September 2, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Our Musical Heritage
and the Revolution
Friends,
Since
late 2018 I have published seven original pieces in The New English Review, an international monthly magazine of
literature and cultural criticism. These usually are longer essays not directly
related to our specific current political and social issues, although I suppose
everything I write these days has at least some connection to what is occurring
in and to our culture. But generally my pieces for NER address broader
questions of music, philosophy, satire, even poetry.
Once
again I’ve had an essay published, and this one bears the title: “Our Musical
Heritage and the Revolution.” And although it takes a deeper view of what is
occurring in our Western musical heritage, it also has relevance to the real
and at times violent revolution around us…and how the development and use of “critical
theory” and specifically the theorizations of Theodor Adorno and the post-Marxists
have effectively transformed the ground rules of nearly everything, from our “progressive”
politics to how we define and talk about things, and, significantly, to the very
culture that surrounds us and how it affects us.
We are
living now in a civilization that through the unceasing labors and zealous work
of our educational, academic and cultural elites is having its very bases and
foundations, its very way of thinking, radically altered and redefined. And
those of us who profess to be guardians and champions of our traditions and
inherited Western and Christian culture, our two millennia-old civilization,
have been slow to react…too slow to actually understand what is actually
happening to us and to our society. Most conservatives, so-called, have
literally been caught, as it were, “with their pants down.” Indeed, perhaps the
major complaint and criticism that I have, along with others far more
significant like Paul Gottfried, Pat Buchanan, and the late Sam Francis, is
that too many “conservatives” have accepted the linguistic and cultural superstructure
and template of the progressivists, on everything from “civil rights” (which
now for many include transgenderism and same sex marriage) to radical ideas
about equality and racism.
Of
course, in this process the role of the self-denominated Neoconservatives as controlling
elites in the present-day Conservative Movement has been critical. For just as these
(mostly) ex-Marxists/Trotskyites brought their welcomed anti-Communism and
intelligence when they made their pilgrimage into the older rightist movement
in the late 1960s and 1970s—“came in from the cold,” as it were—they also took
with them revolutionary concepts, a globalist egalitarian vision that inherently
could not and would not produce real opposition to the actual destruction of our
civilization, because that vision was and remains essentially one of progressive
change and revolution…despite its slower pace and the sometime agreement with
the older traditional conservatives on specific issues. And thus, because of this seeming concordance,
it is easier to deceive well-meaning traditional conservatives into thinking
that “they are like us…they are defending us” against the revolutionaries.
But,
effectively, over the long haul the Neocons only make the gains of the post-Marxist
progressivists more palatable and acceptable.
No doubt many examples can be adduced how over just short amounts of
time the “official conservative position” on various critical issues has
changed, even dramatically.
The
progressivist revolution began some time ago in music, perhaps a century ago in
some respects. But the full force of what has occurred and has been happening
only gained real momentum with the triumph of post-Marxism and critical theory
in our universities and among the intellectual class. That is what my essay explores.
I hope you’ll take a look and read it:
“Our
Musical Heritage and the Revolution,” The
New English Review, September 2020:
https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190252&sec_id=190252
Boyd Cathey (September 2020)
One of the significant aspects of the current revolutionary madness sweeping the nation
is the unrestrained assault on the cultural artifacts of Western Christian
civilization. In effect the attack on monuments and the nomenclature of Army
forts, schools and streets, and on so much more is emblematic of something more
profound and irreparable, an assault on what those symbols signify.
In a broader sense, this assault portends a basic denial of the richness and
nourishing fruits of our culture and what that culture has given us. For that
denial goes far beyond visible symbols in copper and granite or in place names.
We have seen this in the increasing demands for a Taliban-like “cultural
cleansing” of our society. And thus the mounting attacks on our artistic
heritage—on those works of art that remind us of what our civilization has
created and, indeed, of its bounty, goodness and creativity that have helped
fashion who we are as a people.
In this climate of nihilism the remarkable art, the superb literature, and the
great classical musical heritage which have held us in delighted rapture, are
being despoiled, even withdrawn from accessibility like the film classic “Gone
With the Wind” (now no longer available via HBO video platforms). In some cases
this has resulted in de facto or outright banning. And if a work of our
heritage is simply too significant to be erased, then it will be re-cast and
reinterpreted to support the revolutionary agenda.
Penalties are now routinely meted out to the guilty defenders of the two
millennia of inherited Western culture. Thus, as we watch statues memorializing
Confederate heritage destroyed and symbols commemorating Washington, Jefferson,
Christopher Columbus, Father Junipero Serra, and others brought down, we also
should understand that this vandalism encompasses far more: the abolition of
the historic inheritance and rejection of twenty centuries of civilization.
The guardians of our patrimony may utter a mild demurrer, but more commonly,
they accede to and go along with this radical transformation of Western
culture. It is not as much for fear of being called “racist” or a defender of “male
privilege,” rather, too many of our cultural elites are possessed of the same
“wokeness” that dominates the streets, if a bit more rarefied.
The effects are particularly dramatic in performance music. Our musical
expression gives voice to our joys, our sadness, our triumphs, our beliefs, and
how we view ourselves; it is critical to our understanding of the civilization
around us. Yet for decades there has been a constant effort to undermine
and reshape that expression to fit a progressivist, post-Marxist mold and
agenda. A
concentration on race and gender is all-consuming. “Anti-racism” and
“feminism” have become the benchmarks for this transformation.
Over the past half century and longer progressivists have been largely
successful in restructuring what is sometimes termed “higher culture”—an
appreciation and understanding of the role in our society of inherited art,
literature, music, and architecture—and altering its relationship to most
average citizens. When I was a boy, for instance, classical music was
programmed regularly and popularly on commercial radio—the major local station
at that time in Raleigh, North Carolina, WPTF, featured both the Metropolitan
Opera broadcasts on Saturdays and a classical music program every night at 8
p.m. Network television offered us the long-running “Voice of Firestone” and
“The Bell Telephone Hour.” Widely-viewed programs like Sunday prime time’s “Ed
Sullivan Show” would feature Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson and coloratura
Joan Sutherland.
While many of my school chums from sixty years ago didn’t really get into
classical music like I did, they at least recognized its significance and
resonance in society, that it was an integral part of our inheritance, and that
it surrounded and annealed and helped define our culture and made that culture
more complete. Maybe they didn’t listen to the Met, but we all knew the
themes from those popular TV programs like “The Lone Ranger” (with its use of
Rossini’s “William Tell Overture”) or “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” (with the
“Donna Diana Overture,” by Reznicek). And who can forget Elmer Fudd belting out
a cartoon version of Richard Wagner—“I killed the Wabbit!”
Today, it is niche programming on television and radio: cable channels
dedicated to a specific interest, radio devoted to the top 40 hits and
specialty music, or 24-hour talk. Classical music has completely disappeared
from commercial radio and TV. And even classical performances’ relocation to
public broadcasting thirty years ago, with its limited audience, is
increasingly tenuous. Now when PBS offers a “great performance” it is more
likely to be rock music from the 1970s or maybe some celebratory ethnic
sampling.
The template today distorts that important element of our heritage and denudes
us in the face of repeated assaults from cultural Marxism and its minions. The
arts have become highly politicized, and classical music, now largely compartmentalized,
plays a role in that process.
As Marxists Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs explained a century ago, Western
and Christian society—its “hegemony”—could only be overthrown
through patient development, the education of a class of cultural
revolutionaries. And it was through a “long march” through the culture—in
education, entertainment and the arts, religion—that the West would be
defeated, not by force of arms.
The intellectual labor of the Marxist Frankfort School (situated at Columbia
University after being expelled from Nazi Germany), and especially their
influence in American collegiate education, literary studies, and use of
“critical theory” to, first, devalue portions of Western culture and, then,
totally re-position it as a handmaid of cultural Marxism can be widely debated.
But the effects of their theories cannot.
Music is seen as an important vehicle for altering the culture. For Theodore
Adorno, “the objective validity of [a musical] composition…rests with
neither the composer's genius nor the work's conformity with prior standards,
but with the way in which the work coherently expresses the dialectic of the
material. In this sense, the contemporary absence of composers of the status of
Bach or Beethoven is not the sign of musical regression; instead, new music is
to be credited with laying bare aspects of the musical material previously
repressed: the musical material's liberation from number, the harmonic series
and tonal harmony . . .”
One can argue that the most recent attempts at cultural “purification” have
gone farther than anything Adorno or his cohorts of the Frankfort School would
have envisioned or desired. Yet, the dismemberment of the corpus of our
inherited culture and its ideologization could not have occurred, at least in
the same way, had it not been for those earlier Marxist theoreticians and their
followers.
Classical music in this narrative is too white, too masculine. Not only has it
been de-emphasized in our schools and by broadcast media, but every effort has
been made to re-interpret it, reconstruct it to give it a more
politically-correct, less “racist,” less “white,” and less “oppressively male”
character, both in how it is presented on stage and who does the performing.
Increasingly, there are those suggesting a form of affirmative action in how musical
ensembles are formed and the musicians employed. “The status quo is not working
[in employment]. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take
proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their
ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable,” writes New York Times chief
music critic Anthony Tommasini. “[T]he audition process has to be altered to
take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.” In other words,
race (and gender) should be major determinants in whether an aspiring musician
gets a position in a musical organization or not.
This is especially pressing in opera where demands for more black and minority
personnel—singers, staff, company board members—grow. And in particular there
is hostility to whites filling black-face roles, such as Otello in Giuseppe
Verdi’s opera of the same name, roles which have traditionally been assumed by
the best vocalists and not based on race. In other words, a Placido Domingo who
is white and whose Otello is one of his signature roles, would by this standard
partake in racism. Indeed, Joshua Barone, again in the Times, labels internationally-renowned Russian
soprano Anna Netrebko’s defense of the practice as “racist,” the eventual kiss
of death for an artist.
But it is in public performance that revolutionary changes and restructuring
are most apparent and culturally effectual.
There are literally hundreds of examples I could give, everything from the
hyper-leftist “Eurotrash” presentations in opera, to the discovery of second
(and third) level women or black composers who are now boosted by “woke”
critics and global capitalist record companies as “the new Beethoven or
Mozart.”
Let me cite a couple of recent examples that have caught my attention.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s comic opera of genius, The Abduction from the Seraglio,
which playfully makes fun of Islam, was recently heavily censored and its lines
rewritten by the Canadian Opera Company. For that production north of the
border the company had some bright “woke” scribbler rewrite the dialogue “in order to remove
racist and anti-Islamic language.” But, then, is it still Mozart?
And after years of patiently waiting to see a presentation of one of the more
fascinating and significant operas of the first decade of the 19th century,
Gasparo Spontini’s Fernand
Cortez, originally produced (1809) to glorify the French
invasion and conquest of “backward” Spain (it was later revised to reflect the
1815 triumph of the Bourbons), a decent video (on the Dynamic
label) emerged this spring from the May Florence Musical Festival in Italy.
It’s a fairly traditional, well-sung production—few of those “Eurotrash”
touches that ruin so much of current musical and theatrical ventures these
days. Yet, because Spontini glorifies (in some wonderfully heroic music) the
conquest of Mexico and the conversion of the heathen Aztecs to Christianity,
the director felt compelled to add a projected on-screen message both at the
beginning and at the end basically condemning Western and white colonialism and
racism. Nevertheless, the original libretto and music emerge, and I expect to
see fierce condemnations of its revival as “racist” despite the cosmetic
application of political correctness.
Video promo for Fernand
Cortez (Dynamic Records DVD, 2020)
Indeed, there is an effort underway—incredibly—to make Ludwig van Beethoven
into a black man. You see, as musicologist Brenton Sanderson has written:
Given Beethoven’s status as the archetypal musical genius, it is
unsurprising that aggrieved Blacks have, since the early twentieth century,
attempted to propagate the myth that Beethoven had some African ancestry. The
basis for this spurious claim was the composer’s somewhat swarthy complexion,
and the fact a part of his family traced its roots to Flanders, which was for a
period under Spanish monarchical rule. Because Spain had a longstanding
historical connection to North Africa through the Moors, a degree of blackness
supposedly trickled down to the great composer.
But, given the nature of such tergiversation and the implicit (and unwanted)
recognition of the superiority of the Western canon, the major effort of our
cultural revolutionaries is rather to de-emphasize or even deconstruct the classical
tradition altogether:
. . . such efforts [to appropriate the classical tradition] are
self-defeating, merely serving to treat the Western canon as fundamental and
all other styles as deviations from this norm, thus reinforcing “the notion
that of classical music as a universal standard and something that everyone
should aspire to appreciate.” Trying to make Beethoven Black and desperately
scouring the historical records for examples of non-Whites who wrote symphonies
is to accept “a white-centric perspective that presents symphonies as the
ultimate human achievement in the arts.” Black musicologist Philip Ewell
agrees, and advocates “overthrowing the existing structure and building a new
one that would accommodate non-white music a priori—no reaching for ‘inclusion’ necessary
. . . ”
This process is occurring likewise through the emphasis on gender and what is
termed gender equality.
Thus, while we might acknowledge the genius of a Clara Schumann or Fanny
Mendelssohn in the nineteenth century, increasingly we have such ventures as “Project W,” a collection of compositions, newly
written by feminist composers, or the buzz surrounding the rediscovered music
of black woman composer Florence Price (1887-1953) who satisfies both criteria:
female and black.
Now, I happen to enjoy the music of Price. She skillfully integrates various
folk themes and traditional melodies into her compositions (notably her several
symphonies), somewhat like what Antonin Dvorak did with his famous “New World
Symphony” (No. 9), with the use of the “Goin’ home” theme in the Largo movement.
“Juba Dance,”
from Florence Price, Symphony no.1
But Price, for all her genuine musical talent and felicities, is not Dvorak.
And although her output is colorful and musically entertaining, one wonders if
she had been a white male would she be getting the same notice and present-day
fame?
Indeed, such well-versed critics as David DeBoor Canfield in the
prestigious Fanfare magazine (July/August 2019)
admit that too many contemporary (and progressive) writers are “way over the
top in finding her music to be superior to that of any of her contemporaries
(including Gershwin and Copland).”
It’s not.
It is enjoyable and estimable in its own right, and I am pleased that it is
being programmed and broadcast. But we do not have here another Aaron Copland
or George Gershwin, much less a new Beethoven—who, if memory serves me, were
white males and within the classical tradition.
The fairest evaluation of Price’s music I have seen came back in 2001, in the
same venue as Canfield’s review but nineteen years previously, perhaps in less
oppressively “woke” times than now when every word in every Twitter message is
held up for severe judgment on its strict obedience to advancing progressivist
norms. As critic Michael Fine wrote:
Her orchestral music . . . is workmanlike but rarely inspired.
There are sweet and expressive moments, notably in the Grieg-like slow movement
of the Third Symphony, but the music meanders excessively. Promising moments .
. . never deliver. Her scoring is occasionally effective, mainly while setting
traditional music such as Deep
River in the Mississippi
River Suite, but even here she offers few new insights into
these remarkable melodies. The Mississippi
Suite bears a superficial connection to Delius's Florida Suite and Appalachia with its
descriptive sounds of the river and riverbank life. Yet Price lacks the English
composer's genius and intuitive understanding of natural landscape's musical
shape.
That verdict could be extended generally to dozens of other composers and
musicians who happen to be black or female, or perhaps transgender or lesbian.
It represents a substantive judgment on the new template—the irresistible
narrative—of the profession and what passes for intellectual thought on the
pages of journals concerning the performance arts. And eventually it affects us
all.
The overriding goal of the cultural revolutionaries in music is to utilize the
musical inheritance of our civilization ideologically as a means to transform
society. A new history must be created. In this narrative unfamiliar composers
must be highlighted, others re-imagined or re-interpreted, not for the
excellence of the composer or his or her works, but for the greater objective
of power and cultural dominance in society. And some works, beyond the pale,
must simply be suppressed. Gone from view, gone from memory.
Although I am certain that Florence Price, were she alive today, would be
gratified by the attention she is finally getting, I doubt she would care for
some of the reasons for it.
The post-Marxist nihilist revolution places our artistic heritage in peril,
radically restructures our expression in the service of ideology. And as a
result threatens to rob us of the beauty, richness, and grandeur of two
millennia, and replace it with the barren straight-jacket and the ideological
mentality of the Gulag Archipelago.
The battle for our cultural heritage remains to be fully joined. If we do not,
we and it are lost.
________________________
Boyd D. Cathey was
educated at the University of Virginia (MA, Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and the
Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (PhD, Richard M. Weaver Fellow). He is
a former assistant to the late author Dr. Russell Kirk, taught on the college
level, and is retired State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives. Has
published widely and in various languages and is the author of The Land We Love: the South and Its
Heritage (2018). He resides in North Carolina.
________________________
Boyd D. Cathey was educated at the University of Virginia (MA, Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and the Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (PhD, Richard M. Weaver Fellow). He is a former assistant to the late author Dr. Russell Kirk, taught on the college level, and is retired State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives. Has published widely and in various languages and is the author of The Land We Love: the South and Its Heritage (2018). He resides in North Carolina.
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