Ray, And what a lovely reply!
Harry ******************************************** Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net ******************************************** -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ray Evans Harrell Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 5:01 PM To: Keith Hudson; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Where has music gone? What a lovely post Keith, For me it was the Brahm's Requiem and the first time singing with the orchestra. We had plenty of first class choruses in Tulsa but never had I experienced the orchestra with the descending three part women's chords with the resounding D pedal point. It was an important moment but I will never forget the absolutely sublime chords as the chorus rose higher and higher in Schoenberg's magnificent Friede auf Erde. Peace on Earth or the first time I really "got" the Beethoven Ode to Joy which seemed musty the first time I heard it. It took many hearings for me to crawl into its eccentricities. I will never forget the first singer that I taught that opening baritone solo too. I almost cried because it had come to mean so much to me on the reservation. Or playing the trombone in the Prelude to Act III Lohengrin. On and on. That is the place where I experienced community in the non-Indian world. Peter Drucker imagined the ideal of the modern corporation as an orchestra. If you've never played in one or even sung in a chorus you have no hope of knowing what he meant. The closest you can get is the imaginary "higher beings" in the old star trek series or ESP. Reading your article I agree that we must stress amateur musicians once again but it must be secular. It never left our churches over here for the concert hall. The Concert Halls have died while the churches have flourished. You can experience more music of more variety in church in America than any other place. Quite the opposite from Europe. On the other hand such live and participatory music has been cut off from the non-Christian people who do not have this music available in the secular world except in dead recordings. Don't get me wrong. I love my Abbado tapes and there are many singers that I never would have heard except on recording but it was singing on stage with the Richard Tuckers, Cornell McNeil, George London, Anna Moffo, or watching the great Cherokee ballerina Yvonne Chouteau from the stage that touched my heart and opened my soul. I can put all the missing parts into the tapes because I played in orchestras, sang in choruses and performed on the stage with the greatest singers in the world from the time I left the reservation at 17. On the reservation almost everybody did some kind of art. We all sang, played instruments and did the traditional crafts. Today many families maintain their ties by doing crafts together and traveling around to the Powwow summer festivals to dance and sell the crafts that they make during the winter months. A Doctor once asked me if there were any great American Indian operas or works of art. I mentioned the Deer Dance and the Navajo "sings" but he thought that was strange. Opera means "work" and is a multimedia work of painting, dance, instruments and of course singing. The Deer Dance is a nine day festival filled with all of the above and a Navajo "sing" is a many day solo tour de force of design, dance , singing and drama, all for the same reason as the original Greek dramas at Epidoris. Healing the soul and the community. We have forgotten the reason for the music in the first place and forgotten how to feel. We have also forgotten that it takes great skill and development to do both in the more advanced disciplines. That is the one place where I disagree with your article. I find the music of the composers that he thought failures to be as beautiful and enriching as the "old favorites" that he mentions as well. In fact I find the newer works indicative of the time from which they are drawn and that for me is what a large part of it is all about. I'll never forget an audience weeping at a Holocaust minimalist piece at the Guggenheim. It was minimal, simple in concept but incredible in execution. The dancer ran up and down a ramp as fast as she could for almost thirty minutes. The ramp was wood and resounded with her feet as a drum as the history of the holocaust was projected on Frank Lloyd Wright's white walls of the museum. At first it was annoying, in the end the actual devastating fatigue of the dancer as she simply ran up and down, changing directions at each end was a inescapable for us as for her. Her task (a part of the aleatory art form since it was filled with chance decisions unthought before hand) and the reality of the banality of her task along with the inescapable reality translated as being trapped, courageous, determined and for a moment connected us to the reality of a truly trapped individual with our being guards who made her continue to the end. The parallel was devastating as the entire audience wept no matter what people they were from. What are the physical forms of the theater and their meanings? The orchestra is the underworld that feeds the themes of life to the people on the stage while the audience is the angels or demons who determine the success or failure of actual performance. Something that we learn about life and transfer into our own world as humanity. Who has not enjoyed and learned from Baron Ochs and the Marshallin in the last act of Der Rosencavellier as he realizes that she has had a tryst with Octavian but is unable to turn it to his own advantage and the heavenly trio that follows as the Marshallin gives up her 17 year old lover to his new wife? What do we learn about the culture of the Ottoman Empire and the little turbaned servant who leaves nothing behind to be used against his mistress at the end? Last night I went to the "Wagner like" movie "Return of the King" the third of the Tolkien trilogy. It was thrilling although more than a little stereotypical and racist in the attitudes of Tolkien its author. The inferior human races were of course the only turbaned and black faces in the film while the elves were gorgeous white faces mostly blond. Remember this wasn't historical Europe but the pre-world "Middle Earth." Of course it was wonderful to see the little hobbits dreaming of undiscovered American Indian strawberries and bringing in a huge pumpkin also developed by American Indian agricultural scientists not in the pre-world but in the historical present. But those are little things probably not thought about in Tolkien's English world. But it was a grand story with great computer human mixes and all on the huge I Max 5 story tall screen. Fairy Liv Tyler speaking Gaelic was gorgeous and the mountains of New Zealand are amazing. The orchestra was fun and the fight scenes were OK, although nothing of the kind of devastation that I felt reading them years ago. The little Epilogue at the end I found over long and cloying but the whole film, after the initial enjoyment of the effects, left me with both admiration and an uneasy feeling. The good Sam and the evil Smeagal whose altar ego is gollum same sound as the Golum in Jewish literature. I suspect Tolkien was well aware of the Dybbuk and the Golum. Given the other stereotyping and the obvious connection of the Ring to power which easily could be material power considering "eating the forest" and creating the hellish factory which created war machine in film II. The Ring could easily be connected to industrialization and economic power and poor Smeagol was taken in and destroyed and turned into Gollum by it. Does all of that story make you as queasy as it does me? I've heard the story before to describe Jewish people. Having worked with a lot of European legends not to mention Shakespeare and the stereotypes from The Merchant of Venice to Beckmesser in Meistersinger, I felt that Tolkien whether deliberately or subconsciously was exercising a cartoon stereotype that I didn't want particularly in my own head. I don't mind Beckmesser or Carmen because they are from another generation which was more provincial and did not know what we know today. But seeing this film come out in the 21st century with these hidden characters I found offensive. Instead of discussing it on the various sites on the internet dedicated to Tolkien, it is treated as if it didn't exist. I spoke today to a Jewish student who had a strong reaction to the first of the three films and refused to see the other two. It took me three to take offense but sometimes I'm slow. So I went home and watched the real thing, Wagner, Lohengrin. With the passionate Abbado in the pit and the Spanish Domingo as the Knight of the Holy Grail. I listened to all of the blatant stereotyping and it made me see our Western ancestors once more, clearly. Wagner's music was unbelievable and those amazing preludes conducted with genius by Abbado. Even on video it was thrilling. The richness of the score, the singing and the commitment of the artists made me see the potential of these human characters of Brabant while understanding how such "artistic souls" could have decimated my people with impunity and then turned on themselves in their racism in the 20th century. More than Tolkien's simple tale with a lot of violence and crude subhuman characters and Godlike white folks, this complicated story of secrecy and the complexity of what betrayal meant, the loss of power through transparency is deceptively "simple." The power of secrecy whether benign or evil and the importance of trust in the same way that Orpheus "blew it" with Euridice or Coyote did with his daughter here our myths. In Lohengrin the Gods of the Forest are the evil with the priestess Ortrud standing in as the revenge element against the more "modern" Knight Templar Lohengren. That was good religion versus bad religion with chauvinistic culture thrown in for spice, but this "racist issue awareness" is new. What became accepted was the "problem" of the other, the conquered, the inferior, the Smeagal the gollum, the evil spirit. Blacks moved from the pre-history riders of Mastodons in Tolkien to the little black turbaned footboy in Rosencavallier. Rosencavallier is older but the point is still the same. He moves from terrorist to controlled child. Racism then is diffused. Its just economics and Anti-semitism, racism, religious intolerance becomes a tool for politics. How easily we complain about racism in politics like David Brooks, in today's NYTimes, assigning anti-Semitism to those who see a connection between the writers who cut their teeth in the Jewish Commentary magazine and who to a man have provided a rational for the war in Iraq. Calling them Jewish is true since most of them wrote for a conservative Jewish magazine. Calling them Jewish in their cause is not true unless you have never heard of Tikkun which is more representitive of American Jewery although most Jews in America support Israel. Wrapping neo-conservative in Judaism is just as racist as wrapping Tom DeLay and GWB in the American flag or worse Christianity. But racism is a real issue and it goes far beyond such trivializing. The attitude towards Iraq is genuinely culturally chauvinistic since the people advocating the war are appalling in their ignorance of Islamic culture or even the Arab languages. It is one thing to indiscriminately retaliate against a state or group that attacks you as in 9/11, it is quite another just to pick someone and pronounce them more evil than the rest in spite of their history and their relationship to you. Death is death. If you kill children from the air or throw them off buildings they are still dead and in the service of what you want to accomplish. Both are evil acts. And I do believe in evil. But I am a man of the theater. What has been missed by those who do not know their heritage, and thus their ancestors first hand, by participating in the same sounds, rhythms, words and feelings from times so long ago? Is self knowledge not important and does not such artistic experience bring us idenity and knowledge of our history? How poor is value when it is determined solely by pure monetary profit? How degrading is it to society when the ancestors are made available only to the wealthy? That is the gift of the communities of faith to their congregations. But the glue that would cement a society in all American communities is missing unless they are Christian and can hear and perform the great Western Masterworks in Church. Thanks Keith for bringing this Future work of art to the list. Ray Evans Harrell --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). 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