Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2)

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Classical Musics Suicide Pact (Part 2)City Journal ^
| Summer 2021
| Heather Mac Donald
Posted on 08/09/2021 6:08:26 AM PDT by karpov
Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting, and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Musics 2019 production of Saverio Mercadantes little-known opera buffa I Due Figaro showed her influence in some stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.
Vaughn was committed to championing minority musiciansso much so that she endowed a scholarship for them at her alma mater, Brevard College in North Carolina. In all my years of teaching, she said at the time, I often have wished that more minority members were encouraged to pursue a music profession. Besides the classics, she produced socially conscious contemporary works, giving the first professional staging, for example, at the Fort Worth Opera Festival of a feminist opera about a seventeenth-century nun.
The mob cares nothing for facts, though. On June 17, 2020, Vaughn was teaching a class on opera dramaturgy to high school students via Zoom. An unidentified participant, whose name and image were blacked out (very likely a plant), asked her, out of the blue, how she could justify having produced Franz Lehárs allegedly racist (in this case, allegedly anti-Asian) operetta Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles) several years earlier. Vaughn cut the questioner off for raising a warmed-over issue irrelevant to the current discussion.
The fuse was lit. A Manhattan School of Music student petition was immediately forthcoming. Vaughn must be fired because she is a danger to the arts community, it thundered. The petition resurrected a meme from the time of the Lehár productionthat Vaughn had cast a black singer as a butler character, thus proving her racism.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org …
TOPICS:Culture/SocietyKEYWORDS:classicalmusic
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1
posted on 08/09/2021 6:08:26 AM PDT
by karpov
They see racism everywhere.
I increasingly believe that the only way to fight this is for more people to be openly and explicitly racist in their every day lives. For real. Just so that these losers can understand what it really looks like.
2
posted on 08/09/2021 6:15:04 AM PDT
by ClearCase_guy
(We have two Democrat parties. 50% of the US population has no political representation.)
I’m a big fan of Classical music of all types. Heck, I like Herb Alpert AND The Beatles. And even Strawberry Alarm Clock!
3
posted on 08/09/2021 6:18:51 AM PDT
by cuban leaf
(We killed our economy and damaged our culture. In 2021 we will pine for the salad days of 2020.)
1984 ain’t got nothin on 2021.
4
posted on 08/09/2021 6:20:43 AM PDT
by HighSierra5
(The only way you know a commie is lying is when they open their pieholes.)
Why are minorities who are not of European descent involving themselves in European classical music and opera? Isn’t that cultural appropriation, and isn’t that a big no-no in Wokeistan?
5
posted on 08/09/2021 6:21:23 AM PDT
by Cecily
Seeking to make classical music politically acceptable, orchestras and conservatories are resurrecting lesser-known black composers from the past.I notice this a lot on the Sirius XM Symphony Hall channel. It’s mainly the over-rated Florence Price they play. I change the channel as soon as they start with one of her pieces. She’s not a terrible composer; just not all that good.
Even though most of the music I listen to is classical, I do not attend concerts. I mainly listen to CDs (of which I have a ton). My wife and I used to attend opera performances regularly but stopped when opera became dominated by modern directors who want to set everything in modern times with little or no relation to the actual opera plots.
I will probably keep buying classical CDs while I can before Mozart and Beethoven are banned for their whiteness. The article makes it clear the just as math is racist, so is classical music.
6
posted on 08/09/2021 6:24:27 AM PDT
by Sans-Culotte
(11/3-11/4/2020 – The USA became a banana republic.)
“I increasingly believe that the only way to fight this is for more people to be openly and explicitly racist in their every day lives” I’ve long thought this is where things could be headed, and its unfortunate.
Booker T. Washington had the instigators nailed:
There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.
He excoriates the Jesse Jackson, Ak Sharpton, and Obama types, but there is no lack of white counterparts that engage in the same.
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