I already had this written about George Walker, so I’ll share it here. The next-to-last paragraph, about rediscoveries, offers a general point about identity-based programming that is central to my point of view.
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BBC 3 did sterling work on behalf of American composer George Walker during his centenary year 2022. The more I hear, the more I am convinced that Walker was a major 20th Century voice.
Now, it may be that some American orchestras and radio stations have been championing Walker, too, but I am not aware of it, and I tend to be aware of such things. If someone has news of such activity, I would be very glad to hear it.
But in general I think we have to admit that the United States is not doing such a great job with its own cultural heritage, which gets less attention now than it ever did, because everything is politics. Even in the United Kingdom with its Brexit divisions, that is not true, and there is still some space for culture.
The interval of one of the BBC concerts featured Walker’s own words in the form of spoken excerpts from his autobiography, Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist. Walker is eloquent on the subject of being an African-American composer: How there is pride in that while at the same time, expectations from all sides (“You play jazz, right?”) can be frustrating and limiting.
Interested in this book, I found it available for borrowing at the Open Library, and was able to start in on it right away. If one is really interested in culture, the resources are there. And that is hopeful, but we need an audience eager to USE the resources. That audience is not being cultivated in the US, and the POTENTIAL audience is encouraged from every direction to take up its culture war cudgels on behalf of complete trivialities, the minor scandals and controversies of the day.
Of course, a large part of the BBC’s interest in Walker stems from that very fact of his being an African-American composer, and that is fair. But here’s the thing: He only rarely uses black musical sources. This was the case with most of the composers featured, as he was, in Columbia’s excellent Black Composers series of LPs in the Seventies.
Rediscoveries of black or female classical composers are inevitably going to register most sharply with those who are already intense classical fans with a taste for the offbeat. There is seldom any way that their “identities” would be obvious from the music itself – this is in noticeable distinction to literature, film, popular music, or the visual arts, where material related to identity is much more likely to emerge.
George Walker was part of the wave of American classical composers who came to prominence in the mid-20th Century (approximately 1920-1980). He moved in the same academic and institutional worlds, competed (successfully) for the same commissions, won a Pulitzer Prize, and is best seen against that backdrop (which comparatively few people are familiar with these days).
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BBC 3 did sterling work on behalf of American composer George Walker during his centenary year 2022. The more I hear, the more I am convinced that Walker was a major 20th Century voice.
Now, it may be that some American orchestras and radio stations have been championing Walker, too, but I am not aware of it, and I tend to be aware of such things. If someone has news of such activity, I would be very glad to hear it.
But in general I think we have to admit that the United States is not doing such a great job with its own cultural heritage, which gets less attention now than it ever did, because everything is politics. Even in the United Kingdom with its Brexit divisions, that is not true, and there is still some space for culture.
The interval of one of the BBC concerts featured Walker’s own words in the form of spoken excerpts from his autobiography, Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist. Walker is eloquent on the subject of being an African-American composer: How there is pride in that while at the same time, expectations from all sides (“You play jazz, right?”) can be frustrating and limiting.
Interested in this book, I found it available for borrowing at the Open Library, and was able to start in on it right away. If one is really interested in culture, the resources are there. And that is hopeful, but we need an audience eager to USE the resources. That audience is not being cultivated in the US, and the POTENTIAL audience is encouraged from every direction to take up its culture war cudgels on behalf of complete trivialities, the minor scandals and controversies of the day.
Of course, a large part of the BBC’s interest in Walker stems from that very fact of his being an African-American composer, and that is fair. But here’s the thing: He only rarely uses black musical sources. This was the case with most of the composers featured, as he was, in Columbia’s excellent Black Composers series of LPs in the Seventies.
Rediscoveries of black or female classical composers are inevitably going to register most sharply with those who are already intense classical fans with a taste for the offbeat. There is seldom any way that their “identities” would be obvious from the music itself – this is in noticeable distinction to literature, film, popular music, or the visual arts, where material related to identity is much more likely to emerge.
George Walker was part of the wave of American classical composers who came to prominence in the mid-20th Century (approximately 1920-1980). He moved in the same academic and institutional worlds, competed (successfully) for the same commissions, won a Pulitzer Prize, and is best seen against that backdrop (which comparatively few people are familiar with these days).
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