Category: MUS 113

  • Can Opera Be Woke?

    Verdi’s 1887 opera Otello is based on Shakespeare’s great tragedy Othello, or the Moor of Venice. Othello, a heroic general who is manipulated by his aide-de-camp, Iago, into his tragic events leading to his own destruction, is a role considered by many to be the pinnacle of a classically-trained actor’s career. As such, well into the twentieth century,…

  • Don Giovanni Goes to Prison

    Two years ago, Pier Paolo Polzonetti, an Italian-born music professor at Notre Dame University, wrote an essay about teaching Don Giovanni to a music history class that he taught inside a maximum-security prison. His essay, “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison: Teaching Opera Behind Bars,” was published on the blog Musicology Now, run by the American Musicology…

  • Black Men Play (with) the Classics

    More cross-cultural encounters: The great jazz pianist Jason Moran (above right) plays one of the late piano works of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), the Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2, with his trio, the Bandwagon.  Listen to what happens. The piece as Brahms wrote it:

  • Poem: “Black Boys Play the Classics”

    (Photo: Johannes Brahms, 1833-1897.) Another example of “complicating” the repertoire. Is this poem about cultural appropriation or cross-cultural encounter? Black Boys Play the Classics BY TOI DERRICOTTE The most popular “act” in Penn Station is the three black kids in ratty sneakers & T-shirts playing two violins and a cello—Brahms. White men in business suits…

  • The Appropriation of Cultures

    Listen to a wonderful live reading of Percival Everett’s 1996 short story “The Appropriation of Cultures”: This is the song, “Dixie,” that Everett’s character Daniel sings. It was written in 1859, and was adopted, with additional lyrics, as the national anthem of the Confederacy. Perhaps the way that Daniel sings “Dixie” sounded something like jazz…