The podcast continues apace. Games! Stories! Music! It’s great.

Episode 4 includes:

• A rousing round of Listening Limbo
• The dissolution of the Columbia University Marching Band
• Norman Lebrecht’s zero-star review of “John Williams in Vienna”
• An interview with Garrett McQueen about the current state of classical radio.

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UPDATE: “The Bowmakers” is not playing through Tuesday, September 22 at midnight.

“The Bowmakers” is a documentary about a most surprising subject: five of the world’s greatest creators of violin, viola, and cello bows all happen to live in the same small coastal town in rural Washington state. Check out the trailer:

My group, OSSCS, is sponsoring the digital premiere of this film; it’s never been seen outside of Port Townsend, WA (with the exception of a couple festivals.)

Tickets are $15, which might seem steep, but just consider that half of that is actually a donation to OSSCS, and now is certainly a great time to send your support. But also consider that, like, this is just a fantastic piece of cinema, and I promise that you will both enjoy and learn a ton of stuff watching it!

Like seemingly everyone else on the planet, I’ve started a podcast. Well, not just me — it’s me and my friends Kensho and Tiffany, two of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know.

I stole the format from Slate (I worship Slate podcasts and basically remain on Twitter only to interact with their hosts and producers.) It’s a weekly discussion show where we pick three topics having to do with classical music. It could be something about music and politics or culture, or a new album release, or an internet kerfuffle, or a bit of news related to the discipline or industry.

Crucially, we’re trying to make this show a broad-based look at the world of classical music. When classical music breaks through to the mainstream media, it’s usually just something to do with the world of the biggest orchestral institutions, or star conductors — very often it’s strikes or budget cuts or bad behavior.

But the way I see it, most of what happens in the world of classical music happens at a much more grassroots level. It happens in schools and houses of worship and (now more than ever) in people’s living quarters and online.

Oh, and I should mention: there’s also games (!) and listening recommendations in every episode. And we’re like, fun people. I promise!

The Classical Gabfest is now available wherever fine podcasts are downloaded (Apple, Spotify, YouTube, the world wide web, etc.) Enjoy!

Brief reflections on my three favorite contemporary* composers.
(*Contemporary in that their lifespans overlapped with my own.)

Alfred Schnittke: Chiaroscuro in Music

Find me another composer as adept at suffusing his canvas with darkness, laying on the thick impasto of a late Rothko. You’ll find plenty of angst and agony among the rest, but you’ll never find a musician working in such satisfying gradations of blackness as Alfred Schnittke.

Listen to how notes sustain, suffusing the air like smoke. This is a consistent element of Schnittke’s style, from the early days of the first string quartet right up to the austere works that he wrote after dying and coming back to life (not making that up!) Even his zaniest moments are like Pennywise peering out of a street gutter.

This reaches its apotheosis (as does his entire stylistic vocabulary: his melodicism, the crunch of his orchestration, his Beethoven-like motivic development) in the 8th symphony. I can think of no other music that so thoroughly captures the sound of the universe’s empty blackness.

Sondheim-Tunick: Pure Music and its Embodiment

Stephen Sondheim is the heir not only to the artistic legacy of Gerswhin, Arlen, and Rodgers, but he’s also a direct inheritor of the musical legacy of Maurice Ravel. His music is to Ravel’s as birds are to dinosaurs. 

Sondheim writes in short score, the purest articulation of the musical art. His music is not written to be played as such, and so it must be translated, either expanded (orchestrated) or condensed (for piano.) His main translator has been the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, and because I’m an orchestral musician at heart, to me, “Sondheim” really means Sondheim + Tunick. 

And here’s the thing: Sondheim agrees. I’ll let him explain:

Can I love a Sondheim song when it’s stripped down to just piano and voice? Of course. After all, Sondheim is the kernel and Tunick is the husk. But honestly? I’ll never love it as much as when it’s enrobed in the voluptuous garbs of Jonathan Tunick. After all, Sondheim is the diamond and Tunick is the jeweler.

It’s worth noting that every Sondheim has been awarded the Tony for Best Score, he’s taken the opportunity to single out Jonathan Tunick as a collaborator (and often to bemoan the fact that there was no Tony awarded for Best Orchestrations.) Sondheim is a lover of orchestral music; it’s well known that he mainly listens to Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel. Let’s just say, he gets it.

[Coda: When the Tonys finally did institute an award for Best Orchestrations in 1997 (!!!) Jonathan Tunick was the first awardee.]

Alberto Iglesias: The Master of the String Quartet

It’s not just me who calls Alberto Iglesias the master of the quartet — it’s Pedro Almodóvar himself!

How did he come by this mastery? I only recently learned the answer.

Pedro Almodóvar does not use temp scores for his editing, but he wants music. In fact, he wants the music that’s going to be in the film — or the closest possible approximation. So he asks Iglesias to create a sort of temp track of his own.

The thing is, neither of them likes midi. So, starting early in their collaboration, whenever Iglesias would write a piece of music intended for string orchestra, he would hire a string quartet to record a reduced version of the cue. Pedro would end up falling in love with the quartet version. Eventually, Iglesias got wise and started writing the pieces as quartets.

Thus the greatest exponent of the string quartet since Debussy came into being.

But man, just listen to what he can do when he has a full string orchestra at his disposal:

To quote Penélope Cruz:

I think Rossini would have made a great video game composer. Listen to his overtures. Everything is so modular. Any phrase could lead into another, and whenever he gets stuck, he just does one of those up-and-down scales in the first violins.

Plus, those crescendi really amp up the tension, and you could repeat them an infinite number of times without losing anything. The climaxes are inevitably disappointing, but who cares, you just go on to the next level.

His motives are attractive and simple, and he uses them to create a totally convincing “universe”. Like, for a game about a bunch of scheming 19th century housemaids. Finally a video game I could actually get into!

I’ll admit it: I’d planned a Beethoven celebration season for 2020-2021. Obviously OSSCS won’t be presenting anything like a normal concert season, and maybe that’s just as well: I may well have been saved from myself.

The idea of a Beethoven celebration is considered deeply unfashionable in many circles, the most basic of basic bitchdom. One of my former students wrote me an email saying she thought Beethoven celebrations were plainly immoral.

For everyone who’s not on twitter, here’s why: Beethoven already has a cemented position in music history. Every time we perform a Beethoven piece, we lose an opportunity to hear a living or marginalized composer. Beethoven’s music may be great (though there are those who dispute/problematize the very notion of “greatness”), but is that any reason to further entrench the dead white male-ness of the classical music industry when we could be striking out in bold new directions?

When I decided to take on the challenge of programming a Beethoven season, I did it with this in mind. My goal was to make a season that used Beethoven as a framework to explore these ideas and to juxtapose his art in unexpected ways with forgotten voices of the past and those of the present.

Anyway, none of it’s happening now, but just for posterity’s sake, here’s what I came up with. It’s a season of 5 mainstage choral-orchestral concerts, one orchestra-only, one mostly-choral, and 3 smaller chamber concerts.

Ludwig: OSSCS’s (Theoretical) 2020-2021 Season

Marathon

BEETHOVEN  Symphony No. 6
BEETHOVEN  Ah! Perfido
BEETHOVEN  “Gloria” from the Mass in C
BEETHOVEN  Piano Concerto No. 4
BEETHOVEN  Symphony No. 5
BEETHOVEN  Sanctus from the Mass in C
BEETHOVEN  Piano fantasia, op. 77
BEETHOVEN  Choral Fantasy

More than just a (long) evening of music, this concert is a historical re-enactment of the December 22, 1808 gave in Vienna, “the most remarkable concert of his career.”

Passages

MARTINU  Memorial to Lidice
BEETHOVEN  Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II
MOZART  Requiem (Levin completion)

Martinu’s transcendent Memorial was composed to commemorate the Nazi destruction of the Czech village of Lidice (and it happens to quote Beethoven’s 5th symphony.) It’s followed by a total rarity, a cantata composed by the teenaged Beethoven in 1790 while he was still living in Bonn. Beethoven never heard this piece performed, but it displays his unmistakable voice from the first notes. The second half features Mozart’s Requiem, composed the year after Beethoven’s cantata.

Messiah

HANDEL Messiah

This is on the program really just because it’s an annual tradition, but it’s worth noting that Handel was Beethoven’s favorite composer.

The Fans

REICHA  Overture in D
ADAMS  Absolute Jest
BERLIOZ  Symphonie Fantastique

Anton Reicha was a close friend and admirer of Beethoven, and a musical revolutionary of a different sort; this overture is considered to be the first orchestral piece in a mixed meter (5/8). John Adams’ Absolute Jest is a super-charged piece for string quartet and orchestra, built entirely around motives by Beethoven. And of course, nobody worshipped Beethoven more than Berlioz.

Echoes

MAYER  String Quartet in E minor
BRAHMS  Geistliches Lied
BEETHOVEN  “Pathéthique” Sonata (mvmt 2)
ELGAR  Lux Aeterna
SHAW  Seven Joys

First we have an 1846 string quartet by Emilie Mayer, known in her time as “the female Beethoven.” Then Brahms’ stunning choral Geistliches Lied and the choral version of Elgar’s “Nimrod” variation, known as the “Lux Aeterna” (preceded by the movement of the “Pathéthique” upon which it was modeled.) The major work on the concert is Caroline Shaw’s Seven Joys  for choir and brass quintet, which explores spatial effects and resonances as it pays homage to the 9th symphony.

The Haters

DEBUSSY  Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
CHOPIN  Piano Concerto No. 1
CAGE  4’33”
BRITTEN  Scenes from Peter Grimes

It seems only fair that, in a concert season devoted to Beethoven, his detractors should also have a voice. These four composers leveled some pretty sick burns at ol’ Ludwig, and they are each represented by the piece that made them famous (or infamous).

Master and Scholar

NEEFE  Piano Sonata No. 1 [mvmt 1]
ALBRECHTSBERGER  String Trio No. 2 [mvmt 1]
HAYDN  Il maestro e lo scolarevon
ARNIM  Songs and Duets
Archduke RUDOLF  Clarinet Trio in E-flat [mvmt 1]
BEETHOVEN  “Archduke” Trio

A concert featuring music students and their teachers. We all know that Beethoven “studied” with Haydn, but the two never really got along; Beethoven considered his greatest teacher to have been Christian Gottlob Neefe, a Bonn-based opera composer and organist. After moving to Vienna, Beethoven sought out Johann Albrechtsberger, a rigorous theoretician and counterpoint expert. Haydn’s divertimento for 2 pianists, Il maestro e lo scolare, is a delightful theme and variation set. Beethoven didn’t care much for teaching himself, but he did give some tips to one of his unattainably noble girlfriends, Bettine von Arnim, and he gave formal lessons to his great benefactor Archduke Rudolf, who became the dedicatee of his monumental trio, op. 97.

Sonata Mulattica

BOULOGNE  Overture to L’amant anonyme
HAYDN  Symphony No. 62 in D
BEETHOVEN  “Kreuzer” Sonata
BRIDGETOWER  “Henry, a Ballad” (orch. White)

Beethoven’s life story intersects with the history of race in Europe in fascinating ways, not least of which is that he was frequently thought to have African ancestry himself. This concert features the work of two biracial composers who were active during Beethoven’s lifetime: the “Chevalier de Saint-Georges” aka Joseph Boulogne, a French violinist, fencer, and composer who knew and influenced Mozart; and George Bridgetower, a multi-national musician who grew up in the court at Esterhazy, where his father was a servant. Tutored by Haydn, Bridgetower went on to a stunning career as a virtuoso violinist, and was the original dedicatee of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” sonata. This concert will be interspersed with poetry from Rita Dove’s 2009 collection “Sonata Mulattica,” which tells the story of Bridgetower’s life.

Ode to Joy

SCHUBERT  “An die Freude” (orch. White)
MASON A Joyous Trilogy
BEETHOVEN  Symphony no. 9

This concert begins with Schubert’s setting of the “Ode” text that doesn’t take it quite so… seriously. Then a repeat performance of Quinn Mason’s A Joyous Trilogy, which was such a hit when we premiered it in February 2020. Followed by the very cornerstone of the choral-orchestral repertoire: Beethoven’s mighty 9th symphony.

All composers develop their musical language over the course of their careers — it’s inevitable. Some composers’ outputs, it seems to me, can be rather neatly divided into Early, Middle, and Late periods. With others, the situation is slipperier. 

This kind of thing is navel-gazing in its purest form, but since there’s nothing else to do right now…

Early-Middle-Late

Beethoven
Beethoven’s output is not only neatly divisible, but it established a paradigm: during the Early period, the composer masters the common style of the era, infusing it with their own particular genius (1st symphony, Pathétique); in the Middle period, the composer breaks out in bold new directions (the Eroica symphony, zum beispiel); in the late period, the composer condenses what they’ve learned into a more austere, introspective language, wrestling with the ghosts of their predecessors as they contemplate the end of their own life (the late quartets).

Verdi
The early stuff literally nobody listens to (aside from subscribers to the Sarasota Opera) — Giovanna d’arco, per esempio. Then there’s the essential three operas from the early 1850s, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, and La Traviata, which sparked his middle period (lasting as long as, say, Aïda). Then the output becomes sparser, finally arriving at the late glories of Otello and Falstaff (with Don Carlo and Bocanegra pointing the way there).

Schoenberg
The early style, many are surprised to find, is Mahlerian and tonal (Gurrelieder, Pélleas, Verklärte Nacht). Gradually he pushes past tonality until we get the mid-period free atonality of Pierrot Lunaire and the Fünf Orchesterstücke. Round about 1925, he invents a new, more stringent set of compositional rules for himself, giving us the blockbuster Moses und Aron, the violin and piano concertos, Survivor from Warsaw, etc. 

Now that makes for three periods clearly enough, but they’re not of the Beethovenian paradigm wherein the Late style is a reckoning with the early style. But, Schoenberg did have a brief and sporadic dalliance with tonal music once again at the end of his life, so do with that what you will.

Stravinsky
Early: the “Russian” style — Firebird through Les Noces
Middle: the neoclassical pieces (Octet, Dumbarton Oaks, The Rake’s Progress)
Late: the dodecaphonic works (Agon, Septet)

Once again, Stravinsky breaks the mold in that the Late style isn’t a look back to earlier days.

Ligeti
The early style is primarily influenced by Bartók and Kodály (no surprise). Then he defects to the West and encounters Stockhausen, Berio, and Kagel, sparking the Middle period, his own very particular brand of modernism: Atmosphères, Lontano, Apparitions and the like. Then he takes a decade to compose Le grand macabre, which turns out to be both a capstone and a transitional piece. After that, there’s a clear condensation of his style (gone are the ginormous pages of micropolyphony) and we get my personal favorites: the Violin Concerto, the Hamburg Concerto, the Nonsense Madrigals, the Viola Sonata, and Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel.

Schnittke
Ma boyyyy. Probably the composer whose output most clearly hews to the Beethoven model. Early Schnittke is beholden to the Soviet modernists, particularly Shostakovich (who would always remain an influence, but whose influence on Schnittke is, I think, overrated). This includes the Symphony No. 0 (“Nagasaki”), and a few pieces of a more modernist bent such as the first string quartet and the first violin concerto. Then there’s the great polystylistic breakthrough in the early 70s: the first symphony and the first Concerto Grosso, most notably. Then in 1985, he dies for the first time, comes back to life, and thence embarks upon his late, STARK style. For us serious Schnittkephiles, this is the best stuff. The language still nods to his roots, but the polystylism has been dialed way down, and now exists as shadows. Pieces from this era include the late symphonies (especially no. 8), the 2nd cello concerto, Faust, and Peer Gynt.

Easley Blackwood
I know this won’t mean much to many people, but he was my teacher, so I know a lot about him. His early music from the 1950’s was very much in the style of Shostakovich, Schoenberg, and Messiaen and even veered into higher modernism. Then he got involved into mathematical research surrounding various tuning systems, both historic ones and newfangled equal temperaments. This led to his studies of tonal music in tuning systems in octave divisions of 13-24 notes, after which he decided the one system he hadn’t engaged with was 12 notes. For the last 30-some-odd years, he’s written tonal music in the style of Franck and Saint-Saëns.

Other Neat Periodizations

Rossini
All the operas are Early Rossini, then yada yada yada, 25 years later we get Late Rossini! There is no Middle Rossini, since he was just chillin.

Robert Schumann
With Robert Schumann, his stylistic development is much more attached to genre, since he would devote entire years (or more) to, say, writing songs, or symphonies, or chamber pieces. There is, perhaps, an organic change of style over his career, but it’s harder (for me) to pick up on.

Brahms
The first and second piano sonatas are Early Brahms. Everything else is Late Brahms.

Janáček
All Janáček is Late Janáček.

A Less Distinctive Blurring

Tchaikovsky
So many experiments (third orchestral suite, Manfred), yet constantly on the verge of neoclassicism (fourth orchestral suite). Did his style ever actually change, or did he just get better at it?

Sibelius
His music definitely got colder and bonier as it went on, but when did it happen? It’s such a large output, and I’m no specialist. And if he had continued to compose during the last 30 years of his life, would there be a clearly-demarcated Late style? We’ll never know.

Debussy
His opus 1 string quartet sometimes gets assigned into an “early period” of its own, but I think there are many reminiscences of the quartet in Pélleas et Melisande, to the point where you’d have to group (at least) those two together. I guess you could argue that there’s an early period from the quartet through Pélleas, and then a middle period starting with La Mer, but just as much of Pélleas sounds like La Mer. There are the three late sonatas which are kind of doing their own thing, but the piano music and chansons suggest a continual working-through of similar ideas over the course of his career. It’s all very blurry.

Ravel
There’s clearly a development; you can’t say that Une barque sur l’océan sounds much like the G major piano concerto. You could maybe make a bipartite division into Early (impressionist / neoclassical) and Late (jazzy / neoclassical), but that doesn’t sit right somehow. It’s a slow development where you can see some interesting signposts along the way, but I think his style incorporates changes very conservatively and always excellently. The experiments are always successful, and he stays true to form.

Ended Pretty Much Where They Started

J. S. Bach
I mean, I actually have no idea, but it seems like it was all equally exquisite, experimental, and perfect all the way through?

Richard Strauss
With the exception of a mid-career genre change from tone poem to opera, and perhaps a slight mellowing of his musical language after Elektra, I don’t see much to suggest that he really changed styles.

Inconclusive

Schubert
People get all bent out of shape talking about Schubert’s “Late Style”. The guy was 31. Give him a break!

Mozart
See above. I’d say a case could be made that Mozart was moving into a distinctive Middle Period, but we’ll never know!

Lili Boulanger
The greatest tragedy in 20th century music. Even though she was developing rapidly, sadly, all Boulanger is Early Boulanger.

And as for me? 

As for me… I think I’m probably one of those smooth operators who experiment and gradually change, but that’s really for the musicologists to figure out. I hear they’ve got four more detectives working on the case down at the crime lab. All I really hope is that I never have a “late style” because honestly, I really don’t want to have to pretend to care about fugues.

Tonight we shall be bombarded by the bloody racket of those blasted, blasting gunpowder follies known as “fireworks.”

(Alas, not the Stravinskian variety. A pity.)

Not only are they an unabated nuisance that literally frighten some birds, pets, and wild animals to death, but they are also a harmful pollutant to water, air, and land. (This year, we’ll be able to find out just how harmful various types of fireworks are.) They are almost all manufactured by child laborers in Asian and Latin American countries.

Most civic institutions have cancelled their fireworks shows this year. Jolly sensible, and something I hope should continue past the socially distanced era of Covid-19.

I wish people would take more care of their aural health. We live in an obscenely loud era. Sounds are blasting at us from all corners, every day. As far as I’m concerned, the worst offenders are the power tools driven by gas motors: cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses, airplanes, seaplanes (a particular nuisance here in Seattle), lawnmowers, power washers, power tools, weed-whackers, and my most hated of all, the leaf blower.

Why do leaf blowers gall me so? Perhaps it’s something about their particular frequency, but I think it’s more the fact that their job is so easily replaced by the humble rake. (You could say the same of the lawnmower of course — all one really needs is a scythe. Read Anna Karenina, people!!)

And let’s not forget the “flash-bangs” employed at the protests recently. These are getting less attention than the tear gas and rubber bullets (and perhaps rightly so) but those things can cause permanent hearing damage. Of course, it’s entirely possible that cops and protesters alike routinely subject themselves to grotesque levels of volume at amplified music shows, but that’s another story.

And here’s an idea for Elon Musk: instead of sinking your billions into space rockets, why not make a Tesla for electric airplanes? I guarantee you that would advance the cause of humankind a hundredfold over space exploration.

So many diatribes (and I haven’t even mentioned by neighbors’ dog yet.) I used to lodge these noise complaints on Twitter, but I’ve recently renounced the tweet as a mode of expression. Twitter, it seems to me, is part of the same problem. Has anything that is technically silent ever been quite so loud?

Gentle readers, I bid you this fourth of July, at the very least, not to set off any firecrackers. That’ll earn you a passing C. If you want to go for a B, then do whatever you can to avoid singing or hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” easily the worst national anthem in the entire globe (right up there with “La Marseillaise.”) If you want an A, then be sure you’re grilling veggies on the grill instead of any dead animal carcasses.

And for those looking for extra credit, perhaps take a quiet moment to consider whether our violent founding is even worth celebrating at all. Don’t forget, had we not declared independence from the British crown, today we would simply be Canada, and our head of state would be that glorious monarch Elizabeth II. Vivat regina!

People often ask me what the “C.” stands for in “William C. White.” They usually guess Charles or Christopher or Connor, but what it actually stands for is Coleman.

I got the name from my father, Coleman Livingston White, Jr., who, naturally, got it from his father. As a child, I wished I had been named Coleman Livingston White III. I thought it sounded fancy and English, and fanciness and Englishness are two things of which I’m rather fond.

Beyond my grandfather’s generation, I knew nothing more of the name “Coleman Livingston” — it was just an axiom of my paternal heritage. Other than that they hailed from South Carolina, I knew little of the history of that side of the family. I never so much as thought to wonder where the name had come from until I was in my late 20s. Let’s put a pin in that for now.

✥

The first job I had after graduating college in 2005 was as music director of the Hyde Park Youth Symphony, a small community music program on the south side of Chicago near the U of C, where I had gone to school. I was with those kids for three years, a period that was probably more formative for me than it was for them.

That orchestra was truly as diverse a group as you’re likely to find anywhere. There were rich kids and poor kids, black, white, Asian, and Latino, and, crucially, every possible permutation of economic circumstance and ethnicity. They ranged in age widely, as tiny youth orchestra programs tend to. It was a little musical one-room schoolhouse.

It was a ragtag assemblage of instruments. One year we might have 5 flutes, 4 clarinets, a saxophone and a trombone, the next year might be 3 oboes, percussion, and piano. We took the kids because they wanted musical instruction, not because they were highly accomplished players or they formed a coherent “symphony orchestra.” This meant that I had to arrange and orchestrate every single piece we played, both for their skill level and for the instrumentation we had available.

As you can imagine, this was excellent training for me as a composer, but crucially, it gave me total freedom in programming. Yes, I was chained to my desk for hours upon hours drawing up Finale scores, but the truth was that since I was writing all the music myself, I could program anything I wanted to.

So left to my own devices what did we play? Among classics by Corelli, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, we played “The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea” by Stephen Sondheim, a selection of waltzes by Alfred Schnittke, the Vertigo Suite by Bernard Herrmann, a scene from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and the Chopinesque “Valse” by Billy Strayhorn. My tastes may have expanded since then, but they certainly have not changed.

✥

Every year, our major concert took place at the DuSable Museum of African American History, and the program naturally featured music by African American composers. Certainly the greatest height we achieved at in the museum programs was premiering an orchestral work composed by one of the students, a wide-ranging young man who not only wrote this tone poem but created a comic book to illustrate it.

Another project from the DuSable museum that I’ll never forget though, is a concert of selections from Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha.

Treemonisha comes from the year 1911 and combines strains of ragtime, light opera (aka G&S), and even Wagner. The story concerns a community of ex-slaves in Arkansas near the Red River. It was all but unknown until the 1970s when it was resurrected by Katherine Dunham and Robert Shaw.

Treemonisha was the second opera composed by Scott Joplin. The first, A Guest of Honor, has been lost, but it is supposed to have memorialized the 1901 visit of Booker T. Washington to the White House. We’ll likely never know the exact contents of A Guest of Honor, but given that the libretto Joplin wrote for Treemonisha was very much in line with Booker T. Washington’s outlook, we can assume it was a sympathetic and laudatory portrayal.

Alas, Joplin’s was not the only artistic response to that dinner. Booker T. Washington’s White House dinner caused a considerable backlash among white southerners, memorialized in an anonymous poem that was printed in several newspapers called “Niggers in the White House”.

You can click on that Wikipedia link and read the poem, and maybe you should, but if you don’t want to, just take it from me that it’s every bit as vile as you’d suspect.

The great tragedy is that whereas A Guest of Honor was lost to time, “NitWH” kept cropping back up. In 1929 it resurfaced when Lou Hoover, the first lady, invited Jessie De Priest to a White House tea for congressional wives. Jessie’s husband Oscar Stanton De Priest was the first African-American to be elected to congress since the days of reconstruction, and the first ever from a northern state. He represented Illinois’ 1st congressional district, which is in the south side of Chicago. It includes Hyde Park.

This time the poem wasn’t just printed in the papers. It was read on the floor of the senate. The senator who read it represented the state of South Carolina. His name was Coleman Livingston Blease.

Before he was a senator, Blease had served as governor of South Carolina in the first years of the 20th century. His unadulterated brand of white supremacy was so popular with poor white South Carolina mill workers that many of his constituents named their children after him. It’s what my great-grandfather did.

✥

Black history is American history, and it touches us all no matter what our race may be. I’m lucky that my parents raised me in an explicitly anti-racist manner, but we’re not only raised by our parents — we’re also raised by ghosts.

Black history matters. Black kids matter. Black parents matter. Black teachers matter. Black communities matter. Black art matters. Black music matters. Black lives matter.