50 Years After Stonewall, Classical Music Still Fights the Fight
By David Patrick Stearns
June 5, 2019
Typical story themes in LGBT literature are being pushed to the side in the Stonewall 50 anniversary, and with good reason. Poignant tales of finding a loved one in a homophobic world seem comparatively pale as the two-day 1969 Stonewall uprising is re-experienced and commemorated, maybe incongruously, in the uptown world of classical music. Brick-throwing lesbians, a gay Australian outlaw, and unfiltered rage from once-marginalized corners of society might seem out of place in reputedly genteel symphonic and operatic terrains, but they’re not at all, at least now. The long history of classical music provides an endlessly possible vocabulary for amplifying social issues beyond the basic Wikipedia headings about drag queens repelling a routine police raid in the West Village a half century ago.
Political cabaret, refracted Renaissance-era counterpoint and modern dissonance are all resources coming into play in several Stonewall 50 commemorations this year, including The Stonewall Operas, four half-hour works performed May 19 and 20 John Corigliano's AIDS-era Symphony No.1 that's played by the New York Philharmonic May 30 and June 1, and arising from 19th-century history books, Captain Moonlite, the nickname for the gay Australian outlaw who may be a hero for our times thanks to Wally Gunn's excellent new choral opera Moonlite, heard in May in the Bronx, Princeton, and Philadelphia.
Gays once had too much fear and shame to fight at all. In Chicago, such raids included publishing the arrested names in the newspaper – causing any number of suicides. Stonewall patrons from Wall Street were reportedly being blackmailed. Mafia extortion was part of the toxic mix.
Fighting back, however, was in the air on June 28 and 29, 1969. The women's rights movement had gained plenty of momentum. Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War gave birth to something known as "the fighting Jew" after centuries of persecution. The Vietnam War was being still being protested. Topping it off on the day the riots began was the depressing funeral of Judy Garland, who had made impromptu visits to West Village bars. Yet, fighting back at that particular moment had a singular price that was characterized in a number of different directions in the Stonewall Operas.
The four works by New York University Tisch School graduate students, co-produced by American Opera Projects, were first seen at NYU's Schubert Theatre, and then crammed into a stage space about a tenth of that size on the Stonewall Inn's second floor. The dim lights and lack of dinner menu told you this was a place to hide out from the world, and not something that made you feel especially great about being gay. Yet being there was essential to understanding how fighting back was possible only among those who had nothing to lose. You had to be at Stonewall to know what that looked like. And – with the dried alcohol scent – what that smelled like.
And felt like. Their world was nasty. The first opera, Nightlife (by composer TJ Rubin and librettist Deepali Gupta) is a fairly predictable coming-out-in-the-face-of-homophobia story. But its deepest moment is an extended aria by one of the secondary characters about heroin addiction – sung as an answer to the question of if he has a mistress in his life. The detail of the words and the conviction of the music has nothing directly to do with Stonewall, but showed the desperate, dead-end level of society in which West Village gays trafficked. Heroin kills any sex drive – one way to circumvent the gay problem.
To fight or not to fight? That was the question in The Pomada Inn, with music by Brian Cavanagh-Strong and a libretto by Ben Bonnema, set in modern-day Kiev where, as in 1960s America, gays feared raids that would result in job loss and general ostracization. In contrast, an intelligent, sensitive, upscale lesbian couple from New York that would easily pass for straight becomes morally committed to fighting the good fight. But when handed a brick, will they throw it on behalf of their less-fortunate friends? Maybe not. They aren't wired for physical combat. Who is, really. The missing piece, with them, is desperation.
Cut to Outside, with music by Bryan Blaskie and libretto by Seth Christenfeld. It's 1969, Stonewall uprising–eve. But at a gay bar down the block, a drag performer is happy to play to an audience of 10 – despite, thanks to the composer, having some good, barbed cabaret music to sing. His boyfriend is back from the Midwest, still not having come out to his family back home. When the disturbance erupts down the block at the Stonewall Inn, the drag queen – who is down to his last $10 – is out the door ready to break a bottle over somebody's head. The boyfriend stays behind but comes out to his sister by phone – it's still not brick-throwing, but it's a start.
There you have the dilemma. Hiding can be effortless, which is maybe why gay rights lagged behind. If African-Americans could change the color of their skin at will, would that movement had happened when it did? If feminists could pass for men in the work place and get equal pay, would they? Gays could do exactly that. But one of many stages to increased visibility within society was the AIDS epidemic, which pushed gays to publicly protest the indifference of the larger world during the 1980s.
John Corigliano took a huge risk when he wrote his 1989 Symphony No.1 ("Of Rage and Remembrance"), which confronted audiences with the AIDS epidemic. Whatever the subject matter, any new, 45-minute symphony requiring a huge symphonic contingent is a gamble. (With its many collage effects, the piece requires, among other things, the extra expense of a mandolin section.) Corigliano might seem to have had career insurance with his long-in-the-works opera The Ghosts of Versailles waiting in the wings at the Metropolitan Opera. But its 1990 premiere was by no means assured, since Met commissions don't always translate into Met productions (Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron, for example). And no matter how receptive artistic circles are to openly gay composers, what about the conservative donors who have a certain amount of clout? Corigliano's Symphony No.1 is indeed a case of fighting back from the inside out – and at its recent May 30 New York Philharmonic performance, it felt angrier than it ever did, partly because the challenging score can now be played with more authority. Much to the piece's credit, the poly-stylistic piece maintains a piercing fierceness, not to mention eloquent clashes, that apparently prompted a small walkout rate that evening.
The fact that conductors such as Jaap van Zweden (who led the Philharmonic performance) and Charles Dutoit have conducted the piece without needing a special occasion suggests that it has a staying power that can't necessarily be expected of something so specifically tied to an historic event. But even with the composer on hand to talk the Philharmonic audience through the work's extensive musical symbolism as a prelude of sorts, I forgot much of it during the supercharged performance – which told me what the symphony says is one thing, and what it does is another. (Of course, the two are welded together.) This is a piece that drew on Bernstein, Stravinsky, and Ives to create something wholly original. Nothing like it before; nothing like it since. From the offstage piano playing an Albéniz tango, to the poignant cello duet near to the end, to the aforementioned mandolin section, Corigliano brought together sounds and gestures with astounding virtuosity and mastery. Put simplistically, Corigliano is having his cake and eating it too. Though listeners easily forget that Beethoven's Symphony No.3 was once inspired by Napoleon, audiences will always know that this is a work about the AIDS epidemic. But tragedy is timeless, and so is Corigliano's symphony. He didn't just fight back – he created something with an artistic future that won't stop fighting.
"A queer true crime love story" is how Moonlite was dubbed at its May 16 premiere in Philadelphia by the vocal group Variant 6 and Mobius Percussion. And that wasn't an exaggeration. The two-hour choral opera details the events leading to the moment in which Andrew George Scott (1842-80) – already notorious for robbing a bank or two – was caught in a shoot-out that sent him to the gallows. With so many dramatic episodes to choose from in Scott's life, Veronica Jurkiewicz's libretto is weighted toward the dramatic conclusion, when Scott and his lover James Nesbitt, who had been publicly vilified, headed into the bush country looking for work, but ended up starved and exhausted. The final straw was a torrential rainstorm that washed away or ruined what little they had. Except for their firearms. In desperation, Scott and his gang held up the railroad station and hotel, resulting in a shoot-out in which Nesbitt died in Scott's arms.
Some of the libretto came from some of Scott's own texts, and the choral writing utilized a modern version of madrigal-like counterpoint as well as austere harmonies dating back late-medieval composers such as Dufay, which were pungent but avoided the primary-color emotions of major and minor keys. Percussion could blend with the vocal effects, but was particularly atmospheric amid the awful rainstorm that drove Scott back into the outlaw zone. The message: Weep for Scott and Nesbitt if you must, but observe what drove them to fight back. Moonlite has been quite well received. There's serious talk of staging it fully.
So we haven't heard the last of Scott. Or Corigliano, Stonewall, and any number of others once considered to be outlaws in one way or another.
Forthcoming is the New York City Opera's Stonewall, June 21-28 at the Rose Theater – with the high-pedigree creative team of composer Iain Bell and Mark Campbell. It dramatizes the riots head on. Can we expect a good percussion section?
After all, these pieces are about fighting back.
Source: wqxr.org
"Stonewall", New York City Opera, June 21-28, 2019, Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater
Exhibits, panels, opera, more mark 50th anniversary of Stonewall riots
By Deepti Hajela
June 7, 2019
But this year, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising that fuelled the fire for a global LGBTQ movement, there's also a lot more. From symposiums to movie screenings, walking tours to art exhibits, and even an opera, a slew of institutions and organizations are filling June with events that commemorate that moment and its impact through the past five decades, and also using it as inspiration for the current generation of activists to keep pushing for civil rights.
The uproar at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's West Village, began on June 28, 1969, when bar patrons and area residents, tired of harassment that was still allowed by law, clashed with police officers who had come to raid the nightspot. Demonstrations continued for the next several nights.
Those events weren't the first resistance act of the gay rights movement, but it galvanized activism in the United States and around the world.
That history is all over the events that a wide range of institutions are hosting in June, from an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum called "Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall" to an opera by British composer Iain Bell commissioned by the New York City Opera called "Stonewall", which is getting its world premiere toward the end of the month.
There are walking tours, like the one from the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project that will take participants around Greenwich Village and talk about the anti-gay climate that led to the Stonewall protests, and a panel discussion at a branch of the New York Public Library from transgender speakers talking about Stonewall and current trans life.
"In the best possible world we would use these anniversaries, and I think it's happening this time, as a jumping-off point to look deeper", said Eric Marcus, founder of the Stonewall 50 Consortium, an organization that brought together cultural institutions and others primarily in New York City that have created programming connected to Stonewall.
It's not just New York City, as Pride festivals and parades are taking place around the country in June and beyond, and references to the Stonewall anniversary are everywhere.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, a month of events will include a ball celebrating those who resisted at Stonewall. At the Library of Congress in Washington, a display that went up at the end of May called "Stonewall at 50 – LGBTQ+ Activism in the United States" uses flyers and other historical items to showcase protest history.
But for New York City, the anniversary has become the opportunity to take its already high-profile Pride celebrations even higher; Heritage of Pride, the organization that plans the city's parade and other events, has included a commemorative rally in its slate of events for the month, and is hosting WorldPride as well, the first time the international event has been held in the United States in its two-decade existence.
Fred Dixon, president and CEO of NYC & Company, the city's marketing organization, said the city's cultural institutions really responded to the anniversary.
"We're proud of how many came forward and put together great programming", he said.
The spirit of protest that Stonewall represents is also represented in some events this month, including the Queer Liberation March being planned by the Reclaim Pride Coalition.
That group decries what it sees as the commercialization and corporatization of mainstream Pride events. The coalition's march is planned for the same day as the main Heritage of Pride march June 30.
"There are members of our community who have always struggled, who have always been left behind", said Natalie James, co-founder of Reclaim Pride. "What I think we want to go back to is... the radicalism and solidarity of the early days of the activists in this movement."
Source: The Associated Press
More photos
See also
Musical Love Letters: Dedications By LGBT Composers
John Corigliano: Of Rage and Remembrance & Symphony No.1 – Leonard Slatkin (Audio video)
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