Dwellers of the Western World

For all the years I was in a wind band, we never once played a march by John Philip Sousa. As far as I can tell, the reason why we this never happened was that in high school, his music was too hard, and in the University, it was too low brow.

It's really strange when you think about it, because the bands themselves pretty much owe their popular existence to Sousa...it would be like orchestras never playing Beethoven! Or movie theatres never screening Chaplin. Or televisions never showing Milton Berle, all the time.

However, one thing I can say is that I'm not sure that even if we had performed Sousa, we could have ever performed the suite from which the title of this post is derived, mainly because the piece is, um, racist.

In three movements, Red Man, White Man, and, yes, Black Man, the work explores the musical characteristics of the various races, or, more appropriately, one of the genders of the various races, or, uh, one of the genders of one of the various colours of North American peopl...yeah.

It's kind of a minefield, isn't it? He does this kind of flutey thing in the Red Man, and a cakewalk for the Black Man, and it's pretty easy to go, yeah, back in the day, this kind of music, as cultural shorthand, probably worked. As it still does, despite the fact that the "popularity" of something like the cakewalk meant "popularity in the white community", something that rather pervades to this day. (Rap, anyone?)

Which is exactly the problem with Dwellers of the Western World. The music paints in broad strokes, but I wonder, when white people listen to the White Man, do they sit there and go, yup, that chorale in the middle of the movement, that's my music, this music characterizes us.

I suspect not, and yet I suspect the outer movements would have the opposite effect, because they are there precisely to characterize.

My evidence? How about the fact that the Red Man and Black Man movements are less than half the size of White Man? And that neither movement is as musically sophisticated as the middle movement?

Let's say he'd called the work the On America Suite, and he'd named the first movement On the Plains, the Second In the Bandshell, and the Third On the Dance Floor, things might have been more ambiguous. Which is just the way we like things now, isn't it? Ambiguous enough that people might think you're doing something inappropriate, but you're really not, or vice versa?

So it's not much of a stretch to see the Dwellers of the Western World as a fairly concise overview of race perceptions and relations in America at the turn of the Century. That Sousa, ever the populist, is well known for playing straight down the middle when it came to his crowd, makes this supposition that much more plausible.

That these works were intended as entertainment brings home this point - in explicitly expressing these racial cultural stereotypes to his audience, Sousa is also reinforcing them.

But it's a nice piece - so what can one do with it? I don't know if explaining any of this in the program notes does the trick, because the music itself is coded along racial lines...or maybe I'm just too senstitive about all this stuff. Yes, maybe I just need to be less sensitive...

Beyond that, any thoughts?

Bathroom Grafitti and the Hopelessness of the Modern Situation

Found on the men's bathroom wall of Levack Block.

Who brings a magic marker to a bar?

People who are passionate about entertainment criticism.

On (not) Hating Daniel Barenboim

The Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert was excellent, as it usually is.

This year it was led, for the first time, by Daniel Barenboim. I disliked Barenboim for ages, for reasons I cannot really recall, beyond maybe divining a certain moral turpitude in his actions at some point that offended my then black and white sensibilities.

I disliked him even though he led perhaps the best orchestral concert I've ever seen, in the very same hall he was in today, except leading the Chicago Symphony. I cannot recall one of the works, however, they performed Debussy's La Mer and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, both of which were revelatory performances of works I had up to that point been less than impressed with.

However, the highlight of the evening was when, after numerous ovations, Barenboim swung around, sat the orchestra down, and the opening chords of the overture to Tannhäuser pressed into the hot May air.

By this point, everyone, exhausted, elated, just started crying and hugging each other. The music had crept up on people, and caught them terribly off guard.

Just imagine it - a whole bunch of rich, old, young, fat, skinny, poor people hugging each other in gratitude that the CSO would play Wagner for them. If only we could get people to keep clapping after the curtain drops at the Canadian Opera Company...

Nevertheless, I still hated Daniel Barenboim.

And then I forgot why I hated him, but as a legacy of that hatred, I still avoided him. And then one day, I happened upon a book of his conversations with Edward Said and it occurred to me that I had absolutely no reason whatsoever to dislike the man.

And then I saw his performance of one of the Beethoven sonatas last year on American public television, and realised that I could no longer ignore the man. And now I realised just what I've been denying myself, although it had been right there in front of me, all along.

Thoughts get in the way, don't they? But rather than lamenting on the lost years where I absented myself from his music making, I will concentrate on what he still has to offer.

So perhaps the best thing about New Year's isn't just that it's a fresh start, but also an opportunity to really change one's mind.

Anyway, here's a highlight from yesterday's show - the muscians walking offstage in protest to his lazy, slapdash conducting. (Some things never change)

Incontinence

I had an old friend over to my place this afternoon, someone I bumped into last week who I hadn't seen in a long time.

He always seems to be doing stuff, as in, his life seems productive, but not in the crass capitalist way, like he made 55 widgets yesterday.

Rather, he seems to be on the path of the life worth living. Anyway, seeing him on New Year's Day, the 11th anniversary of my moving here to Toronto in search of a grander life, was a helpful, nay, necessary reminder of why I am here, and not in Calgary, or even Vienna.

Speaking of which, Mark Kingwell had an article in the Saturday Globe about idleness. Although I'm certain it is in part to help sell paperback copies of his Idler's Glossary, it is delightful nonetheless.

As always, I recommend you ignore the comments by "readers", unless you are a sociologist, and then, they may supply you with something useful, like how people who desire their own subjugation resist the possibility that it is they and not their overlords, who threw away the keys to their shackles.

I am busily looking for mine...if you find them, don't hesitate to drop me a comment.

Taking Stock

I took the always crowded King Streetcar to work this morning, just as I did this day last year.

Except a lot of things are different, one of those things being that I don't live near the King streetcar anymore. If only that were all that was different.

The Transcontinental is both a pale reflection of my "real" life, and an all-too accurate representation of my inner life. It is full of certain hopes and desires, of ambitions, some realised, most not at all, and it tells a particular story about me, but one that seems not very familiar to my self-conception.

I am happy that so many more people have visited the Transcontinental this year than in previous years, but I am discouraged by the fact that despite the visits, fewer people comment. When one starts to think about this, they start to think about how they can "attract" people here, and I too think often of that.

One of the things I think I need to do is write better. The writing here seems more laboured and yet also lazy, although not because I have posted more. Something is missing.

There is a part of me that wants to do some kind of list, set some kinds of goals here for the next year, but I look at the goals I've set here, like my January 1st, 2007 goal to post every day, and how it, like all the other goals, was not achieved.

So maybe my new year's resolution for the blog is that I'm not going to set any goals, or make any more promises here. I am just going to keep going, and see where things take me, because that approach in other aspects of my life, where I take up those lines of flight, has been enormously productive.

And, as you can see, the site looks completely different. I hope you like that too.

Happy New Year!

Tautological Aphorism V

Mockery is the sincerest form of criticism.

Well what do you know?

I suppose there's hope for me yet!

Small World - Tabling Heine

Earlier today, I was reading Raminagrobis, a wonderful blog that I first encountered via the Varieties. Having read the latest post, I was going to add the blog to my roll. However, I'm working on a paper on Heine, and so wasn't going to do it today.

In Die Harzreise, Heine mentions schoolboys declining "mensa" in the genitive. I was curious to see if he was in any way referring to the ecclesiastical use of the term, as my paper concerns secularization.

So I googled "mensa latin grammar" - and Raminagrobis was the first hit! Turns out he posted on the various cultural differences between latin grammars. Heine's reference made me wonder if mensa isn't also common as an early paradigm in German Latin grammars, and sure enough, page 21 of the Lateinische Grammatik here at google books, the first declension is "mensa" , although this 1837 grammar uses "via" on page 38...

Anyway, and this is certainly no strong counterexample to the cultural differences in noun declensions Raminagrobis cites, but it seems that the shift from "mensa" to "agricola" in German grammars of Latin appears to be a more recent one, as I am pretty sure that Heine here is playing with what would have been common knowledge at the time.

And with that, perhaps the most esoteric blog post I've ever written.

The Smoking Bishop

The thing I most enjoy about Christmas is the sheer variety of traditions that magically appear around this time, most of which either never existed until a few years ago or were long dead until someone with a web page and a 19th Century cookbook resurrected them. So maybe it's not the variety of traditions appeals to me, but the receptiveness to the new through the back door of tradition.


And there's an always fruitful and pleasurable avenue of exploration of the eternal recurrence of holiday traditions - the myriad ways in which one can get soused with warm drinks!

To wit, via the Valve, a link to a holiday drink I had never heard of, but solely on account of the name desperately want to try - the Smoking Bishop.

It sounds like a nice mulled wine, but if this NPR program on the beverage is any indication, the recipe at the Valve may not be the one you want to be going with...Instead, I would suggest you trust the Irishman towards the end of the broadcast segment who modifies it slightly for our modern, naïve tastes, and makes it "taste good"!

Enjoy!

Elliott Carter! Daniel Barenboim! James Levine!

All in one studio - together at last.

What else would prompt me to post three times in one day?

A Transcontinental exclusive!