2020 is the year of #NotBeethoven

So last night and into this new year I listened to Dora Pejačević’s Symphony in F sharp minor, Op. 41 (1918) in prep for what I’m calling my year of #NotBeethoven.* This is in response to Some. Of The. Pushback. To. making 2020 the year to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

White Males Orchestras and America’s Other Orchestras

A couple years ago I discovered a series of pieces title “America’s Other Orchestras” at Arab America and it helped me to solidify some thoughts I’ve been having about how we have discussions, and the narratives we create, about Orchestras and Classical Music. These are thoughts that were percolating at least since I first wrote a couple times about the Kennedy Center’s American Voices Festival back in 2013.

Classical Music, the Perpetual Foreigner Trope, and Colonialism

So a few days ago I started a thread on twitter about Classical Music and Colonialism. I’ve never done twitter thread before–never really considered using the social media platform as a way to convey more in-depth ideas. After having spent some time this past year following a few twitter users pretty faithfully and seeing how they’ve used threads I decided I wanted to try it out. The thread has gotten mostly positive responses and shares on various social media.

Thread: Classical Music, the Perpetual Foreigner Trope, and Colonialism

I've been thinking how we discuss Classical Music. I've been in lively & robust discussions about Diversity in CM only to be derailed by the "That's not really Classical Music" trope.

— Jon Silpayamanant (@Silpayamanant) December 28, 2018

Diversity in Classical Music vs Diversity of Classical Music

Diversity in Classical Music has been a hot topic lately, especially given the recent announcements of upcoming seasons of organizations and the pushback many are getting recently. With the introduction of the Women Composer Database and the Composer Diversity Project, therea a push for aggregating disparate lists of composers to decenter the White Male Canon by highlighting all the Women and PoC (People of Color) composers that have long been existing in the tradition but have been systemically excluded from it except in the most tokenistic of ways.

Decolonizing the Musical Mind

A few weeks ago, I started re-reading Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) and for some reason this time reading it brought me back to the time when I quit playing the cello (right out of music school). A couple weeks ago, I mentioned here on my page, that I was slowly saying farewell to most Western Music (I’ll have to qualify that at another time). I mentioned some of those reasons in my latest blog post a couple months ago, and was in the middle of a couple of posts clarifying some things (one of which is this post).