Customer Reviews

Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood (Border Crossings)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am reviewing the Blitzstein section as someone who has worked on a drama about him. The essay "Reclaiming Walt" is quite insightful in spite of a thicket of overly academic language that reveals it's roots as a 'paper', somewhat revised. In identifying the unrecognized importance of Blitzstein's settings of nine Whitman poems, all with homo-erotic meaning and quite brave for the time, the writer allies Blitzstein with Hart Crane in particular persuasively. Both artists make a very bold (meta)physical connection in their adaptations of Whitman's work and celebrate their own physical beings as he did, a chain of art grounded in the male body. Where the essay goes off the rails - as always in American culture - is dealing with the race issues brought up by Blitzstein's equally bold incorporation of jazz and Negro culture in these mid-20s works, the first American to do so as a classical composer, to my knowledge. The writer finds it automatically offensive and degrading, condescending that Blitzstein yokes Whitman's eroticism with Negro eroticism. But that's hard to see when Blitzstein is celebrating both simeotaneously while taking the phrase 'coon shout' - which he labeled a few of the songs - and making it a badge of honor just as today the word 'queer' has been adopted by gay artists. As with most academic work, the obvious can't be simply accepted, there must be, to borrow S. J. Perelman's phrase, 'a coloured gentleman in the woodpile'. Blitzstein wrote classical songs with jazz elements that he employed Negro singers (who rarely got such opportunities then) to perform. To read anything else into it just seems silly, and aims to protect the writer from any charge of racism himself. That said, the CD is welcome too, with two caveats: that the complete set of nine songs weren't recorded (only four appear) and that for a work that celebrates the male homoerotic element a female soprano sings the songs (though she sings them extremely well). Given the price, most copies of this work have doubtless been bought by libraries. If you can't afford it, you might head there. It is a very interesting work for those with the special interests in these subjects. It would be better work if the writing methods and the intended readers were not solely, narrowly academic. Particularly because both Whitman and Blitzstein created highly intelligent, bold art intended for a very broad, egalitarian audience.