The Muse Dialogue

Looking for a history of ballet? This came out a while ago, but if you have not already seen it, it is worth a look.

Tracing Ballet's Cultural History Over 400 Years Ballet's history is not just about choreography and technique — it's also a history of nationalization, the changing ways we view the body, shifting gender norms and class struggles. Historian Jennifer Homans chronicles the art form in a cultural history, Apollo's Angels.

http://blog.artsusa.org/2015/03/13/top-10-reasons-to-support-the-arts-in-2015/

Top 10 Reasons to Support the Arts in 2015 With the arts advocacy season fully upon us, the following is my updated “10 Reasons to Support the Arts.” Changes this year include updating #3 with the BEA’s new Arts in the GDP research, #8 to i...

More on encouraging children to pursue the arts, which have more career opportunities and career satisfaction than most give them credit for:

"On average, more than 70% of professional artists like their work, while 70% of executives, doctors, teachers and other workers dislike theirs. Fretful parents, who is better off?"

What to Do If Your Child’s First Love Is . . . Art In The Wall Street Journal, Jerry Cianciolo says it’s a myth that a passion for creative expression is a one-way ticket to unemployment.

"Unquestionably, education, particularly in the arts, will play a pivotal role in preparing students' creative capacities and sustaining a creative economy. We are walking out of a nation-wide recession and counting on the new generation to sustain forward progress. William Yu, an economist with the Anderson Forecast at UCLA contends that the arts are more critical than ever in preparing students to write this new history."

How Arts Education Fuels the Creative Economy Education, particularly in the arts, will play a pivotal role in preparing students' creative capacities and sustaining a creative economy.

Looking for a good city for artists? We all probably have good suggestions, but here are three cities that are trying to do something to cultivate good living situations for artists.

http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/cities-affordable-housing-for-artists

3 Cities Make Affordable Housing Plays to Hold on to Artists – Next City “Musicians, artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs add the special sauce for our community.”

Something very much in the spirit of TMD: A conversation with composer Mohammed Fairouz. Fairouz is the composer of Sumeida's Song, soon to be presented by Pittsburgh Opera.

Fairoz is a fascinating individual and artist, a composer who spans world traditions with a keen sense of history and of contemporary possibilities.

A Conversation with Mohammed Fairoz Mohammed Fairoz& #039;s conversation moves effortlessly from global turmoil to nineteenth-century English poetry, from modern Egyptian drama to the sel...

It is Alan Lomax's birthday. Alan Lomax has done music a great service with his career. Have a read from The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of musicologist Alan Lomax (books by this author), born in Austin, Texas (1915). His father, John Lomax, was also a musicologist and wrote books like Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads (1910) and Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp (1918). Alan went to the University of Texas and then to Harvard to study philosophy, but after his mother's death he dropped out of Harvard to accompany his dad on one of his folk song-collecting missions. He loved it so much that he decided to make it his life's work.

He wrote: "Our way of work is simple. From letters and books and word of mouth, we hear of someone, perhaps a Vermont woodsman or a Kentucky miner, who knows a store of old folk tunes. We get into our car and go to visit him. But my father and I don't burst in like college professors in search of quaintness. We make friends. We live in the neighborhood. And before we even go to a place, we find out about the kind of work in that section so that we can talk about it. Only then do we go and ask for songs. [...] Generally the reaction of people is friendly. They're proud you consider their music important, and they want to do the best job possible. I remember one Finnish singer in the Middle West, from whom we were recording a song about a Finnish Robin Hood. It took 20 minutes to sing. When we had cut the record, we played it back for him. His sharp ears discovered one tiny mistake, and he was so eager for perfection that he made us do the entire record over again."

The Lomaxes went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where they met Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. Lomax wrote: "I'll never forget: He approached us all the way from the building where he worked, with his big twelve-string guitar in his hand. He sat down in front of us and proceeded to sing everything that we could think of in this beautiful, clear, trumpet-like voice that he had, with his hand simply flying on the strings. His hands were like a whirlwind, and his voice was like a great clear trumpet. You could hear him, literally, half a mile away when he opened up."

Lead Belly had been playing music since he was a kid with an accordion, and entertained his fellow inmates with his concerts. The Lomaxes were so impressed with Lead Belly that they cut a whole record of his singing, and they agreed to record a song he wrote for the governor of Louisiana, begging to get out of jail. The lyrics were: "In nineteen hundred an' thirty-two, / Honorable Guvner O.K. Allen, / I'm 'pealin' to you. / If I had you, Guvner O.K. Allen, / Like you got me, / I would wake up in de mornin', / Let you out on reprieve."

The Lomaxes took the song to Governor Oscar K. Allen, and not long afterwards Lead Belly was let out of prison - it was actually an early release for good behavior, but both Lead Belly and the Lomaxes thought the song had helped. After that, the Lomaxes helped put Lead Belly in the national spotlight.

Alan and John Lomax headed up the Library of Congress "Archive of American Folk Song," recording and preserving thousands of songs. Alan was particularly interested in doing more extensive interviews with their subjects, and he recorded the oral histories of musicians like Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, and Vera Hall.

In August of 1940, Alan started a prime-time radio program called Back Where I Come From. The first episode was hosted by literary critic Clifton Fadiman and featured Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Len Doyle, Josh White, and the Golden Gate Quartet. Performers took turns saying, "Back where I come from, we always say..." and filling it in with a local saying. Each episode was centered around a particular theme - for the first episode, it was "weather." The cast sang "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More," "The Erie Canal," "The Foggy Dew," and "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," which was interwoven with Guthrie's commentary about the Dust Bowl. Back Where I Come From aired three nights a week, for 15 minutes. Soon Pete Seeger signed on as well. Besides "Weather," other themes included "Jails," "Nonsense Songs," and "Love True and Careless." The cast and crew thought the show was a success, but CBS unexpectedly canceled it in February of 1941.

Lomax wrote to Guthrie: "Our agent William Morris told us we were set for life. And then the great paw of America reached out and stopped it: Mister William B. Paley said that he didn't want any of that goddamn hillbilly music on his network. And that was that." Guthrie replied: "Too honest again I suppose? Maybe not purty enough. O well, this country's a getting to where it cain't hear its own voice. Someday the deal will change."

For the rest of his life, Lomax continued to record folk artists, champion folk music, and publish books. His books include American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934), Mister Jelly Roll (1950), Folk Song Style and Culture (1968), and The Land Where the Blues Began (1993).

The award-winning, best-selling soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) begins with a recording that Lomax made in 1959 of James Carter and fellow prisoners in the Mississippi State Penitentiary singing "Po' Lazarus." More than 40 years after Carter sang "Po' Lazarus," Alan Lomax and his Lomax organization teamed up with an investigative reporter and T Bone Burnett - the producer of the soundtrack - to track down Carter and pay him royalties. Carter's first check was for $20,000, and he was amazed to hear that the soundtrack was outselling albums by Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson. That was in March of 2002. A few months later, Alan Lomax died at the age of 87.

He said: "We now have cultural machines so powerful that one singer can reach everybody in the world, and make all the other singers feel inferior because they're not like him. Once that gets started, he gets backed by so much cash and so much power that he becomes a monstrous invader from outer space, crushing the life out of all the other human possibilities. My life has been devoted to opposing that tendency."

It would seem that great minds do not always think alike. Take the case of Jonathan Swift, who wrote this on Jan. 28, 1742: "I do hereby require and request not to permit any of the choristers to attend or assist at any public musical performances... and whereas it hath been reported that I gave a license to assist a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street, I do hereby declare that I do annul said license, entreating my said Sub-Dean to punish such as shall ever appeal there as songsters, fiddlers, pipers, trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors, or in any sonic quality, according to the flagrant aggravations of their respective disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude."

The subject? A rehearsal for a piece of music by Georg Frideric Handel ... titled The Messiah.

Composers Datebook from American Public Media American Public Media's Composers Datebook informs, engages, and entertains with timely information about composers of the past and present.

In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.
BY JUNE JORDAN

I

honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip r**e
exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime
terrorizing

death by men by more
than you or I can

STOP


II

They sleep who know a regulated place
or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious
like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more

June Jordan, "In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr." from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com.

Source: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997)

Shared by way of Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine

www.junejordan.com

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

~Novalis

More on why learning to play music, no matter how well, is good for you and your brain.

Music lessons spur emotional and behavioral growth in children, new study says Musical training might help kids focus, control emotions and keep anxiety at bay, according to a new study.

Americans for the Arts is planning the 2015 Arts Advocacy Day. More information below on their efforts, and on how you can support the cause.

Bring Your Advocacy to Washington This week’s swearing-in ceremonies mark the official beginning of the 114th Congress in Washington. Fortunately, the end of 2014 brought good news on key arts policies. In addition to the NEA preserving its level funding of $146 million, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced a long-awaited…