I didn’t get far enough through the article, so I may have missed an important part, but I got an impression that it was partly about who gets to play classical professionally. From one of my family friends that’s in the more refined arts, I also get the impression that it’s still quite classist and racist. An attitude that rich white people get to play classical and do certain types of dance, but others, well they can just go do a hip hop fundraiser thing or play in a grunge punk garage band or something like that. I can totally see why somebody’d be pissed off about being dismissed, shut out, and rejected like that.
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Yeah. Also terrifying to think she was just on those bars doing all those tricks.
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So it sounds like the author is advocating not playing classical music. Or maybe both. But by breaking down the barriers, instead of turning one’s back, one can effect change from within. Maybe that’s naive on my part, but it’s worked in other fields (somewhat).
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I’ve worked with Adrian Dunn, who is both a trained opera singer and a composer of Black-centered music. He has his own singing ensemble as well, singing his pieces, not classical ones. I’ve seen what happens when white people discount him, and I casually mention that he is a trained opera singer. All of a sudden, he’s not ‘just’ black, you know? It provides him with the proof (like a PhD, say) that he deserves to be treated with respect, as if he were, you know, actually white.
That’s the world we live in. Obviously we need to change it, but until then, that’s what black performers and composers have to deal with. They don’t really get to effect change from within. Not yet, at least, other than a few token individuals over a long arc of history.
Having said that, I’ll give a shout-out to Lyric Opera of Chicago, which has been very actively recruiting and appointing on-stage singing roles to people of color. The best soloist for the lead male role is black and the best one for the lead female role is white? Then that’s who gets those roles. No worries about it not being historically accurate. But they are not the norm yet in the opera world.
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And also we know that sometimes it was historically accurate, but gets forgotten about.
Shout out to Shakespeare for giving us Othello at least, and giving English profs and teachers an in to talk about how yes, people of African descent have had a presence in Europe for a long time, thank you very much.
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On a related note, this kind of gatekeeping is what I found so riveting about certain storylines in Treme, especially the diverging paths of Delmond Lambreaux breaking into neo-classical circles in NYC, vs Antoine Batiste being relegated to teaching high school band – not that there’s anything shameful in it, just that it fell so far below his aspirations.
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Yeah but Antoine could not get his shit together. He was a hot mess. Talented and so New Orleans.
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This is like finding out Prince annotated the lyrics printed on the inner sleeves of his David Bowie albums.
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Zounds! His meaning obscure hath once again my grasp it has eluded!
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Damn that is sweet
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Oh please. It’s John Milton. They’re all going to be notes like “oooh, sexy, shall have to try to work this one into the next sonnet”.
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Interesting you make that comparison, because it reminds me of something I read a few years ago. Somebody was doing the whole “rap music isn’t real music” routine when the person they were talking to quietly pointed out that Shakespeare – as we know it today – is rarely recited properly, and if you wanted to hear it done right, a good rapper would be one of the few people who could. Because Shakespeare is all about dropping rhymes to a beat and the themes of Shakespeare’s plays are a lot closer to a lot of rap songs than anything else we’ve got going.
The artsy-fartsy snob had no comeback. People always forget that Titus Andronicus was more Game of Thrones than high, sophisticated art for only the few, privileged. Right down to the blood and body-count.
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It’s cheaper to write more code than to understand the code we already have?
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Seriously? That’s awful!
When I was in first-year university, I saw a stand up comedian (who was also a sociology prof) rap Romeo and Juliet after talking about how they were both in iambic pentameter, except updating the words to make them more “rap”, hilariously (maybe that was just because of her wind up before the punchline).
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I remember teachers always pressing students to avoid the meter and break up the lines when reading or performing Shakespeare.
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Yeah. That was also big in my various speech/oral interpretations of literature classes. I was criticized for making Poe too rhythmic. Uh, that’s kind of the way his poetry is written.
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I think each of those philosophies misses an important point about Shakespeare.
Treating it as rap (or otherwise over-emphasizing the iambs) ignores that Shakespeare wrote plays, meant to be acted.
Demanding that someone abandon the meter ignores that those plays are also poetry.
My own preference for Shakespeare (I’m not making any claims that this is the “right way” to perform it) is a more natural delivery. Not “bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH bah-BAH”, but “bahBah bahBah bahBah bahBah bahBah.”
Speech in the English language almost naturally falls into an iambic pattern (I wrote this trying to keep to how people would speak naturally and, IMO, more-or-less succeeded, “e’er” notwithstanding). Neither overly stressing the metre nor abandoning it is necessary; a middle ground where it’s allowed to occur somewhat naturally (to grant the speech mellifluence) is ideal.
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Thank you.
There’s also the point that, metre aside, Shakespeare uses a fair lot of enjambements and caesuras (and so does rap). Reading it line by line with a dead stop at the end of each line is not following the actual rhythm.
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Octolab is my new fave YouTube Channel.
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