# Affirmative Action...



## kg4fxg (May 24, 2009)

Touchy Subject

Any thoughts about classical Music and African Americans? I was reading in one book and they referenced DWM to classical music. (Dead White Males)

Living now in the heart of the South and place of Martin Luther King everything here seems to be about race. Just read the papers. There is even black only colleges.

I will never forget my first college experience where there was one dorm building reserved for black students. If you tried to live there they throw your belongings out the window. There were even black only fraternities.

I appears to me to be so much separation? Do black people like classical music? Or is it a culture in search of a culture? Now the I am "African American" bit. I am German but I don't call myself German American.

Has any of this hurt classical music? I wonder how "Affirmative Action" has affected our local Symphonies? The "Arts" in general?

This book speak volumes, but also states that most white males will not even discuss the topic. So I am sure this thread will get read but not commented on much.

Have you been a victim of "Affirmative Action"? If you are a victim whose lost a promotion or job now you find you cannot afford season tickets to the symphony?

Many sympyphonies have had to resently cut back, paycuts, the ecomony, the housing crisis etc. I am sure "Affirmative Action" has had a role in this bleek economy.

Thoughts......what is "your" experience been like....please.


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## kg4fxg (May 24, 2009)

*Baritone - Thomas Hampson*

Thomas Hampson was recently appointed the New York Philharmonic's first artist in residence. I was reading an article in "Listen" magazine.

He is discussing E-Musik and U-Musik......

"In our time, God bless Wynton Marsalis: we somehow laundered Gershwin into this quasi-classical periphery, probably not as fundamentally as Gershwin's intent ever was - but the person who we're way behind on and just starting to gain ground on is Duke Ellington. It's absolutely astounding the pieces this guy wrote. Looking back, I am sure it had a lot to do with racism in America, but clearly we are gaining serious ground on that now."


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## LvB (Nov 21, 2008)

I think people may not respond because you are covering a great deal of ground here, and it's hard to be sure that we've got the point. You also start out with a basic assumption-- that 'affirmative action' is bad-- from which you extrapolate to further assume the answers people will give.

The questions raised by the first part of your post are grounded in U.S. history:


kg4fxg said:


> Living now in the heart of the South and place of Martin Luther King everything here seems to be about race. Just read the papers. There is even black only colleges.
> 
> I will never forget my first college experience where there was one dorm building reserved for black students. If you tried to live there they throw your belongings out the window. There were even black only fraternities.
> 
> I appears to me to be so much separation? Do black people like classical music? Or is it a culture in search of a culture? Now the I am "African American" bit. I am German but I don't call myself German American.


Racism is a tremendous and brutal part of American history; many of the people you will meet on a daily basis will remember, or will have parents who remember, when, for example, segregation was legal, interracial marriages were illegal, and lynchings were, if not common, certainly not rare events. The impact of this on relations between members of the races lives on, and many blacks have reacted with a kind of withdrawal from what they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as a white-dominated society indifferent to their concerns and difficulties. Having withdrawn, they do not appreciate attempts by whites to make themselves a 'part' of the black community. Hence the tensions you note.

I won't say much more than this, as the subject is too complex to be dealt with quickly; rather, I will move on to your specifically musical concerns.


> Has any of this hurt classical music? I wonder how "Affirmative Action" has affected our local Symphonies? The "Arts" in general?
> 
> Have you been a victim of "Affirmative Action"? If you are a victim whose lost a promotion or job now you find you cannot afford season tickets to the symphony?
> 
> ...


Your key assumption is found in the question "Have you been a victim of "Affirmative Action"?". It assumes that, a) there are indeed 'victims,' and, b) that anyone answering the question cannot have been a beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet the problems faced by orchestras are arguably connected to the absence of affirmative action musically, rather than its presence elsewhere.

Look at it this way. Historically, schools in predominantly black areas are funded much less well than schools in predominantly white areas (Until 1954, segregation was the almost universal practice in the southern states and _de facto_ extremely common in the northern ones, so it was even easier to underfund the black schools; it was this which formed part of the problem which led to the Supreme Court's _Brown v Board of Education_ decision). Accordingly, programs in the arts and music were much less common in black school districts than white ones, and often inferior even when they did exist. Black performers of, and audiences for, classical music were not being created at anything near the rate they were in white school districts; nor was there the same tradition of classical music within black culture. There were significant black composers (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and William Grant Still, e.g.), but they tended to be marginal figures (after all, there were many concert halls which were closed to black performers and sometimes even black audiences).

How, then, could affirmative action, which is designed to address the historical imbalance of inequalities, have "hurt" orchestras? Had there been a serious effort to bring black musicians and performers into the traditionally white-dominated classical music world, there would be a larger base supporting orchestras now, creating a larger pool of resources from which the orchestras could draw. But doing this would have required true affirmative action-- deliberately shifting the balance of funding so as to support, or in many cases create, serious education in classical music in the historically black schools and neighborhoods. This was not done, and an entire segment of the population has thereby been largely alienated from the classical tradition. Naturally, when the time comes to vote on priorities, many members of this community will (and I think quite reasonably) argue against funding something irrelevant to their lives. The result is that everyone is hurt, as support for the arts dwindles overall.


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## kg4fxg (May 24, 2009)

*LVB - Thanks*

I like your point about the lack of funding in schools of which many were and still are predominately black. That makes complete sense why classical is not dominate in black culture, not now loosing ground in present culture.

It is nice to see composers like Tippett who have incorporated Negro Spirituals in their work.

Thank you for such insight!


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