Allan Bloom, Identity Politics, and “Closed Minds”

Looking for another book not long ago, I stumbled upon Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. In 1987, it was a national sensation, a trigger-point for debate over the legacy of the sixties and its “counter-culture.”

Subtitled “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,” Bloom’s salvo attacked from the right. It was less a polemic than a closely reasoned argument fortified with lofty philosophic learning and grounded classroom experience. 

My copy of The Closing of the American Mindis a paperback with scant evidence of close scrutiny. Some three dozen pages are heavily marked with dismissive marginalia. Bloom took aim at my own generation (I was born in 1948). And its political complexion was anathema. 

But times have changed and so have I. Rather than replacing it on the shelf, I re-opened The Closing of the American Mind– and discovered that Allan Bloom was prophetic. In effect, he prophesied identity politics and political rectitude – and closed minds and “impoverished souls.” 

This is the gist of my long piece in last weekend’s edition of The American Interest. You can read the whole thing here.

And here (from my article) is some of what I have to say about the impact of closed minds and impoverished souls on my own professional endeavors:

American classical music is today a scholarly minefield. The question “What is America?” is central. So is the topic of race. The American music that most matters, nationally and internationally, is black. But classical music in the US has mainly rejected this influence – which is one reason it has remained impossibly Eurocentric. As the visiting Czech composer Antonin Dvorak emphasized in 1893, two obvious sources for an “American” concert idiom are the sorrow songs of the slave, and the songs and rituals of Native America. Issues of appropriation are front and center. It is a perfect storm.  

Dvorak directed New York City’s National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to 1895 – in the rise-and-fall of American classical music, a period of peak promise and high achievement. It speaks volumes that he chose as his personal assistant a young African-American baritone who had eloquently acquired the sorrow songs from his grandfather, a former slave. This was Harry Burleigh, who after Dvorak died turned spirituals into concert songs with electrifying success. (If you’ve ever heard Marian Anderson or Paul Robeson sing “Deep River,” that’s Burleigh.) During the Harlem Renaissance, Burleigh’s arrangements were reconsidered by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, both of whom detected a “flight from blackness” to the white concert stage. Today, Burleigh’s “appropriation” of the black vernacular is of course newly controversial. That he was inspired by a white composer of genius becomes an uncomfortable fact. An alternative reading, based not on fact but on theory, is that racist Americans impelled him to “whiten” black roots. Burleigh emerges a victim, his agency diminished. 

Compounding this confusion is another prophet: W E. B. Du Bois, who like Dvorak foresaw a black American classical music to come. The pertinent lineage from Dvorak to Burleigh includes the ragtime king Scott Joplin (who considered himself a concert composer) and the once famous black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, urged by Du Bois, Burleigh, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar to take up Dvorak’s prophecy. After Coleridge-Taylor came notable black symphonists of the 1930s and forties: William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price, all of them today being belatedly and deservedly rediscovered.

But the same lineage leads to George Gershwin and Porgy and Bess: a further source of discomfort. I have even been advised, at an American university, to omit Gershwin’s name from a two-day Coleridge-Taylor celebration. But Coleridge-Taylor’s failure to fulfill Dvorak’s prophecy – he was too decorous, too Victorian – cannot be contextualized without exploring the ways and reasons that Gershwin did it better. As for Gershwin’s opera: even though Porgy is a hero, a moral paragon, it today seems virtually impossible to deflect accusations of derogatory “stereotyping.” The mere fact that he is a physical cripple, ambulating on a goat-cart, frightens producers and directors into minimizing Porgy’s physical debility. But a Porgy who can stand is paradoxically diminished: the trajectory of his triumphant odyssey – of a “cripple made whole” — is truncated. (On Porgy and Bess at the Met, click here.)

Gershwin discomfort is mild compared to the consternation Arthur Farwell (1872-1952)invites. He, too, embraced Dvorak’s prophecy. As the leading composer in an “Indianists” movement lasting into the 1930s, Farwell believed it was a democratic obligation of Americans of European descent to try to understand the indigenous Americans they displaced and oppressed – to preserve something of their civilization; to find a path toward reconciliation. His Indianist compositions attempt to mediate between Native American ritual and the Western concert tradition. Like Bela Bartok in Transylvania, like Igor Stravinsky in rural Russia, he endeavored to fashion a concert idiom that would paradoxically project the integrity of unvarnished vernacular dance and song. He aspired to capture specific musical characteristics – but also something additional, something ineffable and elemental, “religious and legendary.” He called it – a phrase anachronistic today – “race spirit.”

As a young man, Farwell visited with Indians on Lake Superior. He hunted with Indian guides. He had out-of-body experiences. Later, in the Southwest, he collaborated with the charismatic Charles Lummis, a pioneer ethnographer. For Lummis, Farwell transcribed hundreds of Indian and Hispanic melodies, using either a phonograph or local singers.  If he was subject to criticism during his lifetime, it was for being naïve and irrelevant, not disrespectful or false. The music historian Beth Levy – a rare contemporary student of the Indianists movement in music – pithily summarizes that Farwell embodies a state of tension intermingling “a scientific emphasis on anthropological fact” with “a subjective identification bordering on rapture.” Considered purely as music, his best Indianist are memorably original – and so, to my ears, is their ecstasy.

These days, one of the challenges of presenting Farwell in concert is enlisting Native American participants. For a recent festival in Washington, D.C. – “Native American Inspirations,” surveying 125 years of music inspired by Native America — I unsuccessfully attempted to engage Native American scholars and musicians from as far away as Texas, New Mexico, and California. My greatest disappointment was the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, which declined to partner. A staff member explained that Farwell lacked “authenticity.” But Farwell’s most ambitious Indianist composition — the Hako String Quartet (1922), a centerpiece of our festival– claims no authenticity. Though its inspiration is a Great Plains ritual celebrating a symbolic union of Father and Son, though it incorporates passages evoking a processional, or an owl, or a lighting storm, it does not chart a programmatic narrative. Rather, it is a 20-minute sonata-form that documents the composer’s enthralled subjective response to a gripping Native American ceremony. 

A hostile newspaper review of “Native American Inspirations” ignited a torrent of tweets condemning Farwell for cultural appropriation. This crusade, mounted by culture-arbiters who have never heard a note of Farwell’s music, was moral, not aesthetic. It mounted a chilling war cry. If Farwell is today off limits, it is partly because of fear – of castigation by a neighbor. I know because I have seen it. (To listen to the music of Arthur Farwell, click here.)

Arthur Farwell is an essential component of the American musical odyssey. So is Harry Burleigh. So are the blackface minstrel shows Burleigh abhorred – they were a seedbed for ragtime and what came after. Even alongside the fullest possible acknowledgement of odious minstrel caricatures, a more nuanced reading of this most popular American entertainment genre is generally unwelcome. It is, for instance, not widely known that pre-bellum minstrelsy was an instrument of political dissent from below. Blackface minstrelsy was not invariably racist. 

Charles Ives’s Second Symphony is one of the supreme American achievements in symphonic music. Its Civil War finale quotes Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” by way of expressing sympathy for the slave. When there are students in the classroom who cannot get past that, the outcome is Bloomsian: closed minds.