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.

The Invisible Hand of the Great White Male Musical and Artistic Canons

In my previous post I discussed how ridiculously easy it would be to avoid the Art of Monstrous Men, and the post before that discusses how to Decolonize the Musical Mind. The past couple of days I’ve come across some interesting pieces about diversity in the arts (or lack thereof). The first was a piece about bringing the art of women, long buried in storage of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, to light; the second was a piece about how the High Museum in Atlanta tripled its Nonwhite audience in two years by, well, increasing the diversity in its programming, staff, and marketing; and the third is a rebuttal of one of the myths justifying the Great White Canon of Classical Music.

How Easy is it to Avoid the Art of Monstrous Men?

Actually, it’s ridiculously easy.

I’ll just stick to music, since that’s what I usually focus on in this blog. And let me qualify the “ridiculously easy” by stating that I’m referring to the work of folks that may only be scratching the surface of those that remain unaccused–there may very well (and very likely) that there are many more “Monstrous Men” out there. Granted, we may all have different definitions of what constitutes “Monstrous Men” but expand or contract that definition for yourself at your leisure.

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).