Discriminating Ears: Critical Receptions of Blackness in the Music of George Gershwin and William Grant Still

At the apex of their careers, composers George Gershwin and William Grant Still produced what they believed were their finest works: respectively, Porgy and Bess (1935), an opera by a white American composer about African American subjects, and Troubled Island (1949), an opera by an African American composer about Haitian subjects. However, both works fared poorly upon their premiere, with critics decrying Porgy and Bess and Troubled Island as “unoperatic.” Besides providing historical context to both operas, this paper argues that the critical rhetoric surrounding them was tinged by racialized notions of what musical “blackness” sounded like, or should sound like, to white ears. This paper focuses on critics’ coinage of “the cheap” or “popular” as a euphemism for music inspired by African American musical traditions like jazz, the blues, and spirituals. The paper concludes that, while the art music canon can be responsive to social justice movements, critics’ scorn of works like Porgy and Bess and Troubled Island contributes to the entrenchment of an implicitly racialized high–low musical dichotomy.

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Representing Australia to the Commonwealth in 1965: Aborigiana and Indigenous Performance

twentieth century music ◽

10.1017/s1478572219000331 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

pp. 3-22

Author(s):

AMANDA HARRIS

Keyword(s):

Performing Arts ◽

Aboriginal People ◽

Symphony Orchestra ◽

Historical Context ◽

Art Music ◽

Aboriginal Culture ◽

Colonial Theory ◽

Musical Traditions ◽

The Government ◽

The Right

AbstractIn 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre, comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing works by John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe. In examining the historical context for these negotiations, I demonstrate the direct relationship between the historical promotion of ‘Australianist’ art music composition that claimed to represent Aboriginal culture, and the denial of the right of representation to Aboriginal performers as owners of their musical traditions. Within the framing of Wolfe's settler colonial theory and ‘logic of elimination’, I suggest that appropriative Australian art music has directly sought to replace performances of Aboriginal culture by Aboriginal people, even while Aboriginal people have resisted replacement.

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Shift in racial communities impacted by COVID-19 in California

Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health ◽

10.1136/jech-2020-215148 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. jech-2020-215148

Author(s):

Raphael E Cuomo

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Asian American ◽

Linear Trend ◽

Correlation Coefficients ◽

Longitudinal Distribution ◽

County Level ◽

White American ◽

First Case ◽

Exponential Trend ◽

African American Communities

IntroductionSince the first case of COVID-19 was recorded in California, the geospatial distribution of disease cases has fluctuated over time. Given documented racial disparities in other parts of the country, longitudinal convergence of COVID-19 rates around race groups warrants assessment.MethodsCounty-level cases for COVID-19 were collected from the Johns Hopkins University, and racial distributions were collected from the American Community Survey. Pearson’s correlation coefficients were computed for each day since COVID-19 was first reported in California, and the longitudinal distribution of each race-specific set of correlation coefficients was assessed for stationarity, linear trend and exponential trend.ResultsEarlier in the outbreak, the distribution of COVID-19 was most highly correlated with Asian American communities; after approximately 100 days, the distribution of COVID-19 most closely resembled that of African American communities. For every day in this dataset, the county-level distribution of COVID-19 was negatively correlated with the distribution of White American communities in California.DiscussionThe geospatial distribution of COVID-19 in California has increasingly resembled that of African American communities within the state. Further study should be conducted to characterise potentially disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic across race groups.

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Indirectness in the Age of Globalization: A Social Network Analysis

Russian Journal of Linguistics ◽

10.22363/2687-0088-2019-23-4-930-949 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 23 (4) ◽

pp. 930-949

Author(s):

Marina Terkourafi

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American English ◽

Historical Context ◽

Theory Building ◽

Network Ties ◽

British English ◽

Theoretical Predictions ◽

The Individual ◽

Individual Self

Indirectness has traditionally been viewed as commensurate with politeness and attributed to the speaker’s wish to avoid imposition and/or otherwise strategically manipulate the addressee. Despite these theoretical predictions, a number of studies have documented the solidarity-building and identity-constituting functions of indirectness. Bringing these studies together, Terkourafi 2014 proposed an expanded view of the functions of indirect speech, which crucially emphasizes the role of the addressee and the importance of network ties. This article focuses on what happens when such network ties become loosened, as a result of processes of urbanization and globalization. Drawing on examples from African American English and Chinese, it is argued that these processes produce a need for increased explicitness, which drives speakers (and listeners) away from indirectness. This claim is further supported diachronically, by changes in British English politeness that coincide with the rise of the individual Self. These empirical findings have implications for im/politeness theorizing and theory-building more generally, calling attention to how the socio-historical context of our research necessarily influences the theories we end up building.

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Prostate Cancer Incidence and Mortality in Barbados, West Indies

Prostate Cancer ◽

10.1155/2011/565230 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 2011 ◽

pp. 1-10 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Anselm J. M. Hennis ◽

Ian R. Hambleton ◽

Suh-Yuh Wu ◽

Desiree H.-A. Skeete ◽

Barbara Nemesure ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Prostate Cancer ◽

African American ◽

Cancer Incidence ◽

West Indies ◽

African American Men ◽

Mortality Rates ◽

Prostate Cancer Incidence ◽

White American ◽

Incidence And Mortality ◽

The Us

We describe prostate cancer incidence and mortality in Barbados, West Indies. We ascertained all histologically confirmed cases of prostate cancer during the period July 2002 to December 2008 and reviewed each death registration citing prostate cancer over a 14-year period commencing January 1995. There were 1101 new cases for an incidence rate of 160.4 (95% Confidence Interval: 151.0–170.2) per 100,000 standardized to the US population. Comparable rates in African-American and White American men were 248.2 (95% CI: 246.0–250.5) and 158.0 (95% CI: 157.5–158.6) per 100,000, respectively. Prostate cancer mortality rates in Barbados ranged from 63.2 to 101.6 per 100,000, compared to 51.1 to 78.8 per 100,000 among African Americans. Prostate cancer risks are lower in Caribbean-origin populations than previously believed, while mortality rates appeared to be higher than reported in African-American men. Studies in Caribbean populations may assist understanding of disparities among African-origin populations with shared heredity.

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I Love You with an Asterisk: African-American Experimental Composers and the French Jazz Press, 1970-1980

Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation ◽

10.21083/csieci.v1i2.18 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Stephen H. Lehman

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Art Music ◽

Experimental Music ◽

New Music ◽

The Other ◽

The Political ◽

Political Climate ◽

Western Art ◽

Improvised Music ◽

The Impact

Beginning in the 1970s, the French jazz press became the first community of critics seriously to consider the new African-American experimental music being put forth by musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). More than any other aspect of their music, the incorporation of instrumentations, concepts, and musical forms normally associated with Western art music challenged assumptions within both the European and the American jazz communities. The response to these musicians in publications like Jazz Magazine and Jazz Hot was complex and multi-dimensional. A genuine fascination with this new music was nevertheless tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom. The political climate in France after the student demonstrations of 1968 provided a context which also may have been important for at least some French jazz critics. The impact of the French jazz press on the field of improvised music in France in the 1970s was only one component of a transactional process of resistance by critics and conscious counter-resistance by key musicians/composers who wanted to expand notions of what jazz could encompass. Based on archival research and interviews with both musicians and French critics and scholars I intend to examine this dialogue between the French jazz press and the musicians themselves, in an effort to better understand how each community affected the other in France from 1970 to 1980.

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Epilogue

Between Washington and Du Bois ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813056609.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Reginald K. Ellis

Keyword(s):

North Carolina ◽

African American ◽

Moral Education ◽

College Presidents ◽

Historical Context ◽

First Century ◽

Black College ◽

College President ◽

American Black

The epilogue reveals the importance of placing African American black college presidents in an historical context. I re-emphasize the role of a black college president as more than an administrator of an institution but a race leader to his community. I also explain the creation of “moderation” in North Carolina and how Shepard help create this approach to the race issue prior to the legal battles surrounding school integration during the 1950s. Finally, I examine how Shepard’s legacy at North Carolina Central University has lasted well into the twenty-first century. This lasting impact is seen in the theory of the “Central Way” of doing things at the school today. This approach is largely based on the foundation of “moral education” that Shepard created in the early to mid-twentieth century.

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George Gershwin: “Rhapsody in Catfish Row: Mr. Gershwin Tells the Ongin and Scheme for His Music in that New Folk Opera Called ‘Porgy and Bess’” (1935)

The George Gershwin Reader ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327113.003.0057 ◽

2007 ◽

pp. 218-221

Author(s):

Robert Wyatt ◽

John Andrew Johnson

Keyword(s):

George Gershwin ◽

Porgy And Bess

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Entry Barriers for Academically-Underprepared African American Students at American Institutions

10.4018/978-1-7998-8532-0.ch007 ◽

2022 ◽

pp. 105-124

Author(s):

John Robert Harrell II

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

College Students ◽

African American ◽

Education System ◽

English Language ◽

Historical Context ◽

Program Completion ◽

African American College Students ◽

Racial Oppression ◽

The Impact

The impact of systematic racism within the education system has been a web that researchers have aimed at detangling for many years. The myriad effects that racial oppression have had on the education system are numerous; one area of overwhelming concern is the impact on incoming students' readiness to do college-level work in math and English language arts. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the historical implications that race has had on systems of higher education and to describe the perceptions of a subset of African American college students in Texas regarding barriers to college access and program completion during times of crisis. The researcher will use the historical context of racial oppression and the establishment of higher education systems. The demographics shifts to provide a lens through which the perceptions of a sample of African American college students' experiences can be viewed. Ultimately, this chapter aims to share the lived experiences of these students and give voice to college success data.

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“Rhythm,” “Beat,” and “Freedom” in South Asian Musical Traditions

Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190841485.003.0013 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 314-336

Author(s):

Richard K. Wolf

Keyword(s):

South Asia ◽

South Asian ◽

Regional Differences ◽

South India ◽

Art Music ◽

Musical Traditions ◽

Asian Music ◽

North And South

This chapter argues that a family of common rhythmic conceptions underlies many of the musical traditions of South Asia despite sometimes dramatic regional differences in language, culture, and religion. Two contrasting kinds of rhythmic representation are examined: one that objectifies through names and numbers, and one that points toward freedom and resists numeration. Evidence for the first is drawn from the analysis of ritual drumming in India and Pakistan as well as concepts and structures in the art music traditions of North and South India. The second concerns both drumming and the elastic rhythm of rāga ālāpana. Examination of a range of data turns many common conceptions of rhythm, beat, and freedom in South Asian music on their heads.

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