"There is an aspect to cultural work – or in our case, artistic ceremony – which does not align with current colonial reviewing practices. In order to encourage a deeper discussion of the work, we are inviting critiques or thoughts from IBPOC folks only. There is a specific lens that white settlers view cultural work through and at this time, we’re just not interested in bolstering that view, but rather the thoughts and views of fellow marginalized voices and in particular Indigenous women.” 

—Yolanda Bonnell

Actor and playwright Yolanda Bonnell created quite a stir in Toronto arts circles in mid-February when she made the above statement, widely interpreted as a request that only Indigenous, black or other persons of colour be sent to review her show at Theatre Passe Muraille, bug. The play is a searing look at indigeneity and addiction, among other things, and Bonnell suggested that she felt, based on some previous experience, that critics from the dominant cultural group in society would be more likely to misrepresent her work in their reviews. She is not alone in this idea – many other Indigenous artists have been thinking along the same lines for some time. Bonnell also noted what she called the ceremonial aspects of bug, its role as a unifying rite for people who have suffered similar traumas to her own, a production style she did not feel jibed with the traditional expectations of a conventional review.

I’ve cycled through a surprising range of personal responses to Bonnell’s request – surprising to me, that is. And I’d like to share my thought processes about it, as a sort of confession of confusion around the deeply problematic issue of art and politics in our present age. 

The immovable reputation of Beethoven is the kind of continuity that either confirms the unchanging greatness of classical music, or makes us despair of the depth of its conventionality and inertness. I am old enough to remember the last time the world celebrated a major Beethoven anniversary, his 200th, in 1970. Fifty years later, just about everything in the world has changed, but Beethoven, it seems, has not.

He still more or less bestrides our Western musical world like a colossus. People with no interest in or knowledge of classical music are still familiar with the da-da-da-dum of the Fifth Symphony or the transcendent Ode to Joy of the Ninth. They might even recognize the obsessive melancholy of Für Elise. For more serious music lovers, Beethoven remains the ne plus ultra.

How is it, though, that Beethoven can continue to perform the same ritualistic ceremonies for the Western mind as he has for a century, when the values Beethoven represents (of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution), are precisely the ones that have been reconsidered, put in play and found wanting in our contemporary world? Or so it seems. Just ask Stephen Miller, or Dominic Cummings, or Victor Orban, or even, if you can find him, Maxime Bernier. Not to mention, of course, He Who Shall Not Be Named. The decay of the Enlightenment values that Beethoven so completely represents is the central political reality of our times. Beethoven should be in disarray in this milieu. But he isn’t. Why not?

It’s getting to be that time of the year again.

When once more I have to bear witness to my follies.

Here goes.

I’m Jewish.

And I love Christmas carols.

There, now I’ve said it.

I’ve loved carols ever since I piled into the yellow school buses waiting for us kids outside Hillcrest Public School at Bathurst and St. Clair to ferry us down to Simpson’s basement at Yonge and Queen in early December to sing our little hearts out for harried shoppers. (As you can see, I’m also old.) And, while there, little Robert would thrill to the music in ways I only later learned why. We Grade Fours loved to end the first stanza of Good King Wenceslas with an exaggerated “gath - ring winter few – oooo – el.” Only later did I realize we were singing a plagal cadence, which had basically disappeared from Western music 600 years previously. And there was something remarkably brilliant and beautiful in Angels We Have Heard on High, because, I now know, the Gloria in excelsis Deo which I was belting out in my innocence had been sung in the West since the 13th century, due to an injunction from Pope Leo IV, more or less exactly as I was singing it beside the men’s sock department in Toronto in 1958.

I love Porgy and Bess. I’ve loved it ever since I first heard the Leontyne Price/William Warfield RCA recording of excerpts from the opera in the mid-60s. The moment I hear that first octave gliss announcing the overture, and that thrilling Stravinsky-like syncopated ostinato that begins the score, I’m lost. And I don’t regain myself until the strange, half-apologetic sixth chord that ends the opera has sounded, after Porgy has demanded of the Catfish Row residents that they “Bring my goat!” (Stephen Sondheim claims to love this line) and Porgy is on his way to find Bess in New York.

Basically, the beauty of the music simply dissolves everything I want to think and decide and judge and insist about Porgy and Bess. It all just gets lost in the overwhelming sense of joy I have in simply listening to the music, in an exalted state of thankful wonder, again and again and again. 

In September of 2010, a long time ago, now, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra opened their season with a performance of John Adams’ orchestral showpiece, Harmonielehre, named after the early 20th-century harmony text by Arnold Schoenberg. I was excited to hear the work live and impressed by Peter Oundjian’s and the TSO’s chutzpah in making a statement with the Adams as the season opener. Less so my seatmate in Roy Thomson Hall.

Surveying the program, he turned to me and said “Watch what happens at intermission.” (The Adams was scheduled for the entire second half of the concert.) “People will be running out of here like rabbits!” “Why,” I asked, soaked in innocence. He jabbed his program next to the date of composition of the Adams. The stark “1985” seemed to make any further conversation unnecessary. “Modern music,” he finally observed, as though I were a bit dim. “But it’s a very accessible piece,” I meekly protested. “They’d enjoy it.” He looked me up and down for the first time, in obvious wonderment. “Like rabbits,” he reiterated.

And he was right. About 25 percent of the seats that had been full of satisfied patrons listening to Mozart and Schumann, or whatever, during the first half of the concert, lay empty in protest at a terrific reading of the Adams. The TSO was probably delighted the bleeding was only a quarter of the house.

I was reminded of my rabbit-predicting friend as I read the New Yorker’s Alex Ross lament the conservatism of Kirill Petrenko’s programming as he assumes the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic. Not a Harmonielehre in sight (a work now almost 40 years old, by the way), or any other modern repertoire. A bit of Berg and Schoenberg, but that’s it. Ross worries that Petrenko is abandoning the significant role that major symphony orchestras should have in championing the music of now.

But I think Ross is wrong.