world culture

Podcast • September 30, 2008

The American Exception: Pop Culture Today

On the exceptional power of American culture, what first pops out of my own head is a moment about ten years ago, after narrating Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait (1942) at the JFK Library in ...

On the exceptional power of American culture, what first pops out of my own head is a moment about ten years ago, after narrating Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait (1942) at the JFK Library in Boston with the Indian conductor George Mathew — before George got his American green card.

The piece triggered a general rapture over Lincoln’s words (“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy…”) and Copland’s brilliant war-time adaptation of great American folk themes like “Springfield Mountain” and “Campdown Races.” Between final bows, George burst out to me, with tears in his eyes: “Chris… Chris… It makes you so proud to be an illegal alien!”

From Walt Whitman to Frank Sinatra to Spike Lee, we exult in an artistic American pop genius that moves and shakes both plain and fancy people all around the world. The jazz tours by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong from the Thirties to the Seventies, from London to Accra to Moscow to Tokyo, mark a sort of pinnacle for me. But in this Open Source series of conversations about “American Exceptionalism” today — here, here, and here — the question comes: what is the American sound, the American style, the American culture that we’re putting out there today?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Martha Bayles (36 minutes, 16 mb mp3)

Martha Bayles

The independent scholar and cultural omni-buff Martha Bayles went recently to the other ends of the telescope to see us through our exports as they arrive in India, China, Turkey, Indonesia and Egypt. There’s a book in the works, and a strong article on “popular culture” available in the oft-cited Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation. In our conversation, it’s unmistakable that Martha is not just a discriminating listener by training, but an enthusiast and a patriot by instinct. It’s equally clear that she’s distressed by the sound of the American “voice” out there these days:

I think what we project now through a lot of our entertainment is freedom in the sense of libertanism, it’s freedom in the sense of ‘I can do whatever I want and screw you.’ I’ve had people overseas actually say to me that that’s what they think American freedom means. That it’s the freedom of the sovereign kind of self, Orlando Patterson uses that term — the freedom of the master over the slave. It’s not a very pretty side of freedom. And we project this kind of freedom to do whatever the hell you want, unfettered by connections with other people, unfettered by ties to family or community, or any kind of ethical or moral restrictions — it’s a very radical idea of freedom, just as the will of the individual basically to satisfy his or her desires.

Martha Bayles of the blog Serious Popcorn and the book Hole in Our Soul, in conversation with Chris Lydon, August, 2008

Podcast • February 20, 2008

Master Class: the Global Beethoven

The sublime pianist Hung-Kuan Chen is playing for keeps at what I think of as the great three-way intersection of our time. His passport says: USA. His stock in trade is the classical canon of ...
Hung-Kuan Chen, Multi-polar Pianist

Hung-Kuan Chen, Multi-polar Pianist

The sublime pianist Hung-Kuan Chen is playing for keeps at what I think of as the great three-way intersection of our time. His passport says: USA. His stock in trade is the classical canon of European music from Mozart to Messaien, Beethoven to Bartok. His working base is the piano department chair at the Shanghai Conservatory in a country with 80-million young students of keyboard music.

He perches, so to speak, high above the three-cornered convergence of the new Big Three: China, the European Union and the United States — what Parag Khanna calls the “global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle” of the era. Hung-Kuan Chen’s life is not about battles or geo-politics, of course; it’s about art and music. What he teaches, and what we talk about in this conversation, is above all a consciousness that comes with a lifelong immersion in musical masterworks, mostly Western but Chinese as well:

What I brought [to the Shanghai Conservatory] is a certain attitude, or paradigm… that being a musician is to be an artist. And to have an artistic life means to be means highly intelligent, highly alert, discerning and sensitive to the inner world and to the outer world. All in all it is a spiritual experience… a complex life. One has to live it, experience it. I teach them that music work or art work is a by-product of such a life. When we learn a great piece of music — say by Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert, it’s a two-way street. The music is itself great wisdom. Only when we are up to a certain level, we are able to see that level of wisdom in the music and beyond. And this — which is beyond — will further teach us. And if we are dedicated enough to this work, we than elevate ourself to that level. And so it’s a bit like a Jacob’s Ladder, it just goes up and up and up. And that becomes what is called an artistic life.

Hung-Kuan Chen, in conversation with Chris Lydon at the New England Conservatory, February 15, 2008

But don’t we all wonder — the moreso at the very moment when the New York Philharmonic is playing in China, on its way to North Korea, and Hung-Kwan Chen was playing Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata at Carnegie Hall last week — what are the connections and analogies in the heavy traffic of a globalizing culture?

Yes, Hung-Kwan says, he can hope to teach his students about the radical democrat in Beethoven (who in legend anyway, ripped up the dedication of his Symphony No. 3 to Napoleon Bonaparte after the standard bearer of revolutionary France crowned himself Emperor. Beethoven called his piece “Eroica” instead.) But no, Hung-Kwan continues, he cannot hope to protest China in Darfur in anything like the way his fellow pianist Leon Fleischer recently protested the war in Iraq at the White House. Hung-Kwan Chen can count on the authorities in China for prompt delivery of new pianos to his Conservatory — as he couldn’t at any music school in the US. But he also knows that nobody’s interested in his “second opinions” about politics.

Most of our conversation is about sublimity, not politics. That is Hung-Kuan’s way of getting to the point, not avoiding it. “Oh, my God,” as he says, “it’s culture that leaves a legacy, not war or money, or who wins or who places second.”