Tuesday, August 30, 2011

There's a boat that's leaving soon from New York

As we prepare to leave New York, we're thinking of all the places that we've developed an affection for:

- Indian Road Cafe, in virtually one of the last buildings on Manhattan Island (behind the white building on the point)...


- the Hudson River with its New Jersey cliffs...


- Hastings-on-Hudson, with its Norman Rockwell streets....


- and the walk over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, with its backward glance at lower Manhattan...


It strikes us that these are all out-of-town experiences, or at least on the fringe. If we came back to live here, we would probably want to live somewhere like this, away from the radiant heat of the endless sidewalks and walls of buildings.

But what are you going to do? We've been knocked out by the standard of theatre and the galleries, the music... This is New York: when you've seen the Gauguins,Chagalls, Braques, Picassos, and Seurats at one place, you go down the street to the next place and see theirs. Isn't  it the size of New York that generates this height of excellence? Although I do wonder about the size of Pliny's Rome or Mozart's Vienna. Is inspiration always human, social and external?

Last week, we even saw evidence of New Yorkers' desire to green their city - the High Line, the disused railway line at the third-storey level downtown that has been converted into an urban garden.


 It immediately became one of those places we've developed an affection for. 

Friday, August 19, 2011

Sousa and the Sioux - I am reminded

Last week, walking the maze of streets that made up the old part of city downtown, we came across the Museum of the Native American, or at least the part of the collection that was left in New York after the bulk of it was moved to Washington.

Even so 'depleted', the range of exhibits from all across the Americas pays tribute to the inventiveness of human design, as you compare differences in dress and other artefacts from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.

I was particularly struck by this outfit worn by British lieutenant, Andrew Foster when he was inducted ('adopted') into the Anishinaabe in the Upper Great Lakes area in the late 1700s


I would wonder about the sensitivities around showing this image except for the fact that the outfit looks like an  'interpretation' of European dress, a tunic with a collar, albeit topped by a feathered headdress.

Which all reminds me that I should check up and see what's happened with Sousa and the Sioux, another story of contact that I mentioned to an orchestra out West some months ago.

In December 1890 , the United States army killed 150 men, women and children of the Lakota Sioux and wounded 51 others (some of whom died later) at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Ethnologist James Mooney wrote a report on the massacre, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, which was printed in the Smithsonian's fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1896. Mooney located the source of the massacre in army suppression of a religion known as the Ghost Dance which was taking hold in Indian nations in the closing years of the 19th century.The Ghost Dance religion prophesied a peaceful end to white expansion, although its spread at the same time that the government was moving the Sioux onto smaller reservations to accommodate westward expansion, alarmed some settlers.

Mooney's report displays an astonishing sympathy with Native American culture for the 1890s and his empathy is further demonstrated in the fact that the archival cylinder recordings of Sioux and Shoshone songs accompaning the report are not actually by Native Americans, but Mooney himself. Singing them in the Berliner Studio back in Washington must have involved an extraordinary feat of memory.

But what most strikes me most about Mooney's report is that half of the musical transcriptions of the 50+ pages of Ghost Dance chants are by John Philip Sousa - Sousa, the march king, the composer of patriotic, if not tub-thumping, chauvinistic marches, who would produce The Stars and Stripes Forever and Liberty Bell within the not-so-distant future.You wonder how this assignment might have marked him for later life. Where was he in his career at this stage? Did he talk/write about this work? Did he and Mooney correspond/sit down together? Do we know what he thought? After all, he later wrote those patriotic marches.

At the time I was first thinking of this piece I had no answers to these questions. Except that, in a 1920 edition of Theodore Presser's magazine The Etude, there is an article by a Sioux called Red Cloud which says, in part: 'When I came back to America I became more and more interested in music...and finally achieved my great ambition to play [Sousaphone] in the Sousa band. Mr  Sousa must have an inborn feeling for the Indian because in his famous suite Dwellers in the Western World he has an Indian section which, although composed of themes which are entirely original with him, have all the characteristics of Indian music quite as though some departed Indian spirits had inspired him...' Did Sousa and Red Cloud ever discuss their relationship to Wounded Knee?

All these connections suggested music to me. Among other issues, a performance work could try to answer the question: 'how did transcribing the Ghost Dance chants contained in a report on a massacre affect Sousa's sympathies?' The opposite pull of traditional dances and patriotic marches also provides a clue to a musical plan for a piece.

Most recently I wrote to the Sousa Archive in Chicago to see what they may hold in their collection. They told me additionally that Sousa had been named an honorary chief on July 30, 1925 by the Fire Hills Indian Reserve, then by the Ponca Tribe on October 12, 1928, and for a third time by the Pawnee Tribe on May 16, 1931. Were these publicity type demonstrations, or were they expressions of genuine sympathy? Another thread to explore.

The Archive said that unfortunately there was no specific correspondence documenting Sousa's thoughts on Native American music. But there may be interesting references in the Sousa Band press clipping. That it might be worth coming to Chicago to conduct some further research. Indeed it might.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

The contempt for distance

On the way out to Princeton again, I saw a sign at Newark that made me think about the range of meaning you can get into four English words. The side of a pizza parlor displayed the proud boast, 'A Down Neck Tradition'. What on earth does this mean? You surely need to consider secondary or tertiary meanings in the word 'Neck'. The best I can imagine is that it's a place name, as in 'I live in Down Neck'. There's a place over on Long Island called Great Neck, for example. I've known for a long time that the Australian aboriginal languages are polysemous, but I don't think I ever realised quite how much English is. Then, again, newspaper headlines thrive on the ability to 'pack meaning'.

I quite like the look of Newark, but the thermometer peaked at 108F here last week, and since then I've felt sorry for the place.


I noticed, walking around Princeton, that the university was founded out there in 1746. I imagine it would have been a 'long way out' then. This is something that has impressed me about Americans. Australians have made a big deal out of 'the tyranny of distance' as if we have been the only ones to confront it, but Americans have actually shown disregard for it. In days before modern transport, they set up universities miles from the big centres. They even had to contend with blizzards which we don't have.

We walked past a house today (65 Stockton Street) that was Thomas Mann's from 1938 to 1941. 'This town is like a park,' he once wrote, 'with wonderful opportunities for walks and with astonishing trees that now, during Indian summer, glow in the most magnificent colors.' Princeton was also Einstein's hometown from 1933. Could Australian 'country towns' boast this intellectual lineage? Last week we were in Tanglewood, 3 hrs from Boston, 2 1/2 from New York. It's amazing to think that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has made its summer home out there for 70 odd years. Could we host a similar festival in the Australian countryside? Sure, there's Huntington. But - for three months?

It may have something to do with the congeniality of the surroundings...


the fact that the Berkshires are actually an escape from the harshness of summer. But I fear that in Australia there is an assumption that the arts are a city pursuit. I noticed a plaque out at Princeton commemorating the composition of the song 'Old Nassau' in a house back in 1850.

 

It's not Lotte in Weimar nor part of the Joseph books, but, before New Jersey Transit brought Princeton within an hour and a half of Penn Station, it was certainly the country back then.

At least we're also capable of newspaper meanings. 'Eel Gets Chop' - what do you think that means?