For the past decade I have enjoyed the privilege of regularly collaborating in “Dvorak and America” festivals with Kevin Deas, one of the supreme African-American concert artists of our day. His performances of “Goin’ Home” and the “Hiawatha Melodrama” invariably make a great impression.
Kevin’s self-evident generosity of spirit is as vital to his appeal as his luscious bass-baritone. But he has his foibles, one of which is a chronic reluctance to sign CDs.
For the recent El Paso “Dvorak and America” festival, I instructed both the El Paso Symphony and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) to purchase hundreds of CDs for signature and sale. The CD in question is “Dvorak and America” (Naxos), featuring Kevin Deas singing “Goin’ Home” and the “Hiawatha Melodrama,” plus a number of startling Dvorak-related novelties.
Kevin invariably predicts that no one will purchase “Dvorak and America.” Knowing El Paso, I knew otherwise. I managed to goad him into venturing into the lobby of the Plaza Theatre at intermission, where a table stacked with CDs awaited his attention. He discovered a line of customers so long that it disappeared around a corner. They were young and old. Many were Hispanic. Some were first-time concertgoers. They all had something they wanted to tell him. And they wanted to buy signed CDs.
In fact, El Paso is the perfect place for a Dvorak festival. Serendipitously, the El Paso Symphony is the only American orchestra with a Czech conductor. His name is Bohuslav Rattay and he is terrific. The orchestra enjoys a following both hungry and diverse. The orchestra roster includes 18 Hispanic musicians.
As for UTEP, I have never encountered more eager or absorbent students. Of UTEP’s 22,800 students, 78 per cent are Hispanic. More than 60 per cent of UTEP graduates are the first in their family to earn a B.A. One-third of all UTEP students report a family income of $20,000 or less. They disclose no sense of entitlement. The faculty is distinguished – pedagogues who savor the opportunity at hand. The school is a launching pad. Its purposes and effectiveness are inspirational and obvious.
El Paso itself, with a population of 650,000 (80 per cent Hispanic), is a perfect size for communal cultural endeavor. The orchestra, the university, the public schools partner easily. The various departments of the university are seamlessly collaborative. For the Dvorak festival, a fabulous scholar of nineteenth century American literature, the Melville specialist Brians Yothers, boned up on Longfellow and vitally participated in our explorations of the impact of The Song of Hiawatha on the New World Symphony.
The Dvorak topic is protean, actually inexhaustible. His ecumenical conviction that African-Americans and Native Americans were emblematic Americans, crucial to any valid notion of American identity, remains provocative and timely.
The El Paso festival began with a presentation at Chapin High School that was streamed to other public schools. I lectured for three large UTEP classes, connecting with a mixture music and non-music undergraduates and graduate students. Kevin and I performed our “Harry Burleigh Show” for a gathering of all UTEP music majors and grad students. The multi-media El Paso Symphony concerts featured the Hiawatha Melodrama and a visual presentation for the New World Symphony. The pre-concert speaker was Brian Yothers on Longfellow – his range of influence, his shifting reputation.
Finally, there were two concerts on the UTEP campus. Lowell Graham led the UTEP Orchestra in an arresting program of music from Dvorak’s America by George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell and Dudley Buck. The UTEP Chorale offered spirituals and rare “Indianist” works. Here, the main event was Arthur Farwell’s 16-part a cappella “Pawnee Horses,” an American choral masterpiece that remains virtually unknown, brilliantly prepared by UTEP’s Elisa Wilson.
More than 300 UTEP students attended the El Paso Symphony concerts. Many had never before heard an orchestra.
Two indispensable factors were Frank Candelaria, a visionary music historian who also serves as UTEPs Associate Provost, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supported the festival as part of its Music Unwound orchestral consortium.
Next February I return to El Paso for “Copland and Mexico,” which will use Aaron Copland’s Mexican epiphany as a starting point for exploring the Mexican cultural efflorescence of the 1930s. In that decade, it was not only Berlin and Paris that lured American artists and intellectuals abroad. Copland, Paul Strand, John Steinbeck, and Langston Hughes were among those flocking south of the border. Mexican’s own cultural vanguard included a composer of genius still insufficiently recognized: Silvestre Revueltas. The iconic Mexican film Redes, scored by Revueltas with cinematography by Strand, will be the centerpiece of “Copland and Mexico.” UTEP, the El Paso Symphony, the El Paso Film Festival, and the El Paso Museum are already on board. There is a strong push to include events across the Rio Grande in Juarez. The opportunities at hand are inexhaustible.
More than any other American city I know, El Paso deserves to be recognized as a national showcase for the ways in which cultural and educational institutions can work together to instruct, inspire, and unite.
william osborne says
Perhaps because you’re not from that part of the country, I think you’re missing the larger point. Texas has the best public school music education programs in the country, and it is not merely limited to El Paso. Basically, every town and city in the state is like that. Take for example, Allen High School where 450 of the school’s 750 students play in the band. Check out this video of the marching band in Sugarland Texas as just a random sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqHVaQ15yW4
The district and state competitions between the bands are approached with absolute fanaticism. The Friday Night Lights syndrome doesn’t just apply to football in Texas, but to the bands as well. Other big states, like California, simply cannot compare. (And we note, that California, with a population equal to several major European countries and vastly more wealth, does not have a single university school of music with a genuinely national reputation, especially for performance majors.)
The result is that Texas is drenched in fantastic musicians who are vastly under-employed. As an example, check out this exhilarating recording of the Dallas Wind Symphony, a group comprised of local free lancers and college teachers. They are a world class ensemble that essentially plays for the fun of it because there are no jobs to be found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Em2qO0Hnpk
As another example of under-employment, think of the so-called Houston Grand Opera. Houston is America’s 4th largest city, and has untold wealth, but ranks 107th in the world for opera performances per year. The Houston Grand Joke. Mighty Dallas is an even more astounding disgrace. It ranks 297th for opera performances per year while musicians like those in the above recording are left unemployed and often just give up and quit. El Paso ranks 657th ,outranks by little European towns no one has ever even heard of. To avoid embarrassment, let’s not ask what the musicians of the El Paso Symphony are paid – or consider that it has to fill out its ranks with college students due to the low pay even though the city has a population of 650,000. (The neighboring New Mexico Philharmonic in Albuquerque, with a metro population of 900,000, pays its tutti string plyaers $3000 per year.)
The wide-spread cultural education is there in Texas, and fabulous musicians, but its musical life remains impoverished because the USA is the only developed country in the world without a comprehensive system of public arts funding. But in our brainwashed, Orwellian country, that is something that will never penetrate the anaesthetized brains of Americans. They will stare at you blankly, unable to comprehend. I