Radically Transforming Classical Music
by Christopher S. Jenkins
There should be no doubt that, historically, the classical-music establishment in the United States has worked overtime to excise musical influences that are non-white and non-male. These efforts have ranged from physically concrete measures taken by orchestras and presenters in rejecting performers who were not both white and male to musically concrete measures taken by scholars whose music theories and histories privileged music written by white men in a European tradition. Over the past few decades, organizations such as the Gateways Music Festival, the Black Orchestral Network, and the Sphinx Organization have found a measure of success in diversifying classical music by increasing the number and visibility of music students, performers, and composers of color. This success should be celebrated.
But paradoxically, focusing on demographic diversity allows classical music organizations to evade a critical issue: classical music’s aesthetics, formal structures, and ensemble configurations communicate a set of beliefs and aesthetics that are culturally distinct from the values held by many of these new “diverse” participants. These beliefs include anti-communitarian attitudes reified through the strict hierarchy of orchestras; the prohibition of particular bodily movements and interaction styles for performers and audiences; restrictive aesthetic codes of self-presentation, such as for hair and clothing; and musical conceits such as an opposition to propulsive rhythm (the “groove” which informs most of the world’s music).
The demographic approach to diversification provides musicians of color with meaningful employment opportunities but requires a degree of acculturation that constitutes cultural erasure for many. Equitable diversification of Western classical music in the U.S. must go beyond demographic representation. It must involve a cultural transformation that I propose is reflected in the process of “transculturation,” a cultural synthesis in the context of unequal power dynamics that results in an innovative cultural product. The transculturation of classical music in the U.S. can potentially create a musical practice with a mutually sustainable appeal in a pluralistic and diverse society.
“Acculturation” has generally been understood as a process through which marginalized populations adopt linguistic, aesthetic, economic, gendered, and other cultural practices of the mainstream. It also evokes cultural loss in members of the acculturated population. In 1940, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz introduced the term “transculturation,” a more complex description encompassing cultural exchange’s reciprocal and bilateral nuances. For Ortiz, transculturative processes are not a one-way street; their mutuality generates a cultural transfiguration through synthesis and elides the breadth of cultural loss inferred by assimilation. Cultural studies scholar Jossianna Arroyo points out that transculturation is not merely a cultural mixture or synthesis but describes a discourse of relational power, a theory of cultural transition as a politically fraught process resulting in an entirely new cultural and political entity. Transculturation, or “neoculturation,” Ortiz’s term for the new cultural product emerging from cultural synthesis, would result in a “classical music” that incorporates elements of the U.S.’s first authentic classical music — jazz– and other musical elements that have historically been neglected in Western classical musical practices and theoretical study.
Transculturation is not a risk-free proposition for marginalized cultures; it carries with it the threat of cultural degradation and exploitation, and for this reason some theorists criticize it as insufficiently counterhegemonic. But this critique loses sight of the fact that the current situation is one in which classical music organizations impose cultural dominance over people of color. I propose a specific process of transculturation that explicitly transfers control and agency to people of color in situating Western classical and historically marginalized musical traditions on equal footing with white practices. This reflects educator Paolo Freire’s conceptualization of the “pedagogy of the oppressed” as a practice that must be “forged with, not for, the oppressed. . .in their incessant struggle to regain their humanity.” Freire’s intention was to empower marginalized populations by educating them to understand and contextualize the deeper systems of power by which they were constrained.
Concretely, transculturation would involve incorporating improvisation into sections of composed works because improvisation’s spontaneity and invocation of community imply a distinct set of social and political values often absent in Western classical music. The musical practice resulting from transculturation would embrace the potency of musical grooves and diminish the psychological boundary enclosing the stage, creating metaphorical and literal space for audiences to embrace the kinetic bodily responses precluded by traditional concert halls.
In the U.S., musicians of color have already started this process. Examples include innovative musical ensembles such as Interwoven, a chamber group integrating traditional Asian musical practices and instruments with European classical music; the Soulful Symphony, which has performed hip-hop concertos with a full symphony orchestra, jazz band, and gospel choir; or the Iranshahr Orchestra, which fuses European and Iranian classical music practices. Iranshahr’s declaration of ideological autonomy as a “non-Eurocentric orchestra/ensemble” is representative of this movement’s ethos: “Our platform, aesthetic, organization, and structure are rooted in non-European musical ideas and aesthetics.”
Mainstream discourse frames the question of diversification from the dominant group’s perspective, thus inserting the minority group as an object and their inclusion as an objective — that is, “How can we get more Black and Brown bodies to be involved in Western classical music?” An ethical and just transcultural recontextualization frames people of color as subjects with agency and whose cultural values are paramount so diversification can move beyond inclusion toward radical transformation.
Christopher Jenkins is a scholar and performer whose work focuses on racialized aesthetics and the music of African-American composers. He is the Associate Dean for Academic Support and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Oberlin Conservatory.
