Polorum Regina

Cultuurminnende kameraden en vrienden kunnen deze middag om 16 uur terecht in de Sint-Pieterskerk, op het Sint-Pietersplein uiteraard, voor een prachtig concert.

Le Caste Nymphe, vaste klanten in onze kerk, brengt vandaag Polorum Regina.

Twee bekende manuscripten uit Spanje staan centraal, waar net als in de rest van middeleeuws Europa de Mariaverering groot was.

De Cantigas de Santa Maria (lofzangen voor de heilige Maagd Maria) stammen uit de 13de eeuw en zijn geschreven in het Galicisch-Portugees. Ze werden gecomponeerd onder het bewind van koning Alfons X van Castilië en zijn van een onschatbare artistieke waarde.

Het Llibre Vermell de Montserrat is een 14de eeuwse bundel pelgrimsliederen ter ere van de Zwarte Madonna van Montserrat (bij Barcelona). Dit was sinds de 11de eeuw een belangrijk centrum voor pelgrimstochten waarbij muziek een belangrijke rol speelde.

Een prachtig concert, in een prachtige en vooral koele kerk, en vooral geheel en al gratis, geef toe, meer moet dat toch niet zijn op deze prachtige zondag.

To the end of love

Vanavond kun je op het Sint-Pietersplein voor de laatste keer, dit jaar, terecht voor de enige echte Leonard Cohen.

Jim Henson brengt Perseus en Medusa

Op deze rustige maandag brengen we traditiegetrouw een filmpje. Vandaag is dat een prachtige klassieker uit de wereld van Jim Henson.

Uit de reeks 'The Storyteller' brengen we het verhaal van Perseus:

neonazi's in het Amerikaanse leger

Kameraden en vrienden,

op deze fraaie zondag blijven we nog even stilstaan bij de extreem-rechtse aanslag in de Verenigde Staten. De aanslag roept steeds meer vragen op over de invloed van openlijke neonazi's in het Amerikaanse leger.

Leonard Cohen komt er aan!

Wie vanaf gisterenochtend het Sint-Pietersplein passeerde zal er niet naast gekeken kunnen hebben, Leonard Cohen komt er aan.



Deze muzikale grootmeester maakt van het Sint-Pietersplein de startlocatie voor zijn nieuwe wereldtournee.

extreem-rechtse terreur tegen sikhs

Kameraden en vrienden, enkele dagen geleden werden de Verenigde Staten getroffen door een zoveelste terroristische aanslag. Zes mensen werden afgeslacht door een voormalige militair.

De slachtoffers zijn Sikhs, een religieuze minderheid die het zwaar te verduren heeft onder het toenemende racisme en de toenemende islamofobie in de Verenigde Staten.



Hoelang mag extreem-rechts nog haat blijven propageren?

Higgs Boson Particle in animatie

Maandag, dat wil zeggen, hoogtijd voor een filmpje, vandaag, een educatief filmpje, over het Higgs Boson Particle.

de nieuwe omnivore elite

Op deze fraaie zondagmorgen een interessante, iets langere, tekst over cultuur, smaak en elite.
Shamus Khan, elite-onderzoeker aan de Colombia University in New York, schreef volgend zeer lezenswaardige stuk voor de New York Times.

YOU can tell a lot about people by looking at their music collections. Some have narrow tastes, mostly owning single genres like rap or heavy metal. Others are far more eclectic, their collections filled with hip-hop and jazz, country and classical, blues and rock. We often think of such differences as a matter of individual choice and expression. But to a great degree, they are explained by social background. Poorer people are likely to have singular or “limited” tastes. The rich have the most expansive.

We see a similar pattern in other kinds of consumption. Think of the restaurants cherished by very wealthy New Yorkers. Masa, where a meal for two can cost $1,500, is on the list, but so is a cheap Sichuan spot in Queens, a Papaya Dog and a favorite place for a slice. Sociologists have a name for this. Today’s elites are not “highbrow snobs.” They are “cultural omnivores.”

Omnivorousness is part of a much broader trend in the behavior of our elite, one that embraces diversity. Barriers that were once a mainstay of elite cultural and educational institutions have been demolished. Gone are the quotas that kept Jews out of elite high schools and colleges; inclusion is now the norm. Diverse and populist programming is a mainstay of every museum. Elites seem more likely to confront snobbish exclusion than they are to embrace it.

This was not always the case.

In 1880 William Vanderbilt tried to buy one of the 18 coveted boxes at the New York Academy of Music on 14th Street by offering $30,000 for it. Vanderbilt represented new money, and to the old families controlling the academy his attempt to buy his way into a place reserved for them was a crass affront to their dignity. Money may be king in certain parts of New York society. But not everything can be bought.

Or so it seemed. After his bid was rejected, Vanderbilt joined other nouveaux riches families like the Goulds, Rockefellers and Whitneys and founded the Metropolitan Opera House Company. With 122 private boxes, there was plenty of space for the city’s expanding elite.

This new elite sought to supplant the old families from their long-held seats, but the transformation was hardly radical. While the old elite was ultimately forced to join the new elite at the Metropolitan Opera after its academy collapsed in financial ruin, they did so in a space that was still comfortable: an opera house. Modern temples of power were built on the foundations of the old. New elites were often conservative in their tastes — building mansions that emulated those of European aristocrats, buying up old masters and building shrines to European art forms.

In his brilliant work on the Gilded Age, “The Monied Metropolis,” the Harvard historian Sven Beckert argues that this era helped consolidate the American bourgeoisie. Originally, the old families of New York formed an elite caste defined by their lineage and were not threatened by the fact that they shared many of the same tastes as common men. Through much of the 19th century, cultural differences between elites and the rest were not so great. Shakespeare and opera held mass appeal. To attend an evening’s concert at the New York Academy of Music might mean hearing Verdi, but also some church music and perhaps vaudeville-esque interludes by popular comedians of the day.

It was the robber barons’ joining of the elite that forced a change. As access to elite status became less limited through family ties and more open to men of new wealth, New Yorkers found a new mechanism of social closure. They created an exclusive culture distinct from that of the common American, the result of which was something far more elitist. Through snobbery elites became a class. They developed a shared culture and sensibility. They also shared common enemies.

The Rockefellers were not the only “new men” on the scene. Others were pouring into Lower Manhattan. Elites feared the rabble who flowed ashore on boats from Europe — eight million people between 1855 and 1890. The wealthy moved uptown. Among their mansions they built an armory in 1880, “defensible from all points against mobs.” Many sent children away to boarding schools to escape the corruptions of the city.

Elites built moats and fences not just around neighborhoods but also around cultural artifacts. The Metropolitan Opera made cultural performances more “pure,” dropping the vaudeville. High ticket prices made the popular music of Verdi less accessible; soon it was the rich and not the rest who enjoyed this music. Even great public institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art were only nominally so. It was far from the homes of workers, closed on the one day they had free (Sunday) and known to remove working-class patrons for, as the director of the museum put it, “offensive odors emitted from dirt on their apparel.” The sociologist Nicola Beisel has shown how the fine-art nudes that had once circulated among workers on postcard replications were banned as pornography through the Comstock laws and limited to an imposing building that only “respectable” New Yorkers would enter.

This was the birth of the modern upper-class elite; its own schools, clubs and cultural artifacts made it quite distinct from other Americans.
HOW far we’ve come! Our modern omnivores have filled in the moats and torn down the fences. With exclusion and snobbery a relic, the world is available for the most talented to take advantage of. To talk of “elite culture,” it seems, is to talk of something quaint, something anti-American and anti-democratic. Whereas the old elites used their culture to make explicit the differences between themselves and the rest, if you were to talk to members of the elite today, many would tell you that their culture is simply an expression of their open-minded, creative, ready-to-pounce-on-any-opportunity ethic. Others would object to the idea that they were part of an elite in the first place.

But if you look at the omnivore from another point of view, a far different picture emerges.

Unlike the shared class character of Gilded Age elites, omnivores seem highly distinct and their tastes appear to be a matter of personal expression. Instead of liking things like opera because that’s what people of your class are supposed to like, the omnivore likes what he likes because it is an expression of a distinct self. Perhaps liking a range of things explains why elites are elite, and not the other way around.

By contrast, those who have exclusive tastes today — middle-class and poorer Americans — are subject to disdain. If the world is open and you don’t take advantage of it, then you’re simply limited and closed-minded. Perhaps it’s these attributes that explain your incapacity to succeed.

And so if elites have a culture today, it is a culture of individual self-cultivation. Their rhetoric emphasizes such individualism and the talents required to “make it.” Yet there is something pernicious about this self-presentation. The narrative of openness and talent obscures the bitter truth of the American experience. Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these costs. To be an outstanding student requires not just smarts and dedication but a well-supported school, a safe, comfortable home and leisure time to cultivate the self. These are not widely available. When some students struggle, they can later tell the story of their triumph over adversity, often without mentioning the helping hand of a tutor. Other students simply fail without such expensive aids.

These are more than liberal platitudes. Look at who makes up the most “talented” members of society: the children of the already advantaged. Today America has less intergenerational economic mobility than almost any country in the industrialized world; one of the best predictors of being a member of the elite today is whether your parents were in the elite. The elite story about the triumph of the omnivorous individual with diverse talents is a myth. In suggesting that it is their work and not their wealth, that it is their talents and not their lineage, elites effectively blame inequality on those whom our democratic promise has failed.

Elites today must recognize that they are very much like the Gilded Age elites of old. Paradoxically the very openness and capaciousness that they so warmly embrace — their omnivorousness — helps define them as culturally different from the rest. And they deploy that cultural difference to suggest that the inequality and immobility in our society is deserved rather than inherited. But if they can recognize the class basis of their success, then perhaps they will also recognize their class responsibility. They owe a debt to others for their fortunes, and seeing this may also help elites realize that the poor are ruled by a similar dynamic: their present position is most often bound to a history not of their own choosing or responsibility.

It is past time for elites to give up the cultural project of showing how different they are from others. They should commit themselves instead to recognizing that there is a commonweal that we all have a responsibility to improve.

Woody Gurthie, leven en werk

De verjaardag van Woody Guthrie is meer dan reden genoeg om deze fenomenale singer-songwriter in de verf te zetten. Vandaag brengen we een treffende documentaire van de BBC.

Woody Guthrie, the return of a pariah

Omdat het leven en werk van Woody Guthrie niet genoeg in de kijker kan worden gezet, brengen we vandaag een pakkende getuigenis van Billy Bragg over diens werk en vooral diens invloed.

Woody Guthrie at 100: the return of a pariah

Woody Guthrie was shunned by his home state. Now Oklahoma can finally embrace the singer-songwriter's work

The construction team that kept hammering away all night outside my hotel window in downtown Tulsa are gone by the morning, the fierce glare of the Oklahoma summer forcing them into the shade to rest. A few blocks away there are streets full of empty buildings, signs that the oil boom of the past decade is long past. Tulsa sure could do with some regeneration.

Woody Guthrie was born not far from here 100 years ago, and as people all over the world celebrate his life and work this weekend, Oklahoma has still to come to terms with the legacy of its wayward son. In this conservative midwest state, Woody's work is still viewed through the prism of the McCarthy era, when the state department accused folk singers of "un-American activities".

However, it's not what Woody did in the 1940s that still riles people in these parts. It's what his followers did in the 60s that made Woody a pariah in his home state. For Woody was the original singer-songwriter, the first to use his voice not just to entertain, but to ask why people should remain dirt poor in a country as rich as the US.

It was Woody's words that prompted the young Robert Zimmerman to leave his home in the Iron Range of Minnesota and head for New York. Changing his name to Bob Dylan and singing as if he came from the red dirt of Oklahoma, he inspired a generation of articulate young Americans to unleash a torrent of criticism against the complacency of their unequal society. The fact that Woody was a hero to that generation of long-haired freaks ensured that he and his songs would remain largely unsung in Oklahoma.

Yet perceptions change. In the 1990s Woody's daughter, Nora Guthrie, began a labour of love, gathering up all her father's papers and creating the Woody Guthrie Archive in New York City. The man who emerged from the countless boxes of songs, prose and drawings was a much more complex figure than the Dust Bowl balladeer of legend.

Woody was afflicted by Huntington's disease, an incurable degenerative disorder of the nervous system that gradually incapacitates, leading inexorably to death. The years after the second world war are generally held to have marked Woody's decline into ill health, but the archive suggests otherwise. Perhaps aware that he was succumbing to the same illness that had killed his mother, Woody upped his already prodigious output, writing three or four songs a day in the house on Mermaid Avenue, in Brooklyn, where he lived with his wife, Marjorie, and three kids.

He wrote songs about riding in a flying saucer, about making love to film star Ingrid Bergman, about getting drunk and chasing women with his sailor buddies. Clearly the material in the archive – now estimated to stretch to more than 3,000 complete songs – would force us to reassess our idea of who Woody Guthrie was.

Fitting then, as we gather here to celebrate his centenary, that news should come that the Woody Guthrie Archive is relocating to a purpose-built facility in downtown Tulsa. Bringing Woody home is a gamble, but Nora Guthrie knows that Oklahoma needs to rediscover her father's work, now more than ever. Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger sang Woody's most famous song, This Land is Your Land, at Obama's inauguration – but Oklahoma is the only state in the union that failed to return a single district in favour of America's first African-American president.

In the pantheon of American poets, Woody belongs midway between Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, but it is his roots in Oklahoma that give his work an authentic voice, ringing out from the dusty midwestern plains: a welcome antidote to the easy jibe that, if you're poor and white in this part of the world, you're bound to be a redneck.

Schaamteloos overgenomen uit de Guardian.

Woody Gurthie, special van Democracy Now

Een goeie honderd jaar geleden, op 14 juli 1912, werd Woody Guthrie geboren. Democracy Now bracht een special om dit te vieren.

Nora Guthrie, dochter van en zelf zangeres, Anna Canoni, kleindochter van en Steve Earle, muzikant, kwamen naar de studio om te vertellen, elk vanuit hun gezichtspunt, over de ongeëvenaarde ster van de progressieve folk.