Sunday, December 11, 2022

Adolphus Hailstork and the problem of 'White Choral Music'


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZX_t_r2z4g

So far as I know, I think Adolphus Hailstork is our greatest African-American musical master. Still is an absolute master too, I love Florence Price's chamber music even if I don't hear the appeal in her symphonies, but as a personal preference, I click on Hailstork a lot more often.

Just listen to this ten minutes of choral music. I obviously have more complex thoughts about viewing art through identity's prism than most people allow for in 2022; but if you want to understand why lived identity is genuinely of paramount importance in the arts, compare Hailstork's bold and beautiful originality to the shitty ninth-chord white bread we get from so many American composers who dine out on making the choral music equivalent of Kenny G.
Black choral composers and arrangers have provided a glory of this country for literal hundreds of years. But every Christmas classical scenesters have to hear this 'smooth-chorus' shite somewhere that only a WASP could love, and the amount of money Whitacre and Lauridsen make should be considered a war crime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdvnp6GGuMM

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