I've often wondered what would have happened to the US in
the first 80 years of its existance if it had the kind of cold war waged by the
European powers against us at that time. America too had a
genocide that effected more than Stalin's purge or Hitler's camps
combined. The slaves were estimated at 60 million removed from Africa and
the Native American population prior to contact was 33 million in North
America. The US American Indian population in 1900 was under a
million some say as low as 250,000 but that is not counting those of us who were
in the "Hiding Bushes." We also had our own Apartheid
until 1954. I can remember that. I can remember
performing a Lakota song in Carnegie in 1978 when we were first given the right
to practice our religion without going to jail. I did it after an
evening of European and American Art songs. The audience
was frankly "stunned" as was noted by the newpaper critic.
I watched Jan Peerce today on PBS sang a yiddish spiritual for a Russian
audience and their response was exactly the same. First stunned
silence and then frenzied applause.
I think history will eventually place both America and the
Russian experiment in its proper context, whatever that is, but I believe the
current descriptions are too close to us not to serve our individual interests
in a very conflicted situation. I have met too many Russian immigres
who were children of peasants and who were trained by the Soviet State in very
technological jobs that would have been buried down on the farm in the
Aristo-cratic system and seem to be on their way back to the farm in the current
neo-Capitalist one. Their only chance was to escape to the US where
they are not particularly happy. They don't like the jobs, the
culture and certainly not the education system. They have started an
excellent music school in Brooklyn for their own children and one of my
daughter's playmates was performing the Mozart A major piano concerto in the
third grade. She was not a strange or possessed child, just the
daughter of musicians trained in the Soviet Union who were now struggling to get
by here. Admittedly they were able to do so here better than in the
chaos in the Ukraine and in Russia. One grandparent was a voice
teacher in the Kiev Conservatory. To musicians, music
is the country and you go wherever you can to be home. But that
doesn't mean that they enjoyed it here. They didn't.
Truth is the substance of art and beauty is the ideal that
it promises if we are but willing to have the discipline to
learn. But it begins with telling the truth.
Ray Evans Harrell
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- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Ed Weick
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Ray Evans Harrell
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Ray Evans Harrell
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Karen Watters Cole
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Cordell . Arthur
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Cordell . Arthur
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Harry Pollard
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Cordell . Arthur
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Cordell . Arthur
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Ray Evans Harrell
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Ed Weick
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufa... Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Cordell . Arthur
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Ray Evans Harrell
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufa... Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Cordell . Arthur
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Ray Evans Harrell
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Thomas Lunde
- RE: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/ Cordell . Arthur
- Re: [Futurework] http://www.glaesernemanufaktur... Ray Evans Harrell