Singing Against the Grain: Playing Beethoven in the #BlackLivesMatter era by Kira Thurman at The Point. This is some great writing
. . . I have spent my career since then as a historian of black classical musicians and their performances, finding the ghosts of people who looked like me and loved the same music.
Many of them attended Oberlin, a thirty-minute drive away from the conservatory I attended so many years ago for my bachelor’s degree. In conducting research on the history of black classical musicians, I discovered that the high number of black students at Oberlin’s music school was not a coincidence. In addition to being the oldest continually operating conservatory in the United States, Oberlin has a long and rich tradition of training black classical musicians. The first black student to graduate with a degree in music from Oberlin was Harriet Gibbs Marshall, the daughter of African Americans who left gold-rush California for Canada. After graduating from Oberlin in 1894, Gibbs founded the first-ever all-black music school, the Washington Conservatory of Music, in the nation’s capital.
Others followed, and theirs are stories of triumph and obscurity. . . .
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Damon Linker, always good and occasionally profound, at The Week: The polarization of Hurricane Florence. [Advice: read -- it's short -- before commenting based solely on the quote. It's not 'effin both-siderism.]
With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Eastern seaboard, it's as good a time as any to take stock of the wondrous, warping powers of partisanship, which now touches and transforms absolutely everything in our public life.
Even the weather.
Listen for it as the storm approaches, strikes, and then dissipates — the ways that competing ideologies (an increasingly tribal conservatism on the right; statist progressivism on the left) shape differing reactions to the event and expose the deepening political and cultural fissures in our profoundly divided country.
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I thought democracy in Chile was safe. Now I see America falling into the same trap by Ariel Dorfman at The Guardian (US.)
It can’t happen here. That’s an avowal I have been hearing from Americans ever since my family and I, fleeing a dictatorship in our native Chile, finally came to settle in the United States in 1980.
What happened to you in Chile can’t happen here. Democracy in the US is too stable, the institutions too deeply rooted, the people too much in love with liberty.
Weary of wandering, desperate for refuge, I wanted to believe that the American experiment would not abide tyranny. And yet I remained sceptical, stubbornly wary. I had pronounced similar words about Chile, and had also once succumbed to the illusion that democracy in the land I called my own could never be destroyed, that it “couldn’t happen here”.