Mångfald och Klassisk musik 2 October 2014 (Final)

Good evening. My heartfelt thanks to Daniel for inviting me to participate in this

first Interplay Festival. As well as feeling truly honored to be taking my place

among so illustrious a list of speakers, it’s my first time in your city and I’m

totally thrilled to be experiencing its beauty firsthand. I hope that most of you

were at tonight’s concert because it was fabulous. It’s only my second time of

hearing your orchestra and all I can say is, What a band!

And let me also say before I begin, that while I’m aware that -- just as many folks

of an intellectual bent condescend in regards to watching tv -- there are many

who consider social media an uncivilized waste of time. Well, Daniel contacted

me initially via Facebook messaging, so thank you Mark Zuckerberg as well. I

also watch my share of television, but that’s another story.

Unlike most of my esteemed Interplay colleagues, I don’t come to you with a long

list of degrees and accolades to my name. My route to tonight’s topic has been

long and circuitous. So I hope you’ll bear with me for a bit so I can give you a

general idea of how I got here.

I am a veteran of racial upheaval and cultural warfare. My family were de-

segregators in a Connecticut suburb of New York, a beautiful environment with

liberal credentials but rigid social conventions in regards to race just below its

lovely surface. Mine was a family of what black folks have traditionally called

strivers, and the battle for civil rights was our living reality. My father and aunt

walked picket lines as very young children in Richmond, Virginia. Just living

where we lived was considered a contribution to the Struggle; but as a young

teenager I also attended the March on Washington and collected funds for the

Mississippi Freedom Summer. When I attended Harvard University during the

tumultuous late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I became the fifth generation college-

educated female on my father’s side; my great-great grandmother being one of

thirteen former slave women in the first class of what became Spelman College in

Atlanta.

My undergraduate field of study was the newly established Visual and

Environmental Studies, as close as Harvard would venture to a film major; but I

spent far more of my time in political meetings and demonstration than in class –

including heading to Atlanta, Georgia, after the Kent and Orangeburg State

massacres in the spring of 1970, to work in the first Congressional campaign of

Martin Luther King lieutenant Andrew Young.

An increase in black enrolment and the African and African-American Studies

Department currently headed by Henry Louis Gates were our primary successes

during those years. There were failures as well. All were as, if not more,

fundamental to my education than lessons learned in formal class, particularly in

regards to an understanding of personal, community and institutional power.

After writing a Black Arts Movement-inspired thesis entitled, Towards a Black

Aesthetic in Visual Communications, I briefly attended New York University’s

graduate school of film and television before dropping out to work on films in

New York’s Mean Streets. I was selected for the Directors Guild of America’s

Assistant Directing Training Program and emerged about two years later to

become the first African-American female member of the Guild at a time when

there were perhaps only 5 or 6 women in the country engaged in that job. So,

yes, I’ve done a bit of gender-pioneering as well. When I was in training there

were times when I was the only black, the only female and the only person under

30 years old on a particular film crew. An elite-educated, far left-leaning Negro

bourgeois reader of the New York Times, whose task was often to get middle-

aged, working class white men who’d voted Alabama governor George Wallace

for President, to do things they didn’t feel like doing, like work faster and more

quietly.

The guys I trained with were old-fashioned, street-smart bruisers who would

have won any argument that moved into violence. I certainly didn’t have that

option, so even as “revolutionary” school friends wondered how I could stand

being around “those kind of people,” I learned to concentrate on our common

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humanity, to give and demand respect, the results of which were – almost always

– gratifying.

Following completion of the Training Program, I moved from New York to Los

Angeles where there was far more work in what we called The Industry, my

youthful goal still to generate positive black imagery via what French

philosopher Jacques Ellul termed soft propaganda; and soon learned that little, if

indeed anything at all, in the world could be reduced to the stark dichotomy of

black vs. white.

In LA there were wider physical vistas and greater racial variety than what I’d

been used to in the Northeast. Asians and Latinos were as much a part of the

ethnic mix as Anglos and blacks. I became acquainted with a far wider range of

social traditions, of foods and of musics than had been my East Coast habit, all of

which I found fascinating. The film industry took me to West Berlin where I

spent almost 4 out of 6 years in the 1980s before the Wall came down. I’d taken

my first extended trip to Europe a few years before, but living in another culture

was quite a different – and mind-expanding – matter.

Coming from the African-American tradition of “lifting as we climb”, after my

return to LA for one day in every week I wasn’t working on film sets, for some

four years, I established an informal counseling and cultural enrichment group

for young black women at one of South Central LA’s worst performing high

schools. My girls weren’t involved in gangs, but all of them had had friends

who’d been killed in gang violence. To say that the physical plant of the school

was inadequate is beyond understatement. At the beginning of one autumn term

it took 2 weeks for the city to remove the rotting carcass of a very large dog that

was lying on a sidewalk but 10 meters from central path leading to the school.

During my time at Jordan High, there was an abortive attempt to start a young

men’s group as well and I spent one claustrophobic morning engaging a dozen

sullen adolescent young men in a discussion about whether stabbing, sometimes

even killing, someone for stepping on your Nike Air Jordans was a true definition

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of respect. And if you’re wondering, no I hadn’t had any formal psychological

training save the crucible of dealing with varying types of macho in the contexts

of radical student politics and Hollywood film sets, though it did help that I was

tall and had discovered over the years an ability not to show fear in the face of

physical threat.

It was never my intent to be a career Assistant Director. My thought was to come

to actual directing by way of writing, which didn’t happen; but after some 12

years of trying to sell screenplays I finally decided to give it one more go before

chucking it all in, moving back East and maybe teaching school. I wanted

something that would sell. I decided to write about a man for once, and low and

behold an A-list star took the bait.

It was during the writing of this project I term Hollywood Nightmare #1, that life

took me to London, which has been my home for 20 years, and where much of

my time has been spent in and around the elite epicenters of Western classical

music by virtue of my 10 year marriage to a conductor of renown. After

Hollywood Nightmare #2, though I’d never even written a short story before I

decided to abandon screenplays for prose. It took me 7 years but I published my

novel on jazz trumpet-player Valaida Snow in 2004, a good deal of which was

devoted to verbalizing the coming together of mind, body and spirit that occurs

in the playing of jazz. So now I was a writer…

And this rather long introduction, by why of explaining my approach to the

subject matter at hand. Not through formal degreed study of Musicology or

Anthropology or Sociology or Political Science or Statistics, rather via rough and

tumble life experience and a foot-loose sense of curiosity, powered every step of

the way by a strong identification with music.

My tastes are kaleidoscopic: from the Broadway shows, popular classics and

Motown optimism of my suburban childhood, to the jazz and African drumbeats

of my university years; from discovery of zydeco, rockabilly and general world

music in LA to the living complexities and soul of Western classical music in my

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maturity. Indeed, having never studied creative writing nor read many of the so-

called literary classics, my sense of prose form is derived from that of music and I

find my fictional characters via their musical tastes.

A few years ago I was given the opportunity to contribute a long-form essay on

any topic of my choosing for a new publishing imprint. I’d come to the editor’s

attention via some journalism I’d done during Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential

campaign and I imagine she thought that I’d come up with a meditation on how

America was contending with an African/American at its helm (very, very

poorly, I’m obliged to say) but I had another personally essential, unanswered

question on my mind.

I was living the cliché of a knockdown, drag out labyrinthine battle with the

elusive second novel, one of whose themes seemed to be the conflicts between

the African/American and European facets of my characters’ and thereby my

own identities; and the Minotaur was winning.

The essay offer came at a time when I was becoming increasingly aware of, and

excited by, the Western classical music-as-salvation phenomena of Venezuela’s

El Sistema and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra founded by Daniel Barenboim

and Edward Said; but I was curious -- old cultural combat veteran that I am– if

the young people involved in these programs -- especially those for whom

Western classical music wasn’t the cultural norm -- suffered from the same tug

between “our” music and “their” music that had characterized my life and times.

I was, of course, also trying to make sense of the dissonances of my own

experiences, that is as a former Black Nationalist still committed to social justice

but reveling in the highest level of classical music being performed in cultural

palaces around the world. Beyond my sense of political urgency, was I losing

sense of my very identity? Which was what exactly, by the way? But first these

young people.

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In the writing of what became Soul Music, what I learned via observation of

music programs in Palestine, Venezuela, London, Kinshasa, Scotland, the US and

South Africa – and to my considerable surprise -- was that the overwhelming

answer was no. No. They weren’t worrying about these things. They weren’t

caught in the paradigm of the late 20th century’s cultural wars. What I learned,

was that left to follow their ears and their hearts without interventions of older

people and institutions -- including the recording industry – that are vested in

category and cultural hierarchy, those under the age of 35 who were serious

about music – in either the playing or the listening and often facilitated by the

new universe of possibilities made available by the new technology -- found the

sounds where their spirits lived with neither guilt nor acrimony.

While part of my first intent had been to explore the attitudes of Arab members

of the West-Eastern Divan, not because their day-to-day personal challenges of

making music side by side to “the enemy” was any more than that of their Israeli

colleagues, but because they weren’t coming from a Western musical tradition, I

ended up concentrating instead on Al Kamandjati, the West Bank music school

founded by one of the Divan’s first members, viola-player Ramzi Aburedwan.

Having grown up in the Al-Amari refugee camp, where he lost both his father and

a brother to the conflict, and literally the stone-throwing poster child of the First

Intifada, Ramzi considers that his life was saved by being exposed to a viola at

the late age of 17. He progressed quickly, spent a summer at a music program in

the States then was accepted by the Conservatoire in Angers, France before

joining the first intake of the Divan as one of its very few Palestinian members in

1999.

On home visits to Ramallah, it was Ramzi’s habit to play for children in their

classrooms, and after one such visit he learned that children whose artwork was

usually dominated by AK-47s and all manner of explosions, now often featured

him playing his instrument. He resolved then and there to bring music into the

lives of as many Palestinian children as he could.

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In a country for decades dominated by the political, that felt it couldn’t spare the

time or attention to re-shape a cultural landscape pulverized by the nakba,

Ramzi wanted to gift these children with the feeling that came to him while

playing music, an energy that contends with persistent anger -- in his words --

“like purifying water”.

Classes began at Al Kamandjati, which is Arabic for The Violinist, in 2004 when

its founder was 25 years old. It now serves 500 children between the ages of 6

and 18 in villages and refugee camps throughout the West Bank and Lebanon;

and you should be proud to know that your own SIDA has been a continuous

supporter of its mission.

For Ramzi all music is without nationality. It is simply sound. You find that

which appeals and follow it, inhabit it, without concern for its origin. For Ramzi,

Western classical music came first and Oriental second; for other of Kamandjati’s

teachers the pattern was reversed; but there was nothing to be inferred by this

other than personal taste, for the point of the study and the playing is the feeling

of liberation it produces -- be it only for fleeting moments -- a feeling that can be

neither owned nor controlled by anything nor anyone beyond those directly

involved.

This transformative power was particularly exemplified to me in my visit to the

school’s branch in Jenin. In preparation for my travel I’d read that in March 2009

a fire bomb had devastated the previous Jenin facility, including the room where

its instruments were stored. The American report that I’d found online

suggested the responsibility of Hamas, angered by Al Kamandjati’s teaching of

Western classical music and of boys and girls together. Surely evidence of the

cultural tensions I had suspected! And at the time the center’s director Iyad

Staiti had voiced concerns that non-Palestinian visitors not wander around

unaccompanied, but less than one year on Iyad was rejecting both bitterness and

fear:

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No one was hurt. The attack took place at 4:00 in the morning when the Israeli

Defense Force rather than Palestinian police were in charge so there had been no

investigation, and the school just moved on. The Palestinian Authority and

international friends came to their aid. Instruments were replaced, student

enrollment increased. An oud player who’d allied himself with Ramzi after what

he referred to as the “Jenin massacre” of 2002, Iyad also felt no conflicting

tensions between Western and Oriental music. In recreating a Palestinian

cultural identity -- for that is very much their goal -- “we are not restrictive, ” he

said. He told me, “We Palestinians, we love everything beautiful. We love music,

all music, Oriental, Western, hip hop, jazz. It doesn’t matter if the Israelis like it

or do it; and now we have the first orchestra ever in Jenin.”

I have to say that when I heard him say this, tears of shame and humility came to

my eyes; for during our student days we Ivy League believers spoke of our issues

as being matters of life and death, but death was something we’d have had to go

out of our ways to experience. We discussed the option of following the example

of our brothers at Cornell and bringing guns onto campus, but decided against it,

as we did storming a construction site we’d shut down for unfair labor practices

the day before and was occupied that night by state troopers; understanding it to

be a suicide mission without adequate weapons, because we believed in our

futures. We had futures to believe in; and here I was in Palestine speaking with

people for whom “life and death” had been bloody and real, whose presents and

future was caged, yet were refusing to taint music’s joy with the residue of

conflict, while we cultural nationalists and multi-cultural theorists spoke and

some of us still speak of Their music and Our music. Young Kamandjati

musicians I talked to spoke of their love of the Palestinian rap that described the

truth of their lives while having trouble determining which composer was dearer

to their heart, Bach or Vivaldi, Beethoven or Mozart. And this love has continued

during the last conflicts despite the arrest and incarceration of young male

members of their orchestra, despite being denied access to play scheduled

concerts in East Jerusalem and Gaza. They have played Mozart at the Qalandria

checkpoint as a form of civil disobedience to the great confusion of IDL guards.

This music is theirs.

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This lesson, this revelation – that those living closer to the edges of survival

waste no energy in debate as to the origins of a transporting joy, that they grasp

it to their hearts and let it take them -- was reinforced by the homeless

performers in London’s Streetwise Opera, who find both release and purpose in

Haydn, Mozart and Sondheim; by the essentially self-taught members of

Kinshasa’s Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, praising God and achieving

transport away from the harsh realities of their homeland via Beethoven, Verdi

and Berlioz. It is also the truth upon which the world-wide phenomenon of El

Sistema was founded.

From its Venezuelan origins almost forty years ago, this life-changing force has

expanded beyond the Americas and Europe – where one of its most vibrant

manifestations is right here in Sweden, in Goteburg, Stockholm, Södertälje and

Mälmo – to all over Africa and Asia; and beyond what it gives each individual

player, what is proven far and wide, time and time again, are the community

benefits of concentrated, collective music making, up to and including the notion

of conflict amelioration if not outright resolution.

It is this that motivated Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said to form the West-

Eastern Divan as a positive counter to the seemingly infinite intractability that

characterizes the Middle East. In Barenboim’s words:

“With excitement we witnessed what happened when an Arab musician shared a

music stand with an Israeli musician, both trying to play the same note with the

same dynamic… They were trying to do something together about which they

were both passionate because, after all, indifference and music making cannot

coexist. Music demands a permanently passionate attitude regardless of the

level of aptitude… Once the young musicians agreed on how to play even one

note together they would not be able to look at each other in the same way

again.”

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The demonstrated global power of El Sistema, grounded first and foremost in the

universal appeal of making Western classical music together, is proof positive

that like Shakespeare and Strindberg, like Pippi Longstocking and Spiderman,

ABBA, James Brown and the Beatles, this music belongs to anyone and everyone

who is exposed to it and takes it to their hearts. But what of places and players

for whom the stakes don’t appear to be so high? Which aren’t dramatically riven

by war or deprivation? Where there is time and the wherewithal to parse the

origins of joy, the boundaries and hierarchies of culture? Places like essentially

stable and affluent Western democracies?

Regardless of assumption and reputation, diversity is clearly present in the

music itself. Just as African-American jazz and Indonesian gamelan music found

their way into the works of European composers during the first years of the 20th

century, in times further past Moorish inspired chaconnes and sarabandes

provided expositional dance forms alongside Central European Ländlers and

allemandes. As some of this evening’s visuals demonstrate, non-European

musicians have been part of both popular and courtly European music-making

for centuries. Are we to imagine that the manner of their playing in those

improvisational times held no traces of the sounds of their homelands? Or that

their European colleagues were unaffected by what was happening by their

sides? This wasn’t cross-cultural one-up-manship after all. This was music. It

was done together, and it was done for joy.

The vast majority of string instruments both bowed and plucked were developed

over time from southern and eastern models, much percussion including timpani

as well. Turkish Janissary music was a huge influence on 17th and 18th classical

composers, including Haydn and Mozart, giving rise to a style that was called “a

la turk”, and remained so in the case of military bands.

No music -- not Western European, not Chinese, not Central African -- has ever

been hermetically sealed from outside influences be they conscious or

subliminal. Dedicated musicians are voracious in their listening and ecumenical

in their appreciation and processing of what works for them. If unimpeded by

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exterior diktat, they have always been without boundary; so on a most

fundamental level, diversity in the concert hall is already here, in the music being

played within these walls.

But even as Western classical orchestras are being established and dedicated

halls being built around the non-Western world, in our northern, western

essentially stable, affluent and increasingly multicultural democracies, this

diversity is sadly absent from concert halls both on and off the stage. The whys

are numerous, but to make it very basic: you don’t pursue a music you’ve never

heard, or if you’ve heard, you’ve never been allowed to consider as your own,

and into whose spaces you don’t feel yourself to be welcome.

Western classical music has often become entwined in national narratives as the

best and purist evidence of what those nations can be, its concert halls often seen

as temples of worship dedicated to particular national myths and trespass de-

facto verboten to those exterior to this myth. Much of this cultural baggage is a

consequence of the class and racial stereotypes that have characterized empire:

The We are superior position. “We are civilization. You and your arts are of the

body, of the mundane, and not of the mind. Follow our example and be saved, for

ours is the true faith. Or be gone.”

In the interest of at least maintaining if not widely expanding audiences for

Western classical music, much energy has been expended in divesting both the

US and the UK of these archaic attitudes, gradually moving away from the

arrogant stance of:

“ Why aren’t These People -- of darker colour or working class -- scrambling to

become the level of civilized exemplified by this music? Don’t they realize that it

is the highest incarnation of human creativity, in comparison to which that stuff

they’re so attached to is common trash? Don’t they understand that Music (with

a capital M) should be far more than distracting entertainment?”

While in some quarters still wrestling with the paranoid/peevish:

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“If they don’t think this music is the best and essential to the quality of their lives,

is it a rejection of us? Or consciously/subconsciously European supremacy? How

do we change their minds? Do we want to? or better let them stay down there in

the depths? (where they belong?)”

On the other side of these anxieties is the far more productive:

“we want to share something wonderful with you, and we know that you can

bring as much to it as you might gain. We love this music, and we don’t want it to

go the way of the Shakers” (a Protestant American cult which created much of

beauty but, pledged to celibacy, has all but died out.) “This music is not a

sacrosanct museum. It is a still-evolving, living thing that, just like a meadow

abundant with wildflowers, has always benefitted from cross-pollinations. We

welcome you. Remain yourselves; it will add to the feast. We will feed one

another.”

This change in attitude is absolutely essential, for cultural pride and

independence are as important as physical and political freedom in shrugging off

imperial yokes and learning to live with one another. For isn’t that the true

challenge of our time, learning to live with those who have not lived where and

as we have lived, who are Other?

As said, though I made a number of trips to Denmark while researching the life of

Valaida Snow and some years later participated in an Opera-Europa conference

in Oslo, this is my first trip to Sweden and in order to give this talk some manner

of direct relevance to this audience, you good people, these last few months I’ve

been on a very steep and fascinating learning curve. For, other than finally

coming to ABBA via Meryl Streep, a much appreciated ACNE coat, and my avid

fan-dom of Scandi Noir, what did I know of contemporary Sweden beyond the

moral and intellectual standing that came from Alfred Nobel’s decision to

counter the legacy of his martial inventions by endowing prizes for the best that

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man can be, and your general good-guy reputation exemplified by the slogan

“Equality at home, and justice abroad”?

I’d known nothing of your participation in the Atlantic slave trade, the building of

so-called slave castles on the Gold Coast of Africa, the uses of Swedish-produced

iron in the trade and the failed colonial aspirations of King Gustav III. Though I

once spent a lovely two weeks on the island of St. Barth’s and vaguely noticed the

Swedish flag fluttering in the Gustavia town center, I was totally unaware that for

the better part of 70 years the island had served as a free market for the slave

trade, and that this participation earned you a seat at the infamous Berlin

Conference of 1884. I now know that this history is often cited by your growing

Afro-Swedish population in their demands for recognition and opportunity free

of smygrasism; but not having lived here I can’t reasonably assess how much this

historical crime – small in comparison to the others at that Berlin table, but still a

crime -- is influencing your present dealings with people of African descent now

living within your borders. I believe strongly that the birthplace of Carl Linneaus

and Anders Retzius could benefit greatly from instructive exploration and frank

discussion of its colonial history; but I’m not a believer in knee-jerk collective

guilt, and my gut is telling me that the crux of these challenges is rooted in our

own time rather than another.

I’d been vaguely aware that Sweden’s immigration program was generous, but

I’d no idea of its particulars, let alone that as a result, a country that I’d assumed

to be as mono-cultural as my Connecticut home county was now essentially 20%

non-ethnic Swede; that this change, like so many changes in our present day, had

happened rapidly, very rapidly, and that trying to contend with this change is

causing major disquiet in the very core of a country just beginning to loosen the

strictures of Jante’s Law.

You aren’t alone in this of course. All better-off nations are dealing with the

relentless northern movement of people fleeing war, the ravages of climate

change and corruption to seek a better live for themselves and their families.

Bemoan, legislate, turn back, send back and incarcerate all we want, when the

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choice is between certain misery and/or death, vs. maybe misery and/or death

or maybe something better, even a tiny bit better, those humans blessed with a

combination of energy and courage will venture toward possibility, will risk

everything for a chance. It’s part of our homo sapient DNA and this imperative

will not cease until some form of global balance has been restored; but in the

meantime, the complexions of nations are changing and, especially if you rather

liked things the way they’d been before, this change is unsettling.

In my home neighborhood of London’s Islington, where I am of course an

immigrant myself, I too have been aware of striking changes. For what seems to

be the last year, even less than a year, there are many more young Europeans

about, not just the trendy tourists of old but now a steady influx of trendy

residents, having fled their stagnating or more regulated economies for London’s

opportunities. On my Saturday shop I encounter as much French, German and

Italian on the street and in line as English. In Sunday’s farmers’ market, I often

encounter maman et papa, who’ve travelled over pour le weekend evaluating the

produce. Unlike the traumatized, disoriented and often penniless thousands

seeking refuge in Sweden, these people are affluent, comfortable in themselves

and just getting on with their well-blessed lives; but they are changing what is

now my home. I liked it the way it was; and I must adjust. I’ll do it. I am doing it.

It’ll be fine; but -- perhaps from preparing for this evening – I find I’m

experiencing a little tingle as I assess my environment and what this means for

Islington’s future. Just my little edge of living in the 21st century.

To some – like your rapidly ascending Sweden Democrats, the US Tea Party,

Britain’s Ukip and others in most countries of destination – these global changes

are absolutely infuriating; even more so because the influx that lets loose their

crazies is of people of colour, people in whose worth and common humanity they

don’t believe; and deepest down they know that no matter how hard they try, no

matter how ugly their rhetoric or even violent their response, they cannot turn

back the clock. The world, the Sweden, the Britain, the Netherlands, the US,

France, Denmark and Italy of 2020, will not be the world of 1920. The change is

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here and ongoing. It’s like the Ice Age. Demographics are shape-shifting

alongside geography; and, as the saying goes, “Resistance is futile”.

There can be no question that the motives behind Sweden’s immigration policy

have been exemplary. You have been in the forefront of offering refuge to people

in extremis, while others have spoken platitudes and done very little or nothing

at all; but what to do with these people once they’re here, as first disoriented

months turn into years? As the children that accompanied their parents become

adults? As more children are born and mature within your borders?

Though the immigrant generation came of their own free will, some just

desperately grateful, some with unrealistic fantasies, the children did not.

Sweden is all these children know; but what I’ve learned in these last months via

interview and reading the likes of Swedish-Tunisian author Jonas Hassan

Khemiri, the Korean-adoptee academic Tobias Hübinette, Afro-Swedish Anna

Adeniji and the casual racism employed by many of your crime writers to

illustrate this situation -- is that a good many of them are not finding a way to

become an integral part of what should not just be the place where they reside

but their home.

Even if your borders slammed shut tomorrow the people here would still be

here. You’re not going to deport everyone or commit a genocide. That’s not who

you are. These people are part of who you are now and who you will be in the

future, amending your national narrative, changing your face.

What I’ve also learned in this wildly rapid course is that, unlike your immediate

neighbours, the Swedish approach to difference is to function officially as though

it doesn’t exist because there’s no place for class differences in “the people’s

home”; when the truth is that there are people who have more things, have

better access to more of the prizes than other people in your country, as in the

case of any country. The contrast isn’t as hideous as in my countries of the UK

and US, thank goodness; but it exists, and not using the word class doesn’t

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change this, just as excluding the word race from the lexicon doesn’t eliminate its

problematic nature from your times.

These words, race and class. At their mere mention some get aggressive in the

extreme, some get defensive, some feign boredom, some wish they would just go

away. I certainly do. The myths and realities of race have dominated a good part

of my life and I’d like them to stop, just. Stop. Speaking for myself, I’d really have

preferred not to have the word race in the title of my book or lectures, because

when it’s there, some folk just lose the upper part of their brains. It’s as though

neural signals get cut off at the hippocampus. Things just get primitive and nasty

and who wants to deal with that nonsense? I don’t.

but -- particularly in societies such as ours -- the only way this can happen is via

mutual empathy and forensic honesty on all sides, in all regards. Ignoring or

failing to recognize the problem does not work.

As said, I grew up in a Connecticut suburb of New York that was liberal in its

attitudes on the surface. My parents were able to purchase a home in a lovely

area; my siblings and I were welcome at the schools we attended; but there were

rules – the occasional bit of ugliness as well, but mostly just unwritten rules. I

excelled at school, served on committees and teams, was voted this and that; but

when it came to adolescent courtship I was absolutely untouchable, and all of

this was unspoken. A few months ago, I was visited by a middle-school

classmate who said to me “a lot of us wondered what it was like to be you.” (That

is the one other black girl, my oldest friend and I) But nobody asked.

They acted as though Sharon and I were the same as they, while we were

simultaneously most definitely treated as the Other. They might have considered

this being polite, but to us, it was pain, unseen as far as we were concerned,

unacknowledged, unimportant to them, but everything to us. Connecticut,

indeed the America of that day, had a wonderful reputation – just as Sweden still

does. The world believed this a wonderful place to be, but there was a major

dissonance between this glorious reputation and our living, insidious reality.

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Living this dissonance, along with the continual aggressions large and small, that

are the daily diet of despised minorities, was hugely frustrating, increasingly

infuriating, and a major contributing factor to my radicalization; just as it

factored into the attitudes of young black men ready to kill or die over the notion

of personal respect that had been reduced to a pair of sport shoes. But there’s

nothing remarkable about this. Indeed the arc of these frustrations are as

dependable as the laws of physics.

Almost 65 years ago, Harlem’s unofficial poet laureate Langston Hughes

verbalized this arc with the words:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore – and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over – like a sugary sweet?

Maybe it just sags/like a heavy lead.

Or does it explode?

In these speeded-up days, with so many images of both aspirational life and

retaliatory violence so readily available -- and not without ongoing provocation

-- the tendency is to explode, as has happened in Ferguson, Missouri this year, in

Stockholm, last year, in London and Paris a few years ago. The list goes on and

sadly will go on, but what, you may be asking does all this have to do with

Western classical music?

In the words of my dear friend Peter Sellars upon receipt of this year’s Polar

Prize, “Music isn’t just about itself. It’s about everything.. business and politics,

prisons and refugee camps. It’s everything we’re hoping for. If it’s not here yet,

it’s coming, with more justice, balance and precision.”

Music might well have been with us before speech. It is fundamental to who

were are as human beings and in the sharing of its experience, in the listening

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and the playing, we are joined, we are healed. In acknowledgment and

celebration of this healing power, the Chinese ideogram for medicine is an

ornamentation upon the ideogram for music; for in music we are working

towards and achieving harmony (however that is defined), sometimes easily,

sometimes with more effort, but it’s always out there and knowable.

The current impulse to cleave more desperately to tribal identities, trying to

push back against any number of Others is self-defeating in this day and age. We

are joined together. We could take the image of Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in

The Defiant Ones as our avatar, though chained together fighting one another,

dragging one another to certain destruction despite our common destinies; but

would it not the affirmation of shared music-making be a preferable approach to

our time? To intertwine rationally, emotionally, physically and spiritually via

one of man’s greatest joys. In the words of French-residing Lebanese author

Amin Maalouf, forming our individual, community and national identities not just

“vertically” through our ancestors, religious communities and popular traditions,

but also “horizontally” transmitted to us by our contemporaries and by the age

that we live in.

Music can be a mighty tool in this adaptation, just bringing people together to do

something that is innate to our species, providing a shared language when words

are missing or inadequate, providing a structure, even a roadmap, while policies

flounder. Without wasting time, energy and acrimony parsing what is

appropriate to which group. The Berwaldhallen could be in the forefront of

developing ways for all of Stockholm’s disparate communities to find string

common cause together. Through music. Clearing the way and Just Doing It with

commitment and gusto, its many counterpoints and harmonies showing all of us

the way; slowly perhaps, but steadily and with much joy, towards a more perfect

union.

Thank you.

© Candace Allen

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