In the ongoing saga of cancel culture on the nation’s campuses, the study of music has produced its share of egregious examples. In 2020 Dona Vaughn, the artistic director of opera programs for twelve years at the Manhattan School of Music, declined to answer a question posed by a provocateur about alleged racism in The Land of Smiles, an operetta by Franz Lehár that Vaughn had staged five years before, because the question raised a political issue irrelevant to the event underway. A student petition calling for the school to dismiss her promptly garnered 1,800 signatures, and the administration acceded to the students’ demand.
Timothy Jackson, a tenured professor at the University of North Texas, found his career threatened when he defended the hugely influential Austrian-Jewish music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, which he also launched. Schenker had been deemed racist by another music theorist in an essay published on Music Theory Online; among the agitator’s charges was the claim that the establishment of a hierarchy of pitches inherent to Schenkerian analysis is akin to a hierarchy that favors the music of white males. Although Jackson retains his position at UNT, the journal has ceased publication following the withdrawal of funds by the university. Jackson sued his critics for defamation and the university, alleging, among other things, violation of his First Amendment rights. The controversy inspired a cringeworthy statement signed by nine hundred music academics asserting that American music theory is historically rooted in white supremacy. (For more on Jackson’s case, look to the November issue’s Notes & Comments).
In September 2021 Bright Sheng, a prominent composer and the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, showed an undergraduate seminar the 1965 film Othello, in which Laurence Olivier plays the title role with blackened makeup. Sheng, like many people prior to the controversy that ensued, was apparently unaware that some considered Olivier’s makeup to be offensive; charges of racism followed, including at least one from a colleague in Sheng’s department. Sheng was replaced for the remainder of the seminar, and a university investigation began, though this was ultimately called off and he retained his faculty position. In an email he said he is currently “comfortable” with his teaching situation.
In reading about episodes like these, a natural reaction is to want to do something on behalf of the victims. The Palm Beach Symphony has done just that, giving the premiere of a newly composed work by Sheng, “Triumph of Humanity”—commissioned by Paul du Quenoy and his wife, Irina, as well as the Palm Beach Freedom Institute and the Common Sense Society—at the opening concert of the symphony’s fiftieth-anniversary season. There seems to have been no public criticism of the symphony at any time for improperly allying itself with one side in a political controversy.
The premiere of “Triumph of Humanity” duly occurred at the Dreyfoos Concert Hall in the Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach in the first of a six-concert Masterworks series this season. All of these programs feature well-known instrumental soloists, and three include world premieres. Originally, “Triumph of Humanity” was envisioned as a symphonic overture on the theme of liberty, but in fact the piece turned out rather differently: in remarks to the audience before the premiere, Sheng called it a “requiem” to the start of the twenty-first century. Mentioning wars, political tensions, and the pandemic, he wryly dismissed the collective response to the era’s problems as having done “not a great job.” The piece thus has the somber tone of requiem— but it concludes with a “cheer at the end” in the belief that humanity will eventually triumph.
One can also regard “Triumph of Humanity” as a moving personal reflection on Sheng’s own ordeal. The eleven-minute piece begins with a slow, mournful melodic line initiated by lower strings, which signals the astringent nature of much of the piece. Then, contributions from the woodwinds and a new theme introduce a fresh vigor, building to a brief climax with snaps from the slapstick. The somber mood returns for an extensive, brooding bassoon solo, which grows in volume with doublings from other winds. A bell-like theme in the strings, doubled by chimes, then leads to another climax, this time with woodblocks adding insistent strokes. Soon, the strings initiate an agitated, fugue-like passage in a quick tempo, to which the winds respond with ascending and descending scales and fast, repeated notes. The tone is thus set for the frenzied remainder of the work, whose brilliant triple-forte sonority at the close, while affirmative, emerges only after an intense struggle and is far from gently soothing.
Otherwise, the concert was business as usual under the expert leadership of the symphony’s music director, Gerard Schwarz. It opened with another work by Sheng, “Black Swan,” an orchestral adaptation of Brahms’s exquisite Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2 (1893). The piano piece adapts appealingly to its reconfiguration, which contrasts orchestral choirs with each other and features some choice instrumental solos, including one for the concertmaster, Evija Ozolins.
“Black Swan” showed the orchestra to fine effect, as did a suite from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911) arranged by Schwarz. An ampler collection of excerpts than that of the more commonly heard suite attributed to Artur Rodziński, it includes the scampering, scherzo-like Act III prelude, which in the theater is often obscured by the bustling action on stage. The concert closed with a magisterial performance of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-Flat Major, Op. 83 (1881) with the eminent pianist Yefim Bronfman.