tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post619312830447184857..comments2024-03-26T15:57:13.443+00:00Comments on On An Overgrown Path: Young, gifted, black and inappropriateUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-87279144267498103932015-12-21T07:03:25.977+00:002015-12-21T07:03:25.977+00:00I am outraged -- yet again. The question to pose t...I am outraged -- yet again. The question to pose to YT is which of their stated community standards did your video violate: copyright, pornography, illegal acts, gratuitous violence, or hate speech. But I think we know the answer -- it is the last one. I gather it takes but one protest to cause Google to remove a video, and I think the crucial one here is that visitor from the U.S. That complaint, I must also think, was induced by the 1962 cover of Jet. I've come to take it as a general principle that all movements, policies, trends, processes, etc., regardless of their initial merit, have their own dynamic, and once unleashed that dynamic increases until it leads to extremism. Political correctness is an obvious current example of this. My own academic discipline, History, has suffered much from this. Any historian had better think twice about using what is now referred to as the 'N-word' before he uses it in a lecture on the history of African Americans or a related subject. Just about anything about the history of Israel could blow up in your face. <br /><br />Thus, we have here an example of that extremist dynamic. I could write reams about other examples. And it has itself here done damage. When you put up those posts, I did myself post comments about Schuyler, Dean Dixon, and Winifred Atwell (whose recording of the Grieg concerto is on YT). I think we discussed others also. The intent of your posts and others' comments was to shine a light on the injustice in the way racial discrimination affected or destroyed the great talents of musicians, most notably in the U.S., so there is irony in Google's censorship, as well as idiocy. In that the topic of the posts went back some 70-plus years, this is in fact censorship of historical writing. It is censorship of knowledge, knowledge of an issue people should be informed on. I'm frankly glad I got out of academe before this became rampant in universities. It is a menace to Knowledge, a menace to Truth, and it is intolerable.Philip Amoshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11739418522974972567noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8060605.post-67230364973174778512015-12-21T03:12:44.326+00:002015-12-21T03:12:44.326+00:00This is, in a word or two, downright despicable.
...This is, in a word or two, downright despicable.<br /><br />The music of Philippa Duke Schuyler should be better known. We have seen child prodigy composers emerge since Mozart - Mendelssohn, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Jay Greenberg, to name but a few - but for some reason or another we have forgotten, or have shunned, Ms. Schuyler.<br /><br />Was it because of her controversial upbringing? Was it because of her parents? Was it because she went through a psychological turmoil in her adult life that caused considerable crises within her identity as a bi-racial woman? These questions and many more must be addressed, but most important are the works she left behind in her brief life, not only the ones that are completed such as the orchestral scherzo Rumplestiltskin and her two versions of the Nile Fantasy for piano and orchestra, but many unfinished or barely completed works such as her setting of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".<br /><br />Ms. Schuyler's music has always been on my mind for over thirty years since I went to the Schomburg branch of the New York Public Library and reviewed the manuscripts of her scores. The good news is that the scores and parts for her completed orchestral works are intact and need minor editing, and her solo piano works are also in excellent order. All it would take is someone with capital to burn for someone - either John McLaughlin Williams, or myself, or both of us - to record her music and make it available for the public to decide about her compositions, but most important, also add a piece to the puzzle about this complex and intriguing American woman.Kevin Scotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11168548308074459074noreply@blogger.com