Posts

Chapel Choir Corruption

Oxford's ecclesiastical roots are well known and well manifest. Gowns, spires aplenty, regular bells, Latin graces: all are largely secularised symbols of a past Christian exclusivity. In its musical life, however, the continuation of chapel choir culture is still blatantly oppressive. Here are a few reasons why. Firstly, the matter of organ and choral scholarships. Most colleges at Oxford offer these. Organ and choral scholarships reward talent at - you guessed it - singing and playing the organ with money, sometimes hundreds of pounds a year, and other perks, such as free lunches. As well as the face value of the scholarships, colleges pour in thousands of pounds into these scholars' development, hiring part- and full-time directors of music to oversee training and services. With an immense amount of resources thrown their way, Oxford's organ and choral scholars are primed for leaving university as some of the best-connected young performers in the country. Of course, eac
Post a Comment
Read more

Pealing back the meaning

Sitting alone in my bedroom, suffering with COVID-19, I was pleased to receive a knock on my door from a neighbour. He was delivering a marginally belated birthday gift to ease the isolation of isolation. The gift in question was a collection of translated poems by Yehuda Amichai, a man I'd not heard of before. I like a lot of the poems: they're witty, down-to-earth, sometimes almost prosaic in their bluntness; many strongly objectivise women, however, in a sickeningly explicit way. Reading one poem, The Figure of a Jewish Father , I was struck by this line: '...And at evening // he hears church bells rejoicing the plight of Jews.' (p. 97) The idea of church bells as an instrument of Christian hegemony is not something I had considered before. This may seem odd from someone who has lived for the past couple of years in central Oxford, a city where every 15 minutes one is reminded where the nearest church is.  But the pealing of bells is most often a call to prayer, not
Post a Comment
Read more

Scholarship Shmolarship

I recently applied for a scholarship (which will not be named). The interview was uncomfortable - mainly because there were no representatives from the humanities on the panel - and reaffirmed the arguments that this blog has been espousing. As supporting documents for the application I submitted a personal statement which talked about issues of antisemitism* in music as my main area of interest; a link to this blog was also included in my CV. I would hope that all of the panelists read both, but it seems the message was lost. One panelist obviously thought they were on the ball, asking confidently: 'Should we listen to Wagner?'. This is an worn and somewhat irrelevant. Firstly, music taste is highly personal: you can listen to Wagner if you like, or not if you don't like. Secondly, I don't believe that most people who listen to Wagner (or indeed programme Wagner's music in concerts or for broadcast) do so politically. What matters more is how we talk about Wagner.
Post a Comment
Read more

Passionate Probing

The first of a few books that deal with anti-Semitism in music - Michael Marissen's Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion  - arrived last week. It was an exciting read, quite unlike anything I have seen before, but did not completely satisfy. The field is obviously Marissen's specialism: not only is there a vast background knowledge of the life and works of Johann Sebastian Bach, but there is also a well-informed spine of key texts on anti-Semitism (some of these, such as those by Gavin Langmuir, I need to read myself). These two fields are integrated well and with obvious experience, but with this comes an over-conciseness which spoils both the argument and the reading experience of the book. Despite Marissen's claim that the text is for academics and hobbyists alike, there is a clear expectation of Christianity - or at least familiarity with Christian terminology. The word 'passion', for example (quite a key one in this book!) is never explain
Post a Comment
Read more

Mahler as a kvetch

It is perhaps surprising that the week in which 'subjectivity in Gustav Mahler's symphonies' was the topic of discussion I failed to find anything interesting to write about. Issues of anti-Semitism around Mahler's career and reception have been studied in depth elsewhere (I now have a copy of Knittel's 'Seeing Mahler' and intend to read it over the winter vacation; Adorno's writings on Mahler are also on my list).  My thought when a tutor remarked that Mahler's annotation of the word weh 'pain' at key points of his manuscripts showed a rupture of self-aware narrative in the music, however? Weh = Vey  = Mahler is a serial kvetch. Bibliography: Abbate, C. (1991). Unsung voices : Opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century (Princeton studies in opera). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barham, Jeremy. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (The Cambridge companions complete collection). Cambridge University Press. Greene, D.
Post a Comment
Read more

Choral Composition Condescension

Last year, being a budding composer, I was excited to see an advert for a competition to set a psalm (or an excerpt/collection) for choir and organ. What persuaded me most to enter was the option to use original Hebrew text. I chose Psalm 118 ('Hodu l'adonai ki tov, ki l'olam khasdo', which forms the end part of Hallel) due to its regular rhyme scheme, call-and-response like lines, clear sections, and broadly cyclical structure. The music was composed sympathetically, I believe, and ended up sounding quite post-minimalist, with outbursts of Gustav Mahler-inspired expression and some lovely quartal harmonies. All finished, the piece was sent off to be judged; the results email that returned exposed a deep problem and misunderstanding of Jewish music within the English choral tradition. Three things stood out.  Firstly, the gist was that the composition would have won, but that due to the complexity of the Hebrew, the choir would not be able to learn it in time for the co
Post a Comment
Read more

Taruskin's Triumph

Compared to Marina Frolova-Walker (see my previous post), Richard Taruskin is on the ball. Despite his penchant for extremely long sentences and words that only he seems to know the meaning of, Taruskin sets an example for raising issues of anti-semitism in his musicology, analysis, and history. In his book 'Defining Russia Musically', not only is there an index entry for 'anti-Semitism' - and 'anti-Semitism of,' for various composers - but chances to talk about it are grasped fully. No composer, critic, or musician who exhibited anti-semitic views is left unexposed, and rightly so: to pass over anti-semitism is to discount its validity as a form of racism. This means going after Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky; even Mikhail Glinka, whose personality is seldom revealed in literature. A large section is also devoted to Igor Stravinsky's active support for fascism in Italy and the Third Reich; the extent and explicitness of his hatred for
Post a Comment
Read more