Musical Events
by Alex Ross
June 29, 2020
On May 27th,
two days after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd,
Anthony McGill, the principal clarinettist of the New York Philharmonic,
posted a recording of himself playing “America the Beautiful.”
It is a rendition with a difference. McGill begins by swelling slowly
into an initial G, from silence. When he reaches the portion of the
melody matching the words “America, America,” he changes a high
E-natural to an E-flat, thereby wrenching the key from C major to C
minor. He remains in the minor mode to the end. Then he goes down on
both knees, his clarinet behind his back, as if shackled, and bends his
head. The video, titled “TakeTwoKnees,” lasts about ninety seconds, but
it has the weight of a symphonic statement.
McGill
later recounted that he had been searching for some way to respond to
Floyd’s killing. His wife, Abby, suggested “America the Beautiful,” and
as he was trying out the song on his clarinet he played a wrong note and
slipped into the minor, at which point he found his message. “We
shouldn’t pretend like life and the world is always major because we
want it to be,” he told NPR. “Sometimes life is minor. It goes off its
true melody. It goes off of that simple, beautiful melody that we all
expect it to be.” Jimi Hendrix’s dissonant fantasia on “The
Star-Spangled Banner” set a precedent for this kind of politically
charged musical commentary, but McGill’s gesture has an eerie stillness,
almost like a meditation. It has inspired a torrent of responses from
other musicians. Billy Hunter, the principal trumpeter of the
Metropolitan Opera, has offered a rendition of the national anthem that
goes silent at the words “free” and “brave.”
African-Americans are
severely underrepresented in classical music, although you wouldn’t
necessarily know it from the frequency with which people of color are
now featured in promotional brochures. Online discussions in the wake of
nationwide Black Lives Matter protests have made clear how
uncomfortable the role of a black classical musician can be. One day,
with the collaboration of the Los Angeles Opera, the mezzo-soprano J’Nai
Bridges led a Zoom panel
on racial inequality with a distinguished group of colleagues: Julia
Bullock, Karen Slack, Lawrence Brownlee, Russell Thomas, and Morris
Robinson. After the singers described their reactions to Floyd’s killing
and their own fraught encounters with the police, they addressed
subtler but pervasive tensions in the opera world. Robinson spoke of the
“perpetual paranoia” that he felt as a six-foot-three,
three-hundred-pound black man: “I walk around every opera rehearsal I’ve
ever been to guarded, cognizant of the fact that my interaction needs
to be very public, in front of everyone and very innocuous. . . . This
practicing safe distance has always been a practice of mine.” He
revealed that he has never been hired by a black administrator, has
never shared the stage with a black director, and has never taken a cue
from a black conductor.
The
conversation became even more piercing when Bullock queried the very
gesture of gathering black singers to deliberate age-old racial
disparities. To her, it seemed a possible cover for inaction. “What are
we even doing here?” she asked. “We’ve had that conversation.”
Thomas—who, like the others, lost his principal work in March—declared
that one issue on his mind was whether he was going to have enough food
to feed his family. I watched the video twice, noting how my own nagging
unease affirmed the truth of what was being said. Brownlee made the
point with maximum directness: “Just like Alcoholics Anonymous, you have
to state and realize that you have a problem.” Classical music, which
is to say white classical music, has a problem.
The prevalent sensation of the world cracking in two—Willa Cather
said this of the year 1922, and it might be said of 2020 as well—is
palpable enough that I’ve been wondering how soon the rupture will leave
traces in the work of composers. The lack of any immediate opportunity
for performance has made it unlikely that composers will sit down to
write the hour-long symphony they’ve been meaning to tackle, yet the
coronavirus pandemic and its attendant isolation have already yielded
some notable experimental scores. The turn toward protest may inspire a
wave of work in a much different register. The strangeness of this
moment lies in how it has pulled people both toward an extreme
inwardness and toward an outward explosion of feeling. The radically
expanded vocabulary of music since 1900 is equipped to span that divide.
No comments:
Post a Comment