Category: Race

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Don Giovanni in the Hood

    All the trigger warnings. “Here’s how Peter Sellars describes his [updating of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni]: ‘There’s a rape and a murder in the first 90 seconds of Don Giovanni … It’s probably the greatest opera ever written. … Don Giovanni is an opera that, 200 years later, we’re still struggling to try to understand.’” (From a…

  • 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…