Steve Reich, race and 'cultural appropriation'

[Bryn]

Recently there has been a bit of a social media storm around a quote from Val Wilmer recalling a conversation back in the 1970s in which Reich is reported to have made a baiscally racist remark regarding Afro-Americans in general. More recently there has been this, which seeks to put the issue in context: https://soundexpertise.org/

The question of 'cultural appropriation' is, I feel, all too often raised as a lazy jibe. I recall that in the 1960s and '70s the Communist Party of China would promote the slogan "Let the past serve the present, and let foreign things serve China". Was that 'cultural appropriation'? Is the influence of western pop music on 'world music' cultural appropriation, or. perhaps, cultural imposition? Was Ravel's Pagodes, 'cultural appropriation'? . . .

Discuss . . .

[Bella Kemp]

I think the problem is that the language, thoughts and ideas of the undergraduate essay have somehow filtered through into the mainstream. The term 'cultural appropriation' would have met with the approval of your course tutor and like-minded academics, but in the rest of the world it is pretty silly. There was a recent video clip of a young black girl in America haranguing a white boy of similar age for wearing his hair in dreadlocks: how dare he! It's a passing phase.

[Joseph K]

Well, in my experience several years ago on social media, I disputed the term with someone and pointed out how people like Charlie Parker were influenced by Bach, only to be told that that was ok because it was the other way around, so an oppressed race is ok to borrow the oppressor but, apparently, not the other way around. I then pointed out how Miles used Englishmen etc. Really Jazz itself proves the futility of cultural appropriation being a thing - a form of racism - since it borrows to the point of indistinguishability from different ethnicities' music.

Perhaps someone could enlighten me, but other than that I just associate the phrase 'cultural appropriation' with white people having dreadlocks.

[teamsaint]

I think we have to be terribly careful in using term, becuase it is very much in the eye of the beholder.
I tend to think back to the use of Reggae by punk bands. It was ok for on- message bands like the Clash or Stiff Little Fingers to use reggae forms and styling, but less trendy bands like the Police, ( a bit middle class and industry based) got a fair bit of flak for what would now be called cultural appropriation. Yet I suspect that the Police opened more peoples eyes to the possibilities in reggae that the other two combined, inconvenient though that might be.And I think ( just my view) that they did it in good faith and with no attempt to appropriate in an exploitive way, not least because since Sting was such an adept songwriter that he could have hit records in any idiom.

I also wonder about appropriation of a slightly different kind. I had in mind an act like the Dhol Foundation. In my mind, a perfectly good night out, but I wonder if purists might accuse them of undermining the idiom( s) by diluting with a more white, pop based approach. Maybe Cultural Appropriation is the wrong term, but it might be seen as an offshoot of the same process.

[cloughie]

‘...and the blues had a baby and they called it rock ‘n’roll’ so sang McKinley Morganfield aka Muddy Waters. Surely the evolution of music relies on cross-fertilisation of ideas from a massive range of sources!

[Pulcinella]

Maybe, as wiki suggests, cultural misappropriation is a better term.

At the risk of appearing flippant, which is certainly not my intention, or simplistic, are we not all really just on Different Trains, that occasionally share part of the track or stop at the same station?
The distinction between cross-fertilisation of cultures and misappropriation is probably hard to define; it may well matter more to some cultures than others, and that needs to be taken into consideration.

[french frank]

only to be told that that was ok because it was the other way around, so an oppressed race is ok to borrow the oppressor but, apparently, not the other way around

That does appear to be a fundamental of the concept. Though from one standpoint, I'm not sure that a culture can belong to anyone, and if that is right, it can't be appropriated. The Wiki article quotes Kwame Anthony Appiah and Bernardine Evaristo casting doubt on the idea - and it is only an idea. What does multiculturalism mean if some people want to accentuate the differences between peoples? As a 'gentleman' - in Newman's sense - I never want to inflict pain so if people want to keep their culture to themselves, I go along with it - but we do seem to be treading on cultural eggshells all the time. Back to the OP, I don't think we're supposed to speak of 'Afro-American' (or Moslems): it's African Americans and Muslims. Or was that last year?

[cloughie]

Where does the gospel version of Jerusalem lie in the cultural appropriation scenario?

[Bryn]

Ihad not intended that 'cultural appropriation' be the only subject of discussion here. The is also the question of racism attributed to Reich. I was promted to raise the issue in response to a Guardian item, https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...as-power-today , the crucial paragraph reading;

In his recent book, A Hidden Landscape Once a Week, Mark Sinker reported his conversation with the photographer and writer, Val Wilmer, about when she interviewed Steve Reich, who had recently completed his landmark piece Drumming, based on drum patterns he heard in Ghana. Talking about an African American musician of mutual acquaintance, Reich said “he’s one of the only blacks you can talk to,” before adding “blacks are getting ridiculous in the States now”. Wilmer was shocked and enraged. “Wouldn’t you become politicised?” she concluded. The wider pressures on black composers in 1970s America can never be doubted.

I would like to know more about the context. Around that time, various commentators, not least Cornelius Cardew, who had taken part in several European performances of Drumming with the Steve Reich & Musicians, were critical of what they saw as Reich's misappropriation of aspects of Ghanaian musical culture. Was Reich's reference, “he’s one of the only blacks you can talk to,” an allusion to such critics in the African American community, rather than the more general black community? It does not help that Ronald Trump has expressed his admiration for Reich's music. This has led to Reich being accused, in turn, of being a Trump supporter, evidence of which support I have been unable to find.

[Serial_Apologist]

The well-known British-born guitarist John McLaughlin was once asked about "fusion", and in response, referring to fusion in the general rather than genre-specific sense of a melding of idioms or cultures, he argued that too many such fusions were done without respect for either the inner spiritual principles specific to the culture being fused with one's own - itself a loaded consideration, quite clearly - or the cultural milieu of those principles. McLaughin had studied Indian spiritual traditions with a guru at the turn of the 1970s, Sri Chimnoy, and gone into in great depth, I feel, the underlying spiritual ethos and practices associated with certain types of Indian music in order to collaborate as authentically as possible with Indian musicians deeply versed in their own tradition.

Given the evident depth of commitment to the practices, and, it follows, their underlying values, I think it would be wrong in the case of a musician such as McLaughlin to speak of cultural appropriation, which would be seen as a robbing of the culture or its artifacts for some kind of gain, either personal or on behalf of the parent culture, in McLaughlin's case amounting to the pre-existing cultural aggregation known as jazz. For a long time non-American jazz musicians carried a sense that they were performing a form of music making in a way that was second-hand, in that its rightful birthright lay in the communities of the USA that had sired jazz. As a "liberative" form of musicking jazz in the 1920s which, to its white British and European fans, emblemized a sensuous culture evolved outside the strictures of Victorian repressive mores, regardless of its founding circumstances. And yet, in evolving forms of musical performance that contrasted strongly with the formalities of ballroom dancing as well as the protocols of concert music, and that emphasised spontaneity, corporeal engagement, interaction, creative mutuality and conviviality, jazz as taken up beyond the reaches of its original geographical nexus has come to represent the possibility of musicians anywhere to pursue a cultural activity that is individually and collectively enriching while at the same time progressing the possibilities of musical expression, which can only be a good thing if one agrees that cultures need to progress - and by implication manifest such progress in the products of their time - if they are not to stagnate, which is usually tantamount to backsliding.

In general, with certain notorious exceptions, engagement in jazz tends to predispose its proponents towards ethical and political stances at variance with those of the parent culture; this may in part reflect understandings that result from the realisation that jazz is not a music with mass appeal, from which its makers can become wealthy; and that says something about the parent culture and the way it instils popular adherence to norms negotiated through the exigencies of fashion and the publicity machine. In this one needs a broader contextual discussion to consider the undeniable mismatch between what people in the advanced capitalist world regard as progress, and the attendant values - is such progress predicated at the expense of peoples elsewhere, and how is such progress, as much historically manifest in Victorian architecture as in Womad, for example, to be justified in the degree of sensitivity or otherwise invested in cultural products which, ineluctably as often as nefariously, draw on the past or present appropriation of aspects of other cultures whose people may not have benefitted equally from the exchange?

My own view, for what it's worth, is that, were the cultural exchange part of an established pattern of free trading of ideas in the cultural field as well as merchandise in general, there would be no problem of cultural appropriation.