean in a 1980 BBC interview:
I can't remember any time in my life where I wasn’t sitting looking at the grown-up scene, for example, and thinking, This must be some great charade they’ve all agreed to play. I was always seeing through what went on. That was the makings of a critic, you see.[2]
For those willing to peel the veneer of the “great charade,” the liberation of one’s ears (and mind) awaits.
Notes
[1] Wise, Brian (January 19, 2024). “A Guide to Diversifying Orchestra Audiences”. Symphony: From the League of American Orchestras. URL: https://symphony.org/features/a-guide-to-diversifying-orchestra-audiences/. Retrieved March 19, 2024.
[2] Lessing, Doris (2000). Ingersoll, Earl G. (ed.). “Writing as Time Runs Out”. In Doris Lessing: Conversations. Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press. ISBN 0-865538-080-5. Page 87.