Tag Archives: high culture

Alternative cultural histories, Dvořák and American music

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I have always enjoyed the music of composer Antonín Dvořák. I am familiar with most of his compositions, starting as a kid listening to Symphony #9 over and over to finding many favorites later.

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What if American music had followed his lead in weaving American songs, particularly Black music, into classical compositions? I am finishing up the recent book Dvorak’s Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. The publisher’s description:

In 1893 the composer Antonin Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble” school of American classical music based on the searing “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would found popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall.

Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a “new paradigm” that makes room for Black composers including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Dawson, and Florence Price to redefine the classical canon.

Horowitz argues American classical music ignored and sidelined Black composers and music. Is there an alternative history that could have occurred?

While this falls out of bounds of typical academic research, it can be useful at times to think about ways events and narratives could have gone. In “”Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy,” Max Weber said sociology is interested in “on the one hand the relationships and the cultural significance of individual events in their contemporary manifestations and on the other the causes of their being historically so and not otherwise.”

Horowitz hints at least three ways an alternative timeline could have gone: (1) more classical musicians attuned to American songs and culture rather than turning to European forms and/or modernism; (1) more recognition and knowledge about Black composers; (2) the inclusion of jazz in classical music and American culture more broadly; and (3) more classical music attuned to and drawing on American songs and culture rather than turning to European forms and/or modernism.

If these things had happened, what might be different? As a big fan of the Beatles, I think of ways that their music was directly influenced by numerous American Black rock ‘n’ roll artists. And they were not alone; so did Elvis and the Rolling Stones and others. Yet, when they presented their music as white artists, would the reception have been different if Black music had a more prominent role in the classical world starting in the late 1800s?

There is a lot to consider here and I look forward to finishing the book and exploring more of the music Horowitz write about.

You can find great restaurants in the suburbs?!?

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The New York Times reports on good restaurants in unexpected locations:

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Jalea’s owners, the siblings Mimi and Andrew Cisneros, recognized the risk in choosing this quaint street over a city known for its vibrant restaurant scene. But they saw opportunities in the suburbs that they wouldn’t find in St. Louis. Yes, the rent was lower. And St. Charles, where the Cisneroses spent their teenage years, is also one of the fastest-growing counties in Missouri…

There is also less competition than in the city, they said. Because St. Charles is a small community, the two believe they can make a bigger impact here. With the lower overhead costs, Mr. Cisneros, 29, said he felt much freer to experiment with flavors. (He runs the kitchen, and Ms. Cisneros, 30, oversees operations.) Since the restaurant opened in December, they have been encouraged to see that locals are eager to try Peruvian food.

Media coverage of restaurants in the United States has long centered on cities, while suburbs are most often associated with restaurant chains. But Jalea is one of many independent restaurants — including Roots Southern Table in Farmers Branch, Texas; Travail Kitchen and Amusements in Robbinsdale, Minn.; and Noto in St. Peters, Mo. — that are raising the collective aspirations of the local culinary culture and turning suburbs into dining destinations…

While not all suburbs are alike, in general, suburban planners are not well versed in how best to support independent restaurants, said Dr. Samina Raja, a professor of urban planning at the University at Buffalo.Because they don’t understand that these businesses often have a shorter financial runway than large restaurant groups or chains, the planners are less likely to provide economic development grants or loosen zoning restrictions.

So suburban eating is not all Olive Garden and Chik-Fil-A and whatever other chain restaurant, fast causal, or fast food place is on the nearest main road?

This article attributes much of the change to what the suburbs have become in recent decades: complex suburbia with more diversity, more cultural and entertainment options, and growing populations. And there are concerns about whether suburbs are well-suited for fine dining in terms of regulations and

My biggest question upon reading this story is how long it might take to develop new narratives about where great restaurants are located. If there are indeed fine dining establishments in suburbs across the United States, does this become recognized or are city restaurants still drawing the bulk of attention? This could depend on a lot of factors – where are restaurant critics based, stereotypes about cities and suburbs, the number of independent restaurants per capita in different locations, etc. – but I imagine it would take some time to shift. Even as the article recognizes significant shifts in suburbs that mean they are no longer just retreats of white and wealthy people, is this widely known and told?

Foodism as the newest part of high culture

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A commentator in the New York Times suggests “food [has] replaced art as high culture“:

But what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen, the great social critic of the Gilded Age, called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

Young men once headed to the Ivy League to acquire the patina of high culture that would allow them to move in the circles of power — or if they were to the manner born, to assert their place at the top of the social heap by flashing what they already knew. Now kids at elite schools are inducted, through campus farmlets, the local/organic/sustainable fare in dining halls and osmotic absorption via their classmates from Manhattan or the San Francisco Bay Area, into the ways of food. More and more of them also look to the expressive possibilities of careers in food: the cupcake shop, the pop-up restaurant, the high-end cookie business. Food, for young people now, is creativity, commerce, politics, health, almost religion…

Like art, food is also a genuine passion that people like to share with their friends. Many try their hands at it as amateurs — the weekend chef is what the Sunday painter used to be — while avowing their respect for the professionals and their veneration for the geniuses. It has developed, of late, an elaborate cultural apparatus that parallels the one that exists for art, a whole literature of criticism, journalism, appreciation, memoir and theoretical debate. It has its awards, its maestros, its televised performances. It has become a matter of local and national pride, while maintaining, as culture did in the old days, a sense of deference toward the European centers and traditions — enriched at a later stage, in both cases, by a globally minded eclecticism.

Just as aestheticism, the religion of art, inherited the position of Christianity among the progressive classes around the turn of the 20th century, so has foodism taken over from aestheticism around the turn of the 21st. Now we read the gospel according, not to Joyce or Proust, but to Michael Pollan and Alice Waters.

This is intriguing but I wonder if it is as pervasive as this commentator suggests. I’m thinking of Bourdieu’s ideas that certain cultural tastes became part of a habitus for different classes. Thus, something like food or art or music has to be part of a lifestyle and is often formally taught. For example, high culture as art and music (and perhaps film and more popular music these days – and we might throw in literary classics) is taught in many colleges. Do the same colleges formally teach about food in the same way? Do lower levels of school teach about food? Foodism might be present in many social circles and is increasingly so in the media but I wonder if it has reached the same level of formal training just yet.

Also, if foodism has really ascended to this level, what does this say about the current state of art?

The ubiquity of the standing ovation

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My wife and I recently had the chance to see Les Misérables in Chicago. At the end of the show, the crowd gave a standing ovation. It seems that this is no longer unusual: whether it is a high school play, an orchestra concert, or a big-time musical, the crowd gives a standing ovation. Is this a new social norm?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, here is the definition of a standing ovation: “a rousing ovation conferred by an audience standing as a mark of enthusiastic approval, esp. after a speech.” But I have always thought that a standing ovation is not just given when the crowd enthusiastically approves; rather, it is reserved for special occasions, when the performance or speaker has done a tremendous job. This more restrictive definition is supported by Wikipedia: “A standing ovation is a form of applause where members of a seated audience stand up while applauding. This is done on special occasions by an audience to show their approval and is done after extraordinary performances of particularly high acclaim…Standing ovations are considered to be a special honor.” If this is the social norm, how can every performance be worthy of a standing ovation?

So why might crowds be more willing to give more frequent standing ovations? A few thoughts:

1. It has lost its status as something done for a special or noteworthy performance. It is now perfunctory. Crowds think they are supposed to give a standing ovation no matter what.

2. A more nuanced explanation: in the case of something like Les Misérables, the average attendee does not know whether the actors have given a good performance or not. This is a world-renowned musical, the attendees have paid a lot of money to attend, and so it must have been good and deserving of a standing ovation. The key here is that the average person can’t easily distinguish the quality of many performances and is left to judge the performance by other factors, such as its status. Since the theater or going to the orchestra is a rare event for many and it is accompanied by ideas about high culture and fancier dress, the standing ovation may just seem like the right thing to do.

(This is supported by an incident after the musical: a teenage couple was walking out and one said, “Epinone was just terrible.” The other said, “Yeah, her singing was bad.” A few of us who overheard this just smiled and looked at each other. How were we to know whether this was true or not? Presumably, one would have had to see this musical multiple times or listened to the music many times before a judgment could be made.)

If the standing ovation is now normal, what can a crowd do to show extreme enthusiasm or to mark an excellent performance? A few options: a prolonged applause or loud whistling or yelling along with the clapping.