Page One a column by When Richard Taruskin died in July, the headline of his New York Times obituary characterized him as a “Vigorously Polemical Musicologist.” His truly monumental, six-volume The Oxford History of Western Music will undoubtedly perpetuate tropes for generations. The thorniest of his many theses was that musical works could not be extracted from their political contexts. It is central to his history’s last volume, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, a monument commemorating the ascent of American music during the Cold War. The Times’ obituary said “his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.” Still, untold millions of dollars are annually spent upholding ossified meanings of classical music, institutionally and in the marketplace. What has changed since that allegedly bygone era is the foregrounding of representation into the issues mix, creating increasingly complex political contexts for works to be heard. The response to this by the powers that be in classical music is incrementalism. A new work slipped into a program of war horses, marketed to subscribers. An anniversary prompting prudently selected works by 20th Century composers. A new commission for a celebrity soloist. All of which must be decided upon years in advance, a guarantee of molasses-slow change. These are the easy steps, far removed from those advocated by George E. Lewis in his essay, “New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps.” New Music a colonial construct? If origins matter, consider that the Office of Military Occupation Government United States financed and initially administered the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, the seedbed of total serialism (which gives a twist to Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism). Lewis understands the power of institutions, so it unsurprising that the first step of his prescription – Move beyond kinship. Invest in new populations – addresses the nature of institutions. Lewis cites what feminist scholar Sara Ahmed calls “the reproduction of likeness” and “kinship technologies, a way of reproducing social relationships” as the built-in mechanisms that stifle, if not snuff, institutional change. But this is not a condition limited to richly endowed institutions like The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. Lewis also sees the reproduction of likeness in “[g]enre markers like improvised music, classical, contemporary, jazz, zeitgenössisch, Neue Musik, etc. ... As these kinship-like discourses become adopted as natural by institutions such as festivals, academic programs, and foundations, they act as obstacles to change.” Lewis also understands from various vantages – student, applicant, adjudicator, professor – that gatekeeping is central to an institution’s mission, its sense of self. This is the context for considering his seemingly counterintuitive second step, Give up on meritocracy. Historically for African Americans, meritocracy is double edged; while it is the predicate for empowerment models such as W.E.B. Dubois’ talented tenth, it also enabled the pernicious syndrome forcing persons of color to be twice as good to get half as far. Lewis points to organizations and festivals that ignore Afrodiasporic composers or make token programming gestures. They uphold a “fake meritocracy,” camouflaging “decades of curatorial, commissioning, and academic employment and admissions decisions proceeding from what theorist bell hooks has called ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ [amounting] to an investment in a certain sector of the society, and a complementary disinvestment in other segments of the population. The deleterious results of this disinvestment appear in the very low number of women and people of color that I have found over more than forty years (in several countries) of evaluating applications for graduate school, grants, academic employment, and more, as well as decidedly non-diverse outcomes in contemporary music programming.” Simply put: there is an undeniable likeness between the gatekeepers and those they let in. On their faces, Lewis’ next steps – Diversify school music programs and Encourage ensembles to commission – seem like no brainers. However, as news footage of nearly riotous local school board meetings since 2020 makes abundantly clear, public education is not simply a line of engagement, but an entire theater in the simmering US culture war. Given that programs like the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Jazz Touring Network and South Art’s Jazz Roads program are only now reactivating in the wake of the pandemic – as are programs supporting New Music – the pipeline will be belching air for some time before there is a steady flow of music throughout the US. As for Lewis’ fifth step – Make decolonization an explicitly foregrounded part of cultural policy – it can be argued that diversity is a precursor to decolonization, and that diversity is being pushed to the foreground of cultural funding, albeit at a pace many would like to see accelerate. Lewis’ advocacy for his next step – Internationalize music curation decisions – is well reasoned. To a point. He rightly points out that “non-majoritarian ethnicities, genders, and regions should be engaged, a practice that could allow audiences to hear a greater range of aesthetic and methodological directions.” However, his reference to documenta, the biennale visual arts festival held in Kassel, Germany, as an exemplar is wince-inducing. It should be noted that the essay was written before this year’s edition, curated by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, was scandalized by the inclusion of “People’s Justice,” a 60-foot painted banner by another Indonesian collective Taring Padi. Revealed only after the festival’s preview, the work reflects early-21st Century Indonesian politics, depicting a great battle between oppressors and the people, overlooked by ancestors. Two figures among the many comprising the tableau sparked the scandal – a man with forelocks and fangs wearing a hat with a Nazi emblem, and a soldier with a pig’s head wearing a helmet with “Mossad” painted on it, as well as a neckerchief with a Star of David. Even though the mural was promptly covered with black fabric, the scandal marred what otherwise would have been an unqualified successful step towards decolonization. Quality control is implicitly a function of curation, and cultural sensitivity should be central to quality control. Neither should be compromised in the pursuit of a perceived greater good. The last steps – Encourage media discussions of new music decolonization and Change of consciousness – have a mutually causal relationship. In discussing these steps, Lewis makes what must be for him the distressing admission of “the possibility that diversity discourse, despite the progress it has made, has now reached its peak.” The ultimate source of Lewis’ frustration over the lack of progress of our more fatted, self-satisfied institutions to diversify its offerings is the market reality that a wide swath of consumers prefers the same old same old, be it Mozart or Wynton Marsalis. This is a syndrome that will harden as the current qualified audience ages and emerging audiences continue to be stratified by income. All of this supports the idea that decolonization is a multi-generational project, at least in the US. It is the populations that came of age among the wreckage of the financial crisis of the late 2000s and the pandemic that needs to be energized, and that may be a task as arduous and protracted as getting them to vote. In quoting philosopher Arnold I. Davidson, Lewis identifies the true promise of new music decolonization, one that may resonate across boundaries of age, gender, race, et al: “Multiplication of perspectives means multiplication of possibilities.” “But what keeps us from realizing this promise?,” Lewis asks in conclusion. “A blockage of consciousness is probably the greatest obstacle. I fear that diversity discourse leads us to a prosthetics of inclusion – like a clunky metal knee replacement. Instead, you and I need to invent a new, incarnative ‘we’ that understands contemporary music not as a globalized, pan-European, white sonic diaspora, but more like the blues, practiced by the widest variety of people in many variations around the world. If this new ‘we’ can embrace ‘our’ future, even with all its turbulence, if we can place ourselves conceptually in the situation of a creole, we can reaffirm our common humanity in the pursuit of new music decolonization.” Lewis’ “we” has been here a long while. The problem is that we are in a distinct minority.
Read George E. Lewis’ entire essay at: https://www.van-outernational.com/lewis-en/
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