“What’s Going On” is MusiQology’s weekly news round-up. Running each week, we curate a selection of relevant items from across the spectrum of popular culture, adding our own commentary and spin when it makes sense. With any luck, you’ll be able to spend a little less time browsing the web for what matters. We’ve got you covered.
Bars to Entry
The biggest news in musicology this week revolved around a controversial article published on Musicology Now titled Don Giovanni Goes to Prison: Teaching Opera Behind Bars. After Pierpaolo Polzonetti, a Notre Dame professor, suggested in his piece that the study of opera music might help incarcerated people “understand–and therefore control–human emotions and reflect on ethical issues,” there was considerable and understandable backlash from many members of the musicological community. Polzonetti may have “meant well,” but his writing tells the story of his experience in a way that reinscribes many veiled ideologies of inequity that our scholarship has the chance to reveal and hold up to the light. Meaning well simply cannot be enough. These types of incidents, while harmful to many involved parties, are important because they often catalyze the necessary look inward necessary to bring about broad systemic change. Follow #AMSSOWHITE to see how this story develops.
Coltrane Church Fights Eviction
Elation. Elegance. Exaltation. There is no Sunday morning service quite like those held at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church of San Francisco. Each week, a group of core ministers and parishioners meets in celebration of the work of the great jazzman, with a meditation over the music of A Love Supreme followed by a full Sunday noontime mass complete with a Coltrane Liturgy and opportunities for visitors to participate musically and spiritually. It’s a time of fellowship befitting the man’s masterwork. The church relies on the financial support of travelers and tourists, but it faces eviction amidst the obscenely rising costs of living in the Bay Area, with substantive pieces from the San Francisco Chronicle and SF Gate suggesting that the church remains in danger. But for now, the band plays on, with the church’s archbishop set to receive a Black History Month honor courtesy of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Safe Space
The Movement, an original digital series from Mic created by MusiQology Advisory Board member Darnell Moore, concluded its first season last week with a beautifully rendered video walk through Detroit with Downtown Boxing Youth Program founder Carlo “Coach Khali” Sweeney. “We were adamant about offering a fair and honest narrative perspective of an urban space often painted as a post-industrial, post-bankrupt, and now post-modern city ripe for gentrification,” Moore writes of the series. The five episodes are rich reflections of the work of exceptional activists—in Moore’s words “the invisible heroes making a difference”—in non-white urban spaces that are often misunderstood and misrepresented in much of mainstream media.
Natural Mystic
The spread of the Zika virus throughout the Americas has many on edge, as the sexually transmitted disease’s harmful effects on pregnant women and their children remain relatively fluid and unknown. Efforts from TK to TK have been launched in the TK countries affected, but Jamaica’s Ministry of Culture is deploying a culturally particular method of prevention: a reggae-inflected educational video titled “We nuh want Zik V.” The video features a real gynecologist, Dr. Michael Abrahams, who walks viewers through easy ways to work against the spread of the virus, from dumping out vase water to proper disposal of garbage bags. It’s a silly gesture of course, but it does speak to the power of music to speak across various literacies in times of need. As he says, “Prevention is the best weapon.”
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