{"id":75856,"date":"2022-01-04T10:20:25","date_gmt":"2022-01-04T15:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=75856"},"modified":"2024-09-01T09:54:46","modified_gmt":"2024-09-01T13:54:46","slug":"penner-and-clark-handels-messiah-today-how-classical-music-is-contending-with-its-colonial-past-and-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2022\/01\/penner-and-clark-handels-messiah-today-how-classical-music-is-contending-with-its-colonial-past-and-present\/","title":{"rendered":"PENNER and CLARK: Handel\u2019s \u2018Messiah\u2019 today: How classical music is contending with its colonial past and present"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nina Penner, Assistant Professor of Music at Brock University, and Caryl Clark, Professor of Musicology at University of Toronto, had a piece recently published in The Conversation<\/a><\/em> about how performers and audiences of western classical music can engage in anti-colonial and anti-racist work.<\/p>\n

They write:<\/p>\n

\u201cNo work of western classical music is more closely associated with the Christmas season than\u00a0German-born composer George Frideric Handel\u2019s\u00a0Messiah, which premiered in 1742.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In recent years, audiences have been able to choose between\u00a0performances modelled on those of the composer\u2019s time,\u00a0performances following the 19th-century tradition of massive choirs and modern instruments\u00a0and even\u00a0staged and choreographed renditions\u00a0of the work. When COVID-19 curtailed live performances, online video presentations emerged as a new medium.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This was in the wake of\u00a0worldwide protests after George Floyd\u2019s murder and a global invigoration of Black Lives Matter. Among artists in different industries, Black classical artists\u00a0like baritone Andrew Adridge, in conversation with writer Michael Zarathus-Cook, called for classical music to address systemic issues. He noted: \u201cThere is a problem with race in \u2026 arts organization(s) because there is a problem in Canada\u201d and \u201cshying away from conversations\u201d won\u2019t help.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In a separate piece, Zarathus-Cook wrote about how \u201cwe do have to recognize that the protests we\u2019ve been seeing are spurred both by the urgent need for a radical assessment of police forces and how they interact with [Black, Indigenous and people of colour], and the\u00a0more subtle, culturally diffused, day-to-day racism that is discharged not by a trigger pulled prematurely, but through words and social indications\u00a0that remind the racialized peoples of this country that they are irrevocably on the outside looking in.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Even before the global Black Lives Matter protests, a 2018 report written for the non-profit\u00a0Orchestras Canada\u00a0by writer and arts consultant Soraya Peerbaye and violinist and ethnomusicologist Parmela Attariwala documents\u00a0\u201csystemic inequity and coloniality in Canadian orchestras,\u201d\u00a0ranging from orchestras\u2019 leadership and governance structures to their repertoire and working methods. Music scholars have also been grappling with the\u00a0colonial legacy of classical music, including\u00a0Handel\u2019s investments in the slave trade.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

To continue reading the full article, visit The Conversation <\/a><\/em>website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nina Penner, Assistant Professor of Music at Brock University, and Caryl Clark, Professor of Musicology at University of Toronto, had a piece recently published in The Conversation about how performers and audiences of western classical music can engage in anti-colonial and anti-racist work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45641,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,37,6],"tags":[384,46,2518,35,9312,5512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75856"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75856"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75862,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75856\/revisions\/75862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}