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The James Baldwin Lecture Princeton University, April 20, 2011 Paul Lansky A Musical Conversation on Race I’d like to thank the Center for African American Studies for inviting me to give the annual James Baldwin Lecture. It’s a great honor, and a real challenge. When the invitation came last June from Professor Eddie Glaude I was quite surprised and thought at first that it was some sort of mistake. What could a composer who has spent the major part of his career trying to make dumb computers sing have to say about race? It had never occurred to me that I had anything new to say on the subject and it was even more surprising that an invitation could come from folks who had thought about it a lot. I looked at the list of previous speakers and felt extremely inadequate to the task. Watching the videos of the brilliant lectures by Tony Grafton and Shirley Tilghman only increased my apprehension. Eddie assured me that the committee was interested in a conversation about race as it relates to my music and that the lecture could basically be about my work. This was fine with me, but still I worried that I would not have much to say. He added that they were interested in having non-specialists speak in an attempt to broaden the base of the discussion. I asked for a few weeks to think about it, figuring that this would give me time to come up with a decent reason to decline. So I thought, and I thought, and the more I pondered the question the more interesting it became. I realized that concepts and resonance of race, culture and ethnicity do arise in my music, and, paradoxically, it has been the use of technology that has facilitated this in interesting ways. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I owe a large debt to the 1 music of other cultures, and to the music of African-American culture in particular. In recent years though I have turned to writing for traditional instrumental performers and these matters have receded, they are still present as part of a musical language I forged over a period of forty years. My talk was originally going to be in two parts. Until a few weeks ago I had planned to begin by discussing racial attitudes that I grew up with and then talk about racial and ethnic influences in my music, but I decided to abbreviate the first part of this talk. Briefly, my folks were left wing, non-practicing Jews, whose parents had emigrated from eastern Europe in the first decade of the century. My parents were ‘children of the depression’. I was named after Paul Robeson and have distinct memories of being wheeled in a stroller at May Day parades. I was what has come to be known as a ‘red diaper baby’.1 Our attitudes towards race, culture and ethnicity were complicated, ambivalent, confusing, and strongly influenced by left-wing politics, with an added dash of new-American anxiety. A cultural manifestation of these attitudes led, oddly, to a fascination with American folk music (this will be relevant in my talk). When in 1992, at a Princeton conference on popular culture organized by Andrew Ross, Robert Christgau declared that the folk music revival was a plot between the Communist party and the MLA, I knew what he was talking about. The role of folk music in left-wing politics is an old story, and it also played a significant part in the labor movement. These attitudes towards race and ethnicity influenced our views on their meaning in cultural and artistic contexts, leading to unease about viewing art through the lens of race. In the worker’s paradise if 1 By total coincidence I grew up in the Crotona Park area of the South Bronx, where the blend of Puerto Rican and African-American cultures were to lead to the development of hip hop some years later, well after we left. 2 race didn’t matter, which was more or less dogma, then neither should cultural difference. Racial difference was considered an unfortunate fact of nature and cultural manifestations of racial difference were therefore, suspect and implicit annoyances. (Perhaps I exaggerate a bit but you get the idea.) I haven’t thought long or hard enough to be able to tease out the extent to which these mindsets reflected the complexities of assimilation or disorientation of 2nd generation Jews in a new and confusing society. I read the excellent West/Lerner dialogue Jews and Blacks2 and several other books, including Jane Lazarre’s sensitive book Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons3, but decided that at the end of the day, as interesting as my cultural introspection might seem to me, it was basically too personal, unformed, and would be reflected better in a discussion of my music. And, furthermore, it’s been well hashed out by others. Perhaps this just reflects my genetic squeamishness in talking about race, but so be it. What I want to do today, instead, is celebrate racial and ethnic differences as they enrich and enliven our cultural landscape. Basically, what I will do is provide an annotated demonstration of the ways in which I’ve participated in this exchange. Let me set the stage by reporting on an experience, lasting perhaps no more than ten seconds that may be partly responsible for today’s invitation. Some time in late 1984, probably December, the late Frank Lewin, a good friend and fellow composer, invited me to talk to a class he was teaching at Columbia. Frank lived in Princeton so we drove in together. As we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel I noticed a group of a 2 Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Jews and Blacks, a Dialogue on Race, Religion and Culture in America, 1996 3 Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, 1997 3 half dozen or so black teenagers standing in a circle around a policeman. They were rhythmically bobbing up and down and the cop had a bemused but friendly look on his face. I rolled down the window and was thrilled to hear an exhilarating chorus of hip-hop counterpoint. I haven’t any idea what it was about, but the texture and rhythms were wonderful. Unfortunately the light changed and we moved on but not before I made a note-to-self “what a great idea for a piece.” (Who knows, if we had taken the GW Bridge I might not be here today.) More on this in a bit. I believe that music is a form of social intercourse and the metaphor of a musical conversation leads to an interesting set of questions. At its heart is the notion of reference: the way one piece of music may refer to another piece, group of pieces, style or genre. This entails a broad spectrum of possibility, from explicit quotation at one end to subtle influence at the other. And there is a second spectrum that might be said to measure the extent to which a work succeeds or fails to absorb and internalize its references. Does the reference become an integrated part of the fabric? Or does it remain an appendage? T.S. Eliot’s famous statement in his article on Philip Massenger in The Sacred Wood is appropriate here: One of the surest of tests [of success] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.4 4 T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays, p. 72 4 This is really insider thinking by an artist working at a desk, struggling to invent. While we labor most of us have demons chattering away in our head, and legends peering over our shoulder. As I survey my work I notice that my references to other music occupy many points on the scales of these spectra from implicit to explicit, and from successful to not-so- hot. There are obvious ways in which music evokes race and culture. We have no trouble thinking of some music as Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Balinese, African, Norwegian, or noticing the cultural and ethnic origins of Bossa Nova, Klezmer, Hip-Hop, Blues, Jazz and so on. (Perhaps this is circular reasoning since we often see these as a way in which cultural and racial identity are manifested.) There are, furthermore, frequent referential crosscurrents in all kinds of music. Ragtime obviously owes a debt to 19th century European harmony, and these days hip-hop has global reach as other cultures put their stamp on it. (There are probably few languages and cultures today in which hip-hop artists haven’t made their mark.) In some musical cultures such as Indonesian Gamelan there are experimental, and even avant-garde traditions. I bet that the evolution of free jazz from bebop was influenced by experimental American avant- garde traditions. And rap is strongly characterized by borrowing and reference. In American and European “concert music”, for want of a better term, while cross cultural references go back hundreds of years, the generation of musicians and composers who came of age in the past half- century, when recording became a dominant form of musical commerce, have felt few constraints to poaching among many different musical cultures.

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