Category: MUS 111

  • Can A White Girl Sing Selena?

    April 16 is a state holiday in Texas: Selena Day. Who was Selena? Selena was, is, and, were I to guess, will remain for eternity the most beloved female of all time in the Latino community. (Second place is the Virgin Mary, if you’re looking for context.) . . . She looked like (a more attractive…

  • Blackface/Yellowface

    We’ve talked a little about the longstanding practice in opera of white singers “blacking up” to play characters of color. This practice has only begun to be thought of as controversial in our own century. For now, the least offensive choices for opera producers are to 1) cast singers whose race/ethnicity matches the race/ethnicity of…

  • Variations on a Theme

    (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann.) Robert Schumann, no. 4 of Bunte Blätter (Colored Leaves), op. 99. In 1853, his wife, Clara (Wieck) Schumann, wrote a set of variations on this piece. The following year, Schumann was confined to the insane asylum at Endenich. Clara, who gave birth to their seventh child that May, was forbidden to…

  • Clair de lune

    Nuit du carnaval (Henri Rousseau, 1886). In an art song, there are many layers of meaning. There is the meaning of the sounds of the music. There is the meaning of the words of the text. There is also the meaning of the sounds of the words themselves. Listen to the sounds of the text read in French.…

  • The Alliances that Led to WWI

    Europe in 1914. The multiple alliances that led to the European conflagration This sums it up:    

  • Is Absolute Music Possible?

    Or does music always have an invisible program? Consider Johannes Brahms, the ostensible champion of absolute music. Brahms as an old man, the way he’s most often pictured. Brahms in 1853, the year he met the Schumanns. The night of their first meeting, Robert Schumann wrote in his diary: “Visit from Brahms (a genius).” Soon…

  • Going Home

    The second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony no. 9 in E minor (“From the New World”). What is the instrument that plays the poignant solo? It was thought that Dvorak took this melody from an African-American spiritual that his student and assistant, the composer Harry T. Burleigh, sang for him.  (For more on Harry T. Burleigh…

  • The Problem with Wagner

    As you will recall, Robert Schumann founded and edited the influential music magazine Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.  In 1850, the Neue Zeitschrift published an essay by a pseudonymous author called “Das Judentum in der Music” (Jewishness in Music), which alleged that Jews, being not only culturally and religiously different, but also biologically — that is, racially — different from gentile Germans,…

  • Classical Music Can Save Your Life

    It saved this violist’s life during the Great Depression. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen told the great African-American mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad in the 1970s that her singing might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience. Miss Conrad was one of the students who broke the color barrier at the University of…

  • Pictures of Liszt

    Franz Liszt was one of the most frequently painted and photographed people of the nineteenth century. Here are just a few images. Why do you suppose this was?