Today is a good day. It’s also a hard day for me, and I suspect for many others.
This past Thanksgiving and Christmas were tough holidays for me, being the first holiday season without my Reginald. Still, the burden was lightened a bit by the fact that I was surrounded by family those days, and I had many others wishing me well those days, because they knew those holidays would be difficult for me under the circumstances. Tougher still, on January 15, was our first anniversary since his death (not a wedding anniversary, since we couldn’t get married in this state, but our anniversary in any case). This, too, was made a bit easier because my parents made a point of taking me out to dinner, and because they made a point of trying to celebrate Reginald rather than trying to take my mind off his loss, which would have just made it worse.
Three days have been more unexpectedly hard for me since losing Reginald, as they’ve been happy days that have also underscored what I’ve lost and what he is missing: election day/night; yesterday’s Martin Luther King holiday; and today’s inauguration of Barack Obama.
Yesterday, on Martin Luther King day, I read a news article that nicely tied together that holiday with today’s inauguration of Obama.
As an aside, among other things the article reported on an interesting survey. Almost a year ago, last March, the surveyors had asked a sample of Americans whether they thought Martin Luther King’s dream (i.e. from the “I have a dream..” speech) had been fulfilled. At that point, 35% of white Americans thought it had been, while 34% of black Americans thought so. The survey was repeated sometime between the November election and now. Among white Americans, the numbers had increased to 46% now saying King’s dream had been fulfilled, while among black Americans, more than 2/3 (69%) now said so. I’m not exactly sure what to make of that, but it’s clearly interesting.
What most affected me though was a quote from an analyst, Bill Schneider, “Most blacks and whites went to bed on election night saying, 'I never thought I'd live to see the day.' That's what the nation is celebrating on this King holiday: We have lived to see the day."
When I read that, I broke down sobbing, as I did several times today watching inauguration coverage, precisely because Reginald didn’t live to see the day.
Yesterday and today have been good days. I spent part of yesterday reflecting on how Martin Luther King’s legacy has shaped my life. As a result of his efforts and the efforts of everyone else, sung or unsung, who was a part of the civil rights movement, I, as a white boy growing up in the south, was fortunate to not be deluged with (as much of) the racist garbage that poisoned the minds of earlier generations. Reginald and I were able to live openly as an interracial gay couple without ever encountering so much as a dirty look from any neighbors for seven years in Pensacola, Florida, and that as much as anything is a testament to how successful in some ways the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements have been in altering possibilities.
Still, I know how far there is to go on social issues relating to race, gender, or sexuality. If Reginald had lived to see election day, he would have been overjoyed at Obama’s election and the Democratic pick-ups in both the House and Senate, but, sensitive soul that he was, he would probably have been even more crushed than I was by the wave of anti-gay ballot initiative results across the country, from Prop 8 in California to the fact, much closer to home for us, that 2/3 of the electorate in Florida saw fit to constitutionally ban for gays something that we weren’t recognized as having rights to in the first place.
Today came terribly slow, too. Reginald should have lived to see this day – by which I mean both that it’s terribly tragic and unfair that he’s not alive right now but also that the events of today should have come much sooner. (The election of a woman as president of this country is long overdue, too, and I remember with happiness last year’s primary election when Reginald and I were faced with the wonderful dilemma of which “historic” candidate to vote for, neither of whom was or is perfect, but both of whom we felt were good candidates and far better than anything we’ve had in a long while.) Surely far too many people didn’t live to see the day.
Still, bittersweet though it is, this is a happy day.
Showing posts with label civil rights movement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil rights movement. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, July 9, 2007
On Free Speech
“Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.”
Those two sentences open a recent column by George Will, “Speech Police, Riding High in Oakland.” Will discusses an incident and court case from several months ago concerning a group of Oakland city employees, the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), a flier they distributed and posted on an office bulletin board containing Will’s first quoted sentence, and the dust-up that resulted when another employee’s complaint led to the removal of the flier from the bulletin board.
GNEA is a Christian-identified employee organized that is opposed to the possibility of gay marriage, the main topic addressed in their flier. (I do wonder what the full contents of the flier look like. I searched quite a bit on the web for the full text, but was unable to find it. Many websites supportive of GNEA do contain short quotes, mostly along the lines of that in Will’s column. I wonder whether the lack of ready availability of the full text indicates selective attention to the most relevant passages or whether it indicates omitted text that is less innocuous.)
Office management removed the flier from the bulletin board after the complaint of one fellow employee. As Will mentions, other employee groups had previously put up advertisements and fliers there and through office email, such as a gay employee group’s advertisement of a “Happy Coming Out Day” event. Quoting from Will:
“The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and disruptive.”
My initial reaction on reading Will’s column was that it did seem unfair to allow some groups to use the public bulletin board and to disallow that for others – provided GNEA’s flier was not overly disruptive and relatively innocuous. I still think the flier’s viewpoint should have been allowed expression in that forum, even though I strongly disagree with it, if other viewpoints were also allowed expression there. At the same time, I think that Will mischaracterizes the 9th Circuit court’s decision on the matter.
First, Will and others on the web raise the specter of GNEA’s speech being prosecuted as hate speech. Here’s a quote from a blog post by Ed Brayton on the issue:
“As usual, the media reports focus on the broadest possible issue and not on the actual legal issue under dispute in the case. California does not have a law against "hate speech", nor does any other state. The only place such rules exist in the US are on college campuses (and as I wrote recently, I am in favor of an all out legal assault to get such rules declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). But the issue in this case is much narrower than that and has little to do with outlawing the advocacy of anti-gay positions.
“The particular issue in the case is whether the Constitution requires that employees be allowed to post material in public view in their office that their employer (in this case, the city of Oakland) has deemed to be in violation of their anti-harrassment policies and disruptive to the collegiality of the workplace. The case does not attempt to declare such sentiments "hate speech", nor would it prevent the plaintiffs from expressing their position in a myriad of other ways; it deals solely with the narrow question of whether the employer can regulate the content of material posted on their public bulletin boards.”
Second, Will mischaracterizes the court’s decision, which is actually more nuanced than you’d think from his column. Here’s a selection from the court decision that’s quoted by Brayton:
“Having laid out plaintiffs' and defendants' competing interests, the court must strike the balance called for by Pickering. Neither side has presented a strong case. But, the facts being undisputed, the court must resolve the question of law posed by Pickering. The interests on both sides are slight: On the one hand, defendants' restriction of plaintiffs is far from a wholesale muzzling, but on the other hand, the suppressed speech was not patently inflammatory "fighting words." To be sure, it caused friction in the workplace, but there is a difference between episodes of friction -- which are the daily incidents of life in a pluralistic society -- and disruption -- which impairs the government's ability to discharge its duties to its citizens. The City must tread carefully when it exercises its authority to suppress its employees ' speech.
“Because the flyer plainly addresses a matter of public concern, it is defendants' burden to show that the City's interest outweighs plaintiffs' interest. This balance must be resolved in the City's favor for two reasons. First, plaintiffs' interest in this particular channel of communication is vanishingly small. It is undisputed that plaintiffs may promote GNEA outside of work and may do so even at work under proper conditions. Plaintiffs do not have a privileged First Amendment interest in communicating their message to their officemates, for their First Amendment rights derive from their status as citizens, not their status as employees. Their right to speak to their coworkers at CEDA is no greater than the right of a citizen at large to speak his message to CEDA employees -- which is to say, plaintiffs have little rights at all in the particular channel they chose.
“The second reason that defendants prevail is that their response to Jennings' complaint -- removal of the flyer without any adverse employment action against plaintiffs -- was a narrowly tailored and proportionate response to the actual workplace disruption or, perhaps better described, distraction. An actual adverse employment action against plaintiffs would very likely not be justified on these facts, and the City would be well to consider this for the future. But the City does have an "administrative interest" in avoiding situations that distract employees from their jobs. Pickering counsels that public employers must, of necessity, be afforded some leeway in fixing their employees' attention on their tasks, free from upset stemming from public controversies having no bearing on the work of the employer.”
Will’s account of the decision is as follows:
“A district court affirmed the city's right to impose speech regulations that are patently not content-neutral. It said the GNEA's speech interest -- the flier -- is "vanishingly small." The GNEA, in its brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, responds that some of the high court's seminal First Amendment rulings have concerned small matters, such the wearing of a T-shirt, standing on a soapbox, holding a picket sign and "other simple forms of expression."
This is a highly partial account in that it implies that the court has ruled that if a speech interest is small, it can be disallowed for that reason. What the court has actually ruled is that sometimes one right needs be considered in balance with another, in this case, the employee’s right to speech and the employer’s right to maintain an efficient and non-disruptive workplace. The court actually also warned the city against the use of strong actions in cases like this one.
After reading about this case from a variety of sources, I have a couple reactions to the matter.
1. My first reaction has less to do with freedom of speech than with patterns of speech or discourse.
In a number of ways, conservatives have appropriated the discourse of their opponents. I’ve heard conservative Christians speak of the need for conservative Christians to “come out” – sometimes without a hint of irony. Will uses the language of sexual harassment and anti-discrimination regulation when saying that GNEA could plausibly claim that a “hostile environment” has been created for them.
In addition, conservatives have mastered the discourse of oppression. Gays cannot marry in 49 of 50 U.S. states and have trouble accessing a slew of basic rights (inheritance, hospital visitation, spousal benefits, adoption – just to name some of the most important) that heterosexuals, or at least married heterosexuals can take for granted, yet it’s those who oppose gay marriage who are oppressed, even though they wouldn’t lose any rights or anything if gay marriage were permitted.
This would make more sense if the expansion of rights to excluded or marginalized social groups were being played out in a zero sum game. Instead, the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s for blacks, Hispanics and others, the expansion of rights for women with the successes of feminism, and the possibility of equal rights for lesbians and gay men simply expand rights already taken for granted by one group (whites, men, or heterosexuals) to another. In each case, social change has been accompanied by conservative tails of woe and oppression. (If anything, the opposition to gay marriage and other equal rights makes even less sense to me. With the civil rights movements, southern whites did potentially face new job competition from blacks previously excluded, and men potentially face competition for jobs with women in a way not previously the case, but there’s nothing of the sort in the gay rights issue, because the expansion of gay rights is mostly about the expansion of social rights and not so much economic rights [at least not economic rights that might pit them in competition with individual heterosexuals].)
2. Many don’t seem to get that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to impose one’s speech anywhere. This is true across the political divide.
I do think that it was unwise of office management to have removed GNEA’s flier (again, unless there was material in it that’s not been quoted online that was more disruptive and much less innocuous than Will’s and other’s quotes seem to indicate). Fairness would seem to indicate that if one group could disseminate their views on the bulletin board, then others should be allowed to also.
Still, freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom to speak everywhere. There are contexts in which anyone is free to express their views, but most contexts are not so free, and often for legitimate reasons. A newspaper, such as The Washington Post for which Will writes, controls its own content and has a valid right to exclude material (including whatever letters or manuscripts anyone might want to send in) as the editors see fit – this is part of their freedom of expression. I control my own blog – I don’t often delete comments, but I can legitimately do so, and if I do, I’m not in any way denying anyone’s ability to express themselves – I would just be denying them the ability to impose their expression on a forum controlled by me. The bulletin board from which GNEA’s flier was excluded is similar. It was a forum controlled by someone else, and as the court ruled, denying the group access to the board, while technically a small infringement on speech, in no way kept the individuals from distributing their ideas in other contexts.
Those two sentences open a recent column by George Will, “Speech Police, Riding High in Oakland.” Will discusses an incident and court case from several months ago concerning a group of Oakland city employees, the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), a flier they distributed and posted on an office bulletin board containing Will’s first quoted sentence, and the dust-up that resulted when another employee’s complaint led to the removal of the flier from the bulletin board.
GNEA is a Christian-identified employee organized that is opposed to the possibility of gay marriage, the main topic addressed in their flier. (I do wonder what the full contents of the flier look like. I searched quite a bit on the web for the full text, but was unable to find it. Many websites supportive of GNEA do contain short quotes, mostly along the lines of that in Will’s column. I wonder whether the lack of ready availability of the full text indicates selective attention to the most relevant passages or whether it indicates omitted text that is less innocuous.)
Office management removed the flier from the bulletin board after the complaint of one fellow employee. As Will mentions, other employee groups had previously put up advertisements and fliers there and through office email, such as a gay employee group’s advertisement of a “Happy Coming Out Day” event. Quoting from Will:
“The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and disruptive.”
My initial reaction on reading Will’s column was that it did seem unfair to allow some groups to use the public bulletin board and to disallow that for others – provided GNEA’s flier was not overly disruptive and relatively innocuous. I still think the flier’s viewpoint should have been allowed expression in that forum, even though I strongly disagree with it, if other viewpoints were also allowed expression there. At the same time, I think that Will mischaracterizes the 9th Circuit court’s decision on the matter.
First, Will and others on the web raise the specter of GNEA’s speech being prosecuted as hate speech. Here’s a quote from a blog post by Ed Brayton on the issue:
“As usual, the media reports focus on the broadest possible issue and not on the actual legal issue under dispute in the case. California does not have a law against "hate speech", nor does any other state. The only place such rules exist in the US are on college campuses (and as I wrote recently, I am in favor of an all out legal assault to get such rules declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). But the issue in this case is much narrower than that and has little to do with outlawing the advocacy of anti-gay positions.
“The particular issue in the case is whether the Constitution requires that employees be allowed to post material in public view in their office that their employer (in this case, the city of Oakland) has deemed to be in violation of their anti-harrassment policies and disruptive to the collegiality of the workplace. The case does not attempt to declare such sentiments "hate speech", nor would it prevent the plaintiffs from expressing their position in a myriad of other ways; it deals solely with the narrow question of whether the employer can regulate the content of material posted on their public bulletin boards.”
Second, Will mischaracterizes the court’s decision, which is actually more nuanced than you’d think from his column. Here’s a selection from the court decision that’s quoted by Brayton:
“Having laid out plaintiffs' and defendants' competing interests, the court must strike the balance called for by Pickering. Neither side has presented a strong case. But, the facts being undisputed, the court must resolve the question of law posed by Pickering. The interests on both sides are slight: On the one hand, defendants' restriction of plaintiffs is far from a wholesale muzzling, but on the other hand, the suppressed speech was not patently inflammatory "fighting words." To be sure, it caused friction in the workplace, but there is a difference between episodes of friction -- which are the daily incidents of life in a pluralistic society -- and disruption -- which impairs the government's ability to discharge its duties to its citizens. The City must tread carefully when it exercises its authority to suppress its employees ' speech.
“Because the flyer plainly addresses a matter of public concern, it is defendants' burden to show that the City's interest outweighs plaintiffs' interest. This balance must be resolved in the City's favor for two reasons. First, plaintiffs' interest in this particular channel of communication is vanishingly small. It is undisputed that plaintiffs may promote GNEA outside of work and may do so even at work under proper conditions. Plaintiffs do not have a privileged First Amendment interest in communicating their message to their officemates, for their First Amendment rights derive from their status as citizens, not their status as employees. Their right to speak to their coworkers at CEDA is no greater than the right of a citizen at large to speak his message to CEDA employees -- which is to say, plaintiffs have little rights at all in the particular channel they chose.
“The second reason that defendants prevail is that their response to Jennings' complaint -- removal of the flyer without any adverse employment action against plaintiffs -- was a narrowly tailored and proportionate response to the actual workplace disruption or, perhaps better described, distraction. An actual adverse employment action against plaintiffs would very likely not be justified on these facts, and the City would be well to consider this for the future. But the City does have an "administrative interest" in avoiding situations that distract employees from their jobs. Pickering counsels that public employers must, of necessity, be afforded some leeway in fixing their employees' attention on their tasks, free from upset stemming from public controversies having no bearing on the work of the employer.”
Will’s account of the decision is as follows:
“A district court affirmed the city's right to impose speech regulations that are patently not content-neutral. It said the GNEA's speech interest -- the flier -- is "vanishingly small." The GNEA, in its brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, responds that some of the high court's seminal First Amendment rulings have concerned small matters, such the wearing of a T-shirt, standing on a soapbox, holding a picket sign and "other simple forms of expression."
This is a highly partial account in that it implies that the court has ruled that if a speech interest is small, it can be disallowed for that reason. What the court has actually ruled is that sometimes one right needs be considered in balance with another, in this case, the employee’s right to speech and the employer’s right to maintain an efficient and non-disruptive workplace. The court actually also warned the city against the use of strong actions in cases like this one.
After reading about this case from a variety of sources, I have a couple reactions to the matter.
1. My first reaction has less to do with freedom of speech than with patterns of speech or discourse.
In a number of ways, conservatives have appropriated the discourse of their opponents. I’ve heard conservative Christians speak of the need for conservative Christians to “come out” – sometimes without a hint of irony. Will uses the language of sexual harassment and anti-discrimination regulation when saying that GNEA could plausibly claim that a “hostile environment” has been created for them.
In addition, conservatives have mastered the discourse of oppression. Gays cannot marry in 49 of 50 U.S. states and have trouble accessing a slew of basic rights (inheritance, hospital visitation, spousal benefits, adoption – just to name some of the most important) that heterosexuals, or at least married heterosexuals can take for granted, yet it’s those who oppose gay marriage who are oppressed, even though they wouldn’t lose any rights or anything if gay marriage were permitted.
This would make more sense if the expansion of rights to excluded or marginalized social groups were being played out in a zero sum game. Instead, the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s for blacks, Hispanics and others, the expansion of rights for women with the successes of feminism, and the possibility of equal rights for lesbians and gay men simply expand rights already taken for granted by one group (whites, men, or heterosexuals) to another. In each case, social change has been accompanied by conservative tails of woe and oppression. (If anything, the opposition to gay marriage and other equal rights makes even less sense to me. With the civil rights movements, southern whites did potentially face new job competition from blacks previously excluded, and men potentially face competition for jobs with women in a way not previously the case, but there’s nothing of the sort in the gay rights issue, because the expansion of gay rights is mostly about the expansion of social rights and not so much economic rights [at least not economic rights that might pit them in competition with individual heterosexuals].)
2. Many don’t seem to get that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to impose one’s speech anywhere. This is true across the political divide.
I do think that it was unwise of office management to have removed GNEA’s flier (again, unless there was material in it that’s not been quoted online that was more disruptive and much less innocuous than Will’s and other’s quotes seem to indicate). Fairness would seem to indicate that if one group could disseminate their views on the bulletin board, then others should be allowed to also.
Still, freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom to speak everywhere. There are contexts in which anyone is free to express their views, but most contexts are not so free, and often for legitimate reasons. A newspaper, such as The Washington Post for which Will writes, controls its own content and has a valid right to exclude material (including whatever letters or manuscripts anyone might want to send in) as the editors see fit – this is part of their freedom of expression. I control my own blog – I don’t often delete comments, but I can legitimately do so, and if I do, I’m not in any way denying anyone’s ability to express themselves – I would just be denying them the ability to impose their expression on a forum controlled by me. The bulletin board from which GNEA’s flier was excluded is similar. It was a forum controlled by someone else, and as the court ruled, denying the group access to the board, while technically a small infringement on speech, in no way kept the individuals from distributing their ideas in other contexts.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
John Coltrane's "Alabama"
John Coltrane’s “Alabama” is music that I’m passionate about. For starters, it’s a beautiful song beautifully played in 1963 by the John Coltrane Quartet of Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. If you’re not familiar with the performance, seek it out for a listen – it can be found on the John Coltrane, Live at Birdland album (though “Alabama” is not actually live at Birdland – the album contained three songs that were recorded live at the Birdland club, and originally two studio recordings [with now a third studio track added to the CD issue], one of which is “Alabama”). I also find the song interesting to think about sociologically and historically (in relation to the state of Alabama and the Civil Rights movement and events) as well as in terms of the relationship between music and “content” or between art and world.
Jazz and Civil Rights
In the 1950s and 60s, and into the early 1970s, many jazz musicians used their music to speak to civil rights issues in a variety of ways. There was a natural reason for this. As I discussed in a previous post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” while in one sense jazz has no color (because it’s music comprised of sound), in another, jazz was music produced largely (though never completely) by black men and was certainly perceived by many as “black music.” Many jazz musicians were concerned to produce simultaneously music that was legitimate art and black art. Also, it’s clearly not insignificant that at the time there was a huge region of the country with a very large black population where black jazz musicians, as anyone black, were not treated legally as the social equals of whites.
Some jazz musicians dealt with events related to the civil rights era or made claims for freedom and full civil rights quite explicitly. I have in mind here Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” or Max Roach’s “We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite” or Nina Simone’s “Old Jim Crow” or “Mississippi Goddam” or Charles Mingus’ “Original Fables of Faubus” (“dedicated” to Arkansas governor and integration opponent Orville Faubus) or perhaps most famously, and earlier, Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.”
Others dealt with civil rights more implicitly. A number of Duke Ellington’s compositions celebrate pride in black people generally, e.g. the extended suite “Black, Brown, and Beige.” (We can also see Ellington in the 1960s as an early proponent of “multi-culturalism” with his incorporations of a variety of non-European musical traditions into his big band jazz, e.g. “The Latin American Suite” or “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” or “The Far East Suite” [which frankly would be better called the Near East or Middle East Suite].) Miles Davis’ album A Tribute to Jack Johnson paid homage to the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. The Free Jazz of musicians like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, or the later work of Coltrane technically didn’t refer to anything in the world outside of music, but it certainly fit with the ethos of (at least some factions of) the civil rights movement and the emphasis upon freedom. A number of other works by Coltrane could be considered to implicitly refer to race relations and the civil rights context of the time, e.g. compositions like “Africa,” “Liberia,” “Song of the Underground Railroad,” or “Spiritual.”
“Alabama” is simultaneously explicit and implicit in its relation to the events in Alabama of the early 1960s. By its title and its recording date of November 18, 1963, just two months after the September 15, 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls and injured several other people, the song stakes out an explicit reference to the horrific events on the ground in that southern state. But beyond the title, given the piece’s existence as pure sound without words, any evocation of content is implicit.
Art and Content / Art and World
There are two slightly different though related questions here. What is the relation between art and content, and what is the relation between art and the world?
In an earlier post, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” I addressed the relationship between artist’s biography and the meaning of art. Here is a three paragraph selection from that earlier post:
“On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.”
I made three further points about the relationship between artists’ biographies and their art. First, art does not depend on the artist’s biography. You don’t need to know anything about Parker or Shostakovich to appreciate and enjoy “Lover man” or the viola sonata – it might add to your appreciation in an extra-musical sense, but it’s unnecessary.
Second, art is not sustained by the artist’s biography. The fact that Parker was experiencing withdrawal while recording “Lover Man” might be interesting in its own right, but if the music wasn’t good – if it sounded like someone going through heroin withdrawal – it wouldn’t be good art.
Finally, art is not determined by the artist’s biography. Certainly the cultural context into which any individual is socialized has a profound effect on them, but it never determines what individuals do in detail. David Nice (in the liner notes to Annette Bartholdy’s recording of the viola sonata, Naxos records, 8.556231) writes (parenthetical note added):
“Shostakovich is never afraid of saying it (i.e. dealing with death), though in the most refined form possible, in the Viola Sonata of 1975, last of a harrowing line including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the last three string quartets and the song-cycle settings of Michelangelo poems which examine death from every conceivable angle. None is a conclusive last word – ‘maybe I’ll still manage to write something else’ was always the composer’s response – and that could even be said of the present work which turned out to be his swan-song, completed just before his death on 9th August 1975.”
It might be natural for an artist clearly approaching death to explore death as a theme, but nothing determined the way he went about it, not the anguished sounds we hear in some movements, nor the playful approach to death in others, nor especially the combination of the two, for example in the last symphony’s musical quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture (the theme known to most Americans as the “Lone Ranger” theme) alongside motifs quoted from Wagner’s operas Die Valkyrie and Tristan und Isolde associated with fate or longing and suffering.
I’d like here to make similar arguments with regard to Coltrane’s “Alabama,” though in this case my arguments concern the relationship between a work of art and its content or reference (in this case the Birmingham bombing and other events in Alabama). Art does not depend on its content. Content does not sustain the work of art. Content does not determine the work of art.
Art does not depend on its content
Art cannot depend on its content for its worth as aesthetic object – much art, abstract painting or pure music, has no content at all. “Alabama” can be appreciated as a beautiful, lyrical, mournful piece of music without any knowledge of the context of its production or the events of Alabama 1963. Just as I had loved Parker’s recording of “Lover Man” before knowing anything about Parker’s biography (to a large extent, loving the music was what made me want to find out more about the artist), I had come to love “Alabama” (and not just Coltrane’s performance, but Kenny Garrett’s much more recent recording of the song as well) before being spurred by my passion for the music to find out more about its context. Given the title, I did of course immediately wonder whether it had any reference to the civil rights movement, but I didn’t have to know anything about the song’s “content” to appreciate it.
Content does not sustain the work of art
The Birmingham bombing is one of the more tragic events in 20th century American history. Alabama in general in 1963 was a tragedy. Knowing the referent of the song heightens an already profound appreciation for it, but an inferior work of art would not be made into good art just by having content that is profoundly meaningful. A lesser evocation of the bombing or other events associated with the civil rights movement in the south might touch us, but only by indexing events that in themselves move us, not by creating a work of art that is moving in its own right.
Content does not determine the work of art
For art with content, there ideally should be a relationship between content and form, a certain degree of iconicity or systematic relatedness between referent and the work. I mentioned earlier Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I’m fond of this work (I’m one of those people who have not only the album but who also bought the 5 CD box set “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” – so yeah, I like the music), and I think it works quite well as pure music. I don’t think it works so well as a tribute to Jack Johnson – there’s no real iconicity or systematic fit between the music and Jack Johnson the boxer or Jack Johnson the flamboyant, no-apologies public persona (there is a certain fit between Davis’ public persona and Johnson’s, but not so much between the music and Johnson).
So, when I say that content doesn’t determine the work of art, I don’t mean there’s no relationship there. It’s more that given the plethora of qualities that any object or event in the world has, there are any number of ways to go about creating a work that fits its content. “Alabama” creates a musical correspondence to the events that’s compelling and iconic (and “iconic” in both the vernacular and technical semiotic senses). The two most apparent elements of the music are Coltrane’s horn and Jones’ drumming (though I think that Tyner’s and Garrison’s contributions are crucial as well, especially in creating a sense of foreboding at the beginning of the song with the throbbing rhythm they lay down – just not as prominently apparent to a casual listen). The combination of Coltrane’s haunting saxophone, creating mournful lyrical passages that at times seem hopeless and others hopeful, with Jones’ always intense drumming, that is at times notably restrained and other times bursting out in intense explosions of energy, creates an icon for 1963 Alabama: simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, restraint and repression with the hope of freedom, but also the possibility, very real at the time, that everything would end in an immense explosion of violence.
I’ll close with a quotation from Leroi Jones’ original liner notes for the Live at Birdland album (parenthetical note added):
“If you have heard “Slow Dance” or “After the Rain,” then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that “Alabama” carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele (the session producer) asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature…a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, of these musicians’ feelings. If the “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.”
Jazz and Civil Rights
In the 1950s and 60s, and into the early 1970s, many jazz musicians used their music to speak to civil rights issues in a variety of ways. There was a natural reason for this. As I discussed in a previous post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop,” while in one sense jazz has no color (because it’s music comprised of sound), in another, jazz was music produced largely (though never completely) by black men and was certainly perceived by many as “black music.” Many jazz musicians were concerned to produce simultaneously music that was legitimate art and black art. Also, it’s clearly not insignificant that at the time there was a huge region of the country with a very large black population where black jazz musicians, as anyone black, were not treated legally as the social equals of whites.
Some jazz musicians dealt with events related to the civil rights era or made claims for freedom and full civil rights quite explicitly. I have in mind here Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” or Max Roach’s “We Insist: The Freedom Now Suite” or Nina Simone’s “Old Jim Crow” or “Mississippi Goddam” or Charles Mingus’ “Original Fables of Faubus” (“dedicated” to Arkansas governor and integration opponent Orville Faubus) or perhaps most famously, and earlier, Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.”
Others dealt with civil rights more implicitly. A number of Duke Ellington’s compositions celebrate pride in black people generally, e.g. the extended suite “Black, Brown, and Beige.” (We can also see Ellington in the 1960s as an early proponent of “multi-culturalism” with his incorporations of a variety of non-European musical traditions into his big band jazz, e.g. “The Latin American Suite” or “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” or “The Far East Suite” [which frankly would be better called the Near East or Middle East Suite].) Miles Davis’ album A Tribute to Jack Johnson paid homage to the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. The Free Jazz of musicians like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, or the later work of Coltrane technically didn’t refer to anything in the world outside of music, but it certainly fit with the ethos of (at least some factions of) the civil rights movement and the emphasis upon freedom. A number of other works by Coltrane could be considered to implicitly refer to race relations and the civil rights context of the time, e.g. compositions like “Africa,” “Liberia,” “Song of the Underground Railroad,” or “Spiritual.”
“Alabama” is simultaneously explicit and implicit in its relation to the events in Alabama of the early 1960s. By its title and its recording date of November 18, 1963, just two months after the September 15, 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls and injured several other people, the song stakes out an explicit reference to the horrific events on the ground in that southern state. But beyond the title, given the piece’s existence as pure sound without words, any evocation of content is implicit.
Art and Content / Art and World
There are two slightly different though related questions here. What is the relation between art and content, and what is the relation between art and the world?
In an earlier post, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture,” I addressed the relationship between artist’s biography and the meaning of art. Here is a three paragraph selection from that earlier post:
“On the 1946 recording of the song “Lover Man,” Charlie Parker plays one of the most searing, mournful, and heart-rending saxophone solos (or any kind of solo) in the history of recorded music. As is often the case, there is a further story behind the music. Parker had accompanied Dizzy Gillespie to California (where “Lover Man” was recorded) on a tour of the west coast, and had stayed behind to play jazz clubs in Los Angeles when Gillespie returned to New York. Parker had also turned to heroin again, and while he was playing those sad, searing tones immortalized on the “Lover Man” recording, he was in fact experiencing heroin withdrawal. In fact, later that same day, he was arrested in relation to a fire that broke out in his hotel room, ultimately ending up at Camarillo state mental hospital for a stay of some months. (“Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” recorded in early 1947 after that stay, is one of Parker’s jauntiest, happiest sounding recordings.) How much difference do, or should, such biographical tidbits make in our appreciation of the recording?
In his column in the recent special Awards 2006 issue of Gramophone magazine (V. 84, p. 37), Armando Iannucci raises similar questions. Speaking of Shostakovich’s viola sonata, he writes, “The sonata, the final slow movement in particular, is one of the most beautiful, anguished and intimate pieces of 20th-century chamber music I’ve heard…There’s a pain here that’s not dramatic but real. But it is also the last piece he wrote. How much does that matter?” A bit later on, “What does it do to the music knowing it’s the last thing Shostakovich wrote? Knowing that he knew he was dying.” Speaking of other composers, he argues, “You can’t doubt, for example, that the popularity of the Pathetique Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs or Mozart’s Requiem owe an awful lot to our knowledge that they came at the end of each composer’s life.
In cases such as these, knowledge of artists’ biographies and the circumstances surrounding a piece can enhance the experience of art (even if it’s not always clear why that would be the case). Certainly knowledge of artists and the production of art in general in all forms is of historical, sociological, and anthropological interest in its own right. Still, art doesn’t depend upon, isn’t sustained by, and isn’t determined by the artist’s biography, cultural context, etc.”
I made three further points about the relationship between artists’ biographies and their art. First, art does not depend on the artist’s biography. You don’t need to know anything about Parker or Shostakovich to appreciate and enjoy “Lover man” or the viola sonata – it might add to your appreciation in an extra-musical sense, but it’s unnecessary.
Second, art is not sustained by the artist’s biography. The fact that Parker was experiencing withdrawal while recording “Lover Man” might be interesting in its own right, but if the music wasn’t good – if it sounded like someone going through heroin withdrawal – it wouldn’t be good art.
Finally, art is not determined by the artist’s biography. Certainly the cultural context into which any individual is socialized has a profound effect on them, but it never determines what individuals do in detail. David Nice (in the liner notes to Annette Bartholdy’s recording of the viola sonata, Naxos records, 8.556231) writes (parenthetical note added):
“Shostakovich is never afraid of saying it (i.e. dealing with death), though in the most refined form possible, in the Viola Sonata of 1975, last of a harrowing line including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Symphonies, the last three string quartets and the song-cycle settings of Michelangelo poems which examine death from every conceivable angle. None is a conclusive last word – ‘maybe I’ll still manage to write something else’ was always the composer’s response – and that could even be said of the present work which turned out to be his swan-song, completed just before his death on 9th August 1975.”
It might be natural for an artist clearly approaching death to explore death as a theme, but nothing determined the way he went about it, not the anguished sounds we hear in some movements, nor the playful approach to death in others, nor especially the combination of the two, for example in the last symphony’s musical quotations from Rossini’s William Tell Overture (the theme known to most Americans as the “Lone Ranger” theme) alongside motifs quoted from Wagner’s operas Die Valkyrie and Tristan und Isolde associated with fate or longing and suffering.
I’d like here to make similar arguments with regard to Coltrane’s “Alabama,” though in this case my arguments concern the relationship between a work of art and its content or reference (in this case the Birmingham bombing and other events in Alabama). Art does not depend on its content. Content does not sustain the work of art. Content does not determine the work of art.
Art does not depend on its content
Art cannot depend on its content for its worth as aesthetic object – much art, abstract painting or pure music, has no content at all. “Alabama” can be appreciated as a beautiful, lyrical, mournful piece of music without any knowledge of the context of its production or the events of Alabama 1963. Just as I had loved Parker’s recording of “Lover Man” before knowing anything about Parker’s biography (to a large extent, loving the music was what made me want to find out more about the artist), I had come to love “Alabama” (and not just Coltrane’s performance, but Kenny Garrett’s much more recent recording of the song as well) before being spurred by my passion for the music to find out more about its context. Given the title, I did of course immediately wonder whether it had any reference to the civil rights movement, but I didn’t have to know anything about the song’s “content” to appreciate it.
Content does not sustain the work of art
The Birmingham bombing is one of the more tragic events in 20th century American history. Alabama in general in 1963 was a tragedy. Knowing the referent of the song heightens an already profound appreciation for it, but an inferior work of art would not be made into good art just by having content that is profoundly meaningful. A lesser evocation of the bombing or other events associated with the civil rights movement in the south might touch us, but only by indexing events that in themselves move us, not by creating a work of art that is moving in its own right.
Content does not determine the work of art
For art with content, there ideally should be a relationship between content and form, a certain degree of iconicity or systematic relatedness between referent and the work. I mentioned earlier Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I’m fond of this work (I’m one of those people who have not only the album but who also bought the 5 CD box set “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions” – so yeah, I like the music), and I think it works quite well as pure music. I don’t think it works so well as a tribute to Jack Johnson – there’s no real iconicity or systematic fit between the music and Jack Johnson the boxer or Jack Johnson the flamboyant, no-apologies public persona (there is a certain fit between Davis’ public persona and Johnson’s, but not so much between the music and Johnson).
So, when I say that content doesn’t determine the work of art, I don’t mean there’s no relationship there. It’s more that given the plethora of qualities that any object or event in the world has, there are any number of ways to go about creating a work that fits its content. “Alabama” creates a musical correspondence to the events that’s compelling and iconic (and “iconic” in both the vernacular and technical semiotic senses). The two most apparent elements of the music are Coltrane’s horn and Jones’ drumming (though I think that Tyner’s and Garrison’s contributions are crucial as well, especially in creating a sense of foreboding at the beginning of the song with the throbbing rhythm they lay down – just not as prominently apparent to a casual listen). The combination of Coltrane’s haunting saxophone, creating mournful lyrical passages that at times seem hopeless and others hopeful, with Jones’ always intense drumming, that is at times notably restrained and other times bursting out in intense explosions of energy, creates an icon for 1963 Alabama: simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, restraint and repression with the hope of freedom, but also the possibility, very real at the time, that everything would end in an immense explosion of violence.
I’ll close with a quotation from Leroi Jones’ original liner notes for the Live at Birdland album (parenthetical note added):
“If you have heard “Slow Dance” or “After the Rain,” then you might be prepared for the kind of feeling that “Alabama” carries. I didn’t realize until now what a beautiful word Alabama is. That is one function of art, to reveal beauty, common or uncommon, uncommonly. And that’s what Trane does. Bob Thiele (the session producer) asked Trane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems.” I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, “It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me.” Which is to say, Listen. And what we’re given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature…a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, of these musicians’ feelings. If the “real” Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)