The Cancellation of Classical Music
Heather Mac Donald has written a terrific piece in Spiked about how the hysterical crusade against ‘whiteness’ in the upper echelons of the American cultural establishment is threatening to destroy classical music. Here’s how it begins:
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 Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa, I due Figaro, showed her influence in stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.
Vaughn was committed to championing minority musicians – so 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 17th Century nun.
The mob cares nothing for facts, though. On June 17th 2020, Vaughn was teaching a class via Zoom on musical theatre. An unidentified participant, whose name and image were blacked out, asked her, out of the blue, how she could justify having produced Franz Lehár’s allegedly racist operetta, Das Land des Lächelns (The Land of Smiles), several years earlier. (The racial sin, in this case, was allegedly against Asians.) Vaughn cut the questioner off for raising an 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 production: that Vaughn had cast a black singer as a butler, thus supposedly proving her racism. For good measure, the petition threw in unspecified “reports” of “homophobic aggression and body shaming”. The petition quickly garnered 1,800 signatures. Phoney Instagram accounts under Vaughn’s name suddenly appeared on the web, containing fake inflammatory material
Vaughn’s colleagues, cowering from the mob, let her twist in the wind. Almost none came to her defence. Vaughn was fired and replaced by a black male.
Worth reading in full.
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I can no longer bring myself to read ‘Spiked’, sadly. I feel quite bitter about the treatment of Andrew Bridgen and I don’t know how else to express my displeasure, apart from unsubscribing.
But Heather MacDonald is the one writing here and not Spiked. They just publish what she has written.
Spiked have been very flaky throughout. Tom Slater banged the drum for lockdowns. Brendan O’Neil appeared on a BBC R4 programme slagging off vaccine sceptics. Fraser Myles then produced the AB hit piece.
Fundamentally, they’ve drifted closer to the mainstream, having started as Marxists they’re now very conventional Tories.
Marxists – Tories.. what’s the difference. None, as far as I can make out!
Isn’t that precisely what got Andrew Bridgen cancelled, with him platforming words from another person 😵💫
Agreed, but let’s look at the content, not the means by which it is published. And the writer is not Fraser.
I wondered when ‘they’ were going to come for classical music, and here it is. Good article. I was particularly struck by this quote:
‘As the lies about classical music accumulate, not one conductor, soloist or concertmaster has rebutted them. These influential performers know that Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and quartets are not about race, but about pushing beyond ordinary human experience into an unexplored universe of unsettling silences and space. They know that Schubert’s song cycles are not about race, but about yearning, disappointment and fleeting joy. They know that the Saint Matthew Passion is not about race, but about crushing sorrow that cries out in pain before finally finding consolation. To reduce everything in human experience to the ever more tedious theme of alleged racial oppression is narcissism. This music is not about you or me. It is about something grander than our narrow, petty selves. But narcissism, the signal characteristic of our time, is shrinking our cultural inheritance to a nullity.’
Didn’t the anti-white racists in the German Empire claim that Beethoven was Black?
So now we have to put up with Black fascists and anti-white Racists?
I think not.
If they want a color war, they will get one.
Some certainly seem to want a war
It seems inevitable to me
Well said Wydwoman. You would think the classical performing and appreciating group of people would have backed Dona Vaughn, and it is wrong that she has lost her position over this, and I hope there is a better run establishment that can use her talents. On the other hand, it may not be wrong that the replacement is a black male, but it should have been handled much better.
As I posted on “News Round-Up” regarding the horrible whiteness of English gardens story:
“For me the interesting question is why. Why do some people think or pretend to think that this is a “problem”? Why do people feel the need to attack our cultural and scientific achievements? Is it perhaps some combination of jealousy and embarrassment?”
She should have just taught about rap ‘music’ instead. With all of the F-bombs, bitch-bombs, ”N-words”, mysogynist, sexually explicit, rapey lyrics and glorification of violence and graphic details of killings, I think this sort of inoffensive material would have gone down a storm with the snowflake ( oops, racist. My bad ) students. Throw a bit of white hate in there too and you’ve got yourself a badass, motherf*ckin’ masterpiece.
I quite like some rap though as a genre it does suffer from the things you describe (some people may see those as plus points of course). As I posted on the NR thread to do with gardens, why attack white culture instead of exalting non-white culture? Is it because exalting non-white culture hasn’t worked?
Yep, I also like some rap, more old-school, mainstream stuff now though, so it’d be foolish to go all ‘Mary Whitehouse’ and diss an entire genre. I also liked when Eminem infiltrated the scene because he didn’t try to adopt the whole ‘Gangsta’ image and took a different, spoof-like approach with his stuff, which was fresh and I think made him accepted more by the rap crowd. Yes he was pretty fly for a white guy!
But part of me’s thinking would I have liked rap so much if I’d actually tried to understand the lyrics, because most the time I didn’t have a clue what they were on about and just enjoyed the music. lol Perhaps that’s why they don’t make what they’re rapping especially clear to the listener, it flies under the radar. I think a catchy melody/beat/sample can hide a multitude of sins a lot of the time and there can be no disputing the fact artists are getting mega rich and famous saying some really distasteful and nasty stuff. I don’t see a whole lot of pearl-clutching going on in response to that though.
I think Eminem can be quite clever though I don’t agree with his politics and I don’t recall him speaking out against the covid nonsense.
Quite like Run DMC, Akala (though again don’t agree with a lot of what he says), De La Soul, Tone Loc can be very funny though somewhat full of himself (though he’s hardly the only pop star who falls into that category).
Haha, a bit of Funky Cold Medina, because Three is the Magic Number ( no more, no less ) 😉 you’re speaking my language there man! 🙂 I guess it’s like that, and that’s the way it is..
One thing I know is that life is short
So listen up homeboy, give this a thought
The next time someone’s teaching why don’t you get taught?
Heehee, love it! 🙂 OK gotta dash to the gym to get my Sunday morning sweat on, all this talk of fatness nextdoor..
I ( don’t ) like big butts and I cannot lie..
Funky Cold Medina contains what the woke would describe as transphobic sentiments
James Lindsay (https://newdiscourses.com/) is an excellent source for anyone wanting to understand the structure, origin, destination, motivation and psychology of this and similar crusades. It’s not going away any time soon.
Why should classical music escape the crazy sweeping the world? It doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone surely?
Over the last year hundreds of artists, musicians, dancers and classical music performances have been ‘cancelled’, because they had the temerity to be born Russian….
The world has gone nuts…
Wanting to get rid of Classical Music because it is the music of white people from hundreds of years ago is like a vegetarian wanting rid of hedgehogs because they eat lettuce.
At first I thought the banner in the picture above said Defend White Supremacy.
An interesting new take in the issue.
I’m glad Toby has brought this to our attention. It is unfortunate that classical music has very little interest to young people not involved in it, and a group of ordinary people would not include many classical music fans. They don’t know what they are missing. I would say I was not a strong fan until my daughter started her course of classical singing at Bath Spa Uni. This weekend, we went to watch her and fellow students perform in an opera in Bath I thought it was great, and the students performed very well, but the audience was not as large as it deserved. There was no political theme involved, and there was an element of interaciallity to the performers. There are quite a number of black and Asian performers in the upper echelons of all classical genres. Many of these performers can choose the music they perform, and often chose the traditional classical music that seems to be vilified by these woke nutters.
There is a lack of courage of too many to defend others against the mob.