Cultural appropriation vis-a-vis globalization

As I edit these shorts, a topic recurs as it does whenever I encounter Asian or folk influence in contemporary music performance. I've encountered views on the topic with a range of tone (here's an irritating one), but none yet that attempts to address the complex experience of 2nd- plus-generation immigrants coming of age in white Eurocentric culture. Try this:

1. Am I assimilated because I've accessed white privileged education, move in white queer or liberal circles, and know relatively little about my culture of origin?
2. If I'm assimilated, is my interest in minority cultures and use of artifacts (including artistic) from these cultures appropriative exactly as if I were white?
3. Is the only way for me to escape the white man's path, to be more Chinesey by investing more of myself in my culture of origin, whatever that is and regardless of the reasons my family chose to leave it?

There's a narrative that I need to investigate. In a globalized world, I can't believe I'm alone on this! As I touched on in my previous post I filled a spiritual void in childhood from whatever I could get my hands on. Coming into awareness that there is a tremendous complexity and history behind each culture I encounter was a difficult step for me. I don't dispute that we owe other cultures deeper respect and serious and cautious study. What irks me right now is the alienating, silencing effect when one who is genuinely interested in a non-origin culture hears his expression is appropriative.

Serious questions:

Can a musician incorporate elements of culture of non-origin music into her work without knowledge of the cultural significance of this sort of music and without being appropriative? Can one who studies a non-origin culture extensively and still be appropriative?

Lest I be blamed for leaving it out on this post, I'll write it here: Orientalism. Now, your turn to sound off.

Btw #3 is a ridiculous suggestion because it is both impossible and uninteresting. Having had the Western, stereotype-focused anti-oppression education that I have makes it impossible for me to retrace my parents' values to 1980s China and somehow claim them. What would be interesting is to see how my generation of organizers all over the world, including in the mainland, conceptualize oppression.

On religion

Speculation on the timing of the Biblical Rapture has led me to consider my standing relative to America's dominant religion. I have to admit picking up Douglas Adams's posthumous publication A Salmon of Doubt contributed.

Unlike most of my peers I grew up with no religion, indeed, little talk at all of spiritual belief and the meaning of life and death. Yet, in an antagonistic adolescent world, I experienced what I still consider a divine moment in 2001, hearing Smetana's Die Moldau at New Haven's Woolsey Hall. It felt qualitatively as a transport to paradise. I experienced it again when I visited Bali two years later, again on hearing fine concerted sound that instantly bridged the sacred and the profane.

No doubt my choices of expression, society, and service work come from a common source with these moments of acute awareness. My faith is in a life and strength that feeds my daily choices of right from wrong, but have presence beyond that. As I grow older, the way I relate to others gains depths of gratitude, forgiveness, and generosity that surprise me even as they bear me forward from moments of spiritual devastation. These teach me to be steadfast in practice, even when progress appears impossible.

This life and strength, the common source, is as unmistakable to me as those moments of transcendence through music. It renders meaningless categories of self and other, mortality and eternity. When I'm aware of it I'm empowered in doing my life in the completeness of reality.

In holding this divinity the questions "do you take Jesus as your lord and personal savior" or "do you believe in God" make no sense. The source is empty of questions, judgment, or answers, yet all the music ever played, now sounding, and yet to be conceived flow continuously from it, soundlessly ghosted in our world.

Songwriting and Theater of the Oppressed

My friend Martin has a peculiar practice of what I call "intimate economy." Whenever he abandons his home for a new life on the other side of the world, he gifts trinkets, books, accessories -- all those comfort items that make a home -- to appropriate friends. This time I got this:

Now, I'm not a songwriter so I don't know how to write guitar chords or catchy lyrics (though I've tried my hand at hip-hop). But since my experimentation has plunged me headfirst into the world of improv, it seemed appropriate to document these compositions, so. If this inspires you to write pop style songs, by all means share.

I've continued my Theater of the Oppressed journey with Morgan Andrews here in Philly. Last weekend he facilitated an incredibly sensitive, intimate Rainbow of Desire session featuring a black female couple's dispute over public presentation of their relationship. The 30-some odd participants selected their story over four others' from the room. I know Morgan is a master theater facilitator, so he changes up the process according to everyone's energies, but overall Rainbow of Desire is designed to refract the multiple simultaneous impulses of each individual in a provocative scenario into discernible facets, characterize them, process them through image making and image dynamism, and release them in support of the individual's true practice.

Almost every time I disclose that I'm a composer, someone asks what kind of music. We are such powerful, complex beings. We deserve all of one another, and we have the potential to make this world better in our lifetimes. This is the work I mean when I answer. How can I better put in words the calling to dress myself in rope bondage and medical needles, beat a violin, and step all over my audience members?

On Queer and Questioning

For GLSEN's Day of Silence to draw attention to oppression of sexuality & gender minority youth (not linked because I bear a methodological grudge against the national organization), I have a message to voice.

I first came out not as lesbian when I dated girls in high school nor as transgender or genderqueer when I finally gave up trying to fit in, but as Questioning. That means I'm willing to own that I'm "questioning" my identity, but more importantly, I'm refusing to let you put your label on me. Queer and Questioning are identities of refusal. They deny the ultimate denier, dominant society and culture, which silences or appropriates our myriad ways of being.

So to those who, through silence or voice, self-identify as Questioning, I raise a coffeecup toast.

Curtis Symphony Orchestra: Turangalila-symphonie

On Tuesday I had the too-rare privilege of attending a performance I knew I would thoroughly enjoy. Olivier Messiaen's epic work demands not only unfaltering virtuosity from all performers but a unique instrumentation. I once saw this piece struck from a university program because it calls for the electronic keyboard instrument ondes Martenot in addition to the composer's customary arsenal of percussion.

What do I love about this piece? Of course Messiaen leaves a legacy of color, but that means little on its own. He creates in each piece a fantasy world: laws of materials physics reinvented, transitions as dramatic as scenes cut in film, mammoth layers of soundcraft like fine masonry; the brass Statue Theme, the full-ensemble Joie that bursts out singing and dancing, the Garden of Sleeping Lovers, and his masterful blocks of contrasting textures and themes. I think most of all I admire the "ten thousand worlds" of passions and tenderness it holds as a mortal's expression of the infinity and contradiction of divine love. Love is simple. How one arrives at its power -- through life and the troubling world that shapes ours -- is complex.

Some describe the Turangalila-symphonie as a piano concerto; I think of it as a double concerto for ondes Martenot as well. Although the ondes Martenot produces only one voice, the part is wildly expressive and varied. It was curious to watch Thomas Bloch's quiet poise through the piece. For years I have giggled at extravagant gestures by Western string players -- it's refreshing to examine options for stage presence developed by theater, folk, experimental, noise, and pop artists.

Another memorable moment was the closing of movement 5, Joie du sang des etoiles (though I'd have to check the score), when pianist Di Wu* lit fireworks of chords in enormous leaps and rapid succession all over the keyboard. My seat was two tiers up but quite close to the orchestra so my eyes feasted on her lightning placements.

I should mention eight years ago the Swarthmore College gamelan opened for the Philadelphia Orchestra when they gave this piece. Christoph Eschenbach conducted those performances as well, and though my ears are something else now I dare say the Curtis Orchestra was at least as tight. From my seat the glockenspiel (sometimes two doubling!) and remainder of the orchestra usually overpowered the piano solos. That may be an artifact of many hearings of recordings with balance adjusted, but I hesitate to fault the composer.

Before the feature, Curtis Institute of Music faculty member Alan Morrison gave brief introductions to organ pieces by Messiaen's contemporaries Louis Vierne and Charles Tournemire. I found it unfortunate they programmed Curtis student Bryan Anderson to play Messiaen's organ pieces after the symphony, when my head was exploding from spent neurotransmitters and the hall rapidly emptied. Yes, I want to hear that music, but at the time, my ears could only hold ambience.

*[EDIT 4/22] This post helped me frame the question: can an East Asian woman wear her hair permed without being accused of assimilation? Conversely, can one avoid being offered a perm every time she enters a salon?

Educational Bodies Conference

I returned yesterday from the aforementioned conference with something of a new head.

My host's second-floor flat in Cambridge has a unique sound world I freshly re-experienced upon arrival Thursday afternoon. The house is adjacent a city park and across the street from a public school. Its construction filters sound in a quite warm yet distant way. Dozens or kids were playing outside and a couple of times marching band drum practice struck up a pattern briefly. Their youthful shouts, the dull smacks of balls, and cheers filled the sunlit room. Upstairs neighbors added a rare, even slower, duller thud here and there. My host sat across the room in a matching easy chair silently pivoting her bare feet on the edge of a shaft of sunlight and irregularly touching off a battery of Mac laptop keyboard clicks. She slurped coffee now and again, then once more quietly, holding it on her tongue for a breath before swallowing wetly in the ensuing silence. I breathed my coffee the way the moon fills a bay with the tide. I listened to my own breaths -- higher overtones on the inhale than the exhale, a bit more labored than usual. Closer, sharper, charged.

I wish I could say I existed in the sound world with such fervor throughout the visit. But I have no idea what to expect from an academic conference. My most memorable moments were meeting co-panelists Pavlos Kountouriotis, Matthew Cumbie, and Amanda Jackson; staring at Rachel Taranta's "quasi-monochromatic illumination" of brightly painted squiggles; chatting about the impossibility of young immigrant passing in academic and professional America with Andy Reyes; experiencing Jill Sigman's mummification-hot wax-inscriptions THE MACHINE and talking about it after the conference; and of course performing full-contact violin.

Found onstage, crumpled into a tiny ball at the end of the performance:

That, and my first hustle making music. My attention deteriorated more rapidly than after any other type of performance. The needles are a fine engine for me to transcend the myth of performance so I can be myself with the instrument, but I don't come back to my rational self before a good night's sleep. That I finally got last night and I woke up lit "like a pinball machine." The Muse can make a fine lover even though she's batshit insane most of the time.

So I thank the fine presenters and audience and welcome questions and remarks.

EDIT 4/15: I've uploaded some audio selections from the performance to my SoundCloud page (right).

Cambridge Performance of Gender & Sexuality in Academia

The next performance of full-contact violin will be here. You have my permission to giggle at the abstract.

Yenching Auditorium, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA

13:30 – 14:30 Panel 2: Perverse Bodies

Matt Cumbie and Amanda Jackson
Qian Li
Andrés Castro Samayoa