The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating article on Antonin Dvorak's prescient statement to the New York Herald in May 1893: "In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music." Contemporary responses to Dvorak's statement called on the horrific eugenic theories of the time even to the point of characterizing his own "Slavic" classical music as "racially" inferior (thus rendering his judgment of American culture flawed):
In the 1890s — the decade of Dvorak in America — music reviews in the Boston daily press routinely employed the adjectives "barbarian" and "primitive" in "scientific" assessments of compositions by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and other "Slavs" (in contradistinction to "Anglo-Saxon" masters occupying a higher evolutionary rung). Dvorak was viewed in Boston as an unwanted interloper. His view that "red" and "black" Americans could be considered emblematic or representative was thought naïve at best.
The entire article is well worth reading and studying.
"...'scientific' assessments of compositions..."
Oh, dear. Can't we somehow generalize the Establishment Clause to discourage this kind of crap, too? I don't suppose so...
Posted by: HA HA HA | January 11, 2008 at 07:47 AM
I think the old Russian joke about socialism applies here as well, "If it's so scientific, why didn't they try it out on mice first?"
Posted by: gail | January 11, 2008 at 07:56 AM