Harassment

Watch "Harassment," a video that accompanies a 4/28/12 story appearing in The Post and Courier about the LGBT community at the College of Charleston...



And here's a link to the story package: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120428/PC12/120429370/1165

Review: Charleston Symphony tackles Mahler

The sheer numbers were impressive. It’s not often you get to see the Gaillard stage filled edge to edge and feel the wide-open hall vibrate with such a big sound.

Leave it to Gustav Mahler to write a symphony that requires two sets of timpani, two harps, four trombones, eight trumpets, nine horns, robust winds and percussion and nearly 50 strings. Oh, and did I mention the organ? The off-stage brass? The two solo singers? The huge chorus?

The occasion was Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor, the “Resurrection,” featuring a confident Daniel Hege on the podium, soprano Jill Terhaar Lewis, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Luiken, the CSO Chorus and the College of Charleston Concert Choir prepared by Rob Taylor. It was courageous (both musically and logistically) of the recently resurrected Charleston Symphony, with its core of 24, to tackle this monster, and I confess I was a little worried that a freshly assembled ensemble consisting of many musicians who don’t play together consistently would fail to make the music gel and pack Mahler’s requisite emotional punch.

Well, the team pulled it off.

Mahler’s 10 symphonies are big, complex expressions of innocence and experience, alternating between childlike folk tunes expressing happy nostalgia and profound laments informed by the heart-rending angst of a composer torn between identities.

Mahler, born a Jew, converted to Catholicism, though had to contend with explicit anti-Semitism. He married the beautiful young socialite Alma Schindler who would bear him two daughters, one of whom, Maria, would die young of scarlet fever. But Alma was not the stay-at-home type, and she began an affair with the architect Walter Gropius.

Having gained a great reputation as a conductor of opera and symphonic music, Mahler would struggle to find time to compose. He loved the voice but never wrote an opera himself, preferring to meld voices — solo and chorus — into the textures of his enormous concert works.

What’s more, his music, informed both by the Germanic tradition and by Eastern Europe’s folk tradition, was the last to fully embrace the post-Romantic style. He was a man on the cusp of the era of modern music who nevertheless could not resist looking over his shoulder at a dying tradition.

Saturday’s concert began with an allegro maestoso featuring lots of give and take between strings and brass, with the winds and percussion adding their critical textures. It felt a little like the musicians were being reacquainted with one another after rehearsals. They were perhaps too worried about playing the notes on the page and keeping things together (which they did rather well) to permit themselves to delve into the contradictory significance of the music.

But then they let go. The andante, which had a chamber music feel, was a charmer, full of pluck (literally) and grace. Hege set down the baton and conducted with his bare hands, which lent a welcomed immediacy to the proceedings.

The third movement, “In quietly flowing motion,” was an evocative, sometimes tempestuous ride featuring Mahler’s typical mood swings, lilting melodies and bold bursts of brass.

Luiken sang her Urlicht (“Primal Light”) gorgeously, those Romantic lines soaring to the heavens. And the finale, a scherzo of the apocalyptic kind, showed off the chorus and soloists to beautiful effect. An admirable finesse and glow dominated, along with pain and longing, culminating in bursts of blissful exuberance.

Lewis lent gravitas to the large vocal sections with chorus, her lyrical voice emerging from the textures effortlessly.

The choristers waited patiently for the fifth movement to sing, then began with a shimmering “aufersteh’n,” “rise again!” It grew from there. “You were not born for nothing!” … “In love’s fierce striving I shall soar upwards.” … “That for which you suffered, to God will it lead you!”

Mahler suffered. He suffered from the loss of a child and the abandonment of a wife. He suffered from insult and betrayal. He also succeeded, becoming one of the most respected conductors of his time.

The music he managed to write — mostly symphonies and songs — is imbued with all the angst and disappointment, love and longing, he could muster.

It is music from an era when the heart seemed always ready to burst, when a new world order loomed in the near distance and when a European composer often had something big and important to say.

The Charleston Symphony on Saturday made its statement, conveying Mahler’s whimsy and sorrow with a command unusual for a regional orchestra.

Leaving the Gaillard after that splendid concert, as the drizzle began to coat the ground, one felt — dare I say it? — reborn.

Review of Peter Beinart's "The Crisis of Zionism"

BY ADAM PARKER

April 2, 2012

A generation ago, the state of Israel was for many Jews still a mythical place: a democratic oasis in the Middle East that helped save a people, a secular state based partly on egalitarian principles, a country under physical threat but determined to secure its future for the generations of Jews to come.

But then something went wrong. Opportunities to end the occupation of Palestinian territories seized in 1967 were squandered — perhaps intentionally, undermined by both sides for different reasons. And Zionism, once a liberal idea conceived by Theodor Herzl and other secular European Jews, was transformed into a quasi-theocratic form of neo-colonialism that compromised its legitimacy.

Today, it is in serious trouble, according to Peter Beinart. In his passionate new polemic, “The Crisis of Zionism,” Beinart spells out the problem in a heart-rending interpretation of the current political impasse, an impasse not just between Israelis and Palestinians but within Israeli society.

“As a Zionist, I believe that after two millennia of homelessness, the Jewish people deserve a state dedicated to their protection,” Beinart writes. “As a partisan of liberal democracy, I believe that to honor that history of suffering, a Jewish state must offer equal citizenship to all its inhabitants.” He refers here not only to Arab citizens of Israel, of which there are perhaps 1.5 million (20 percent of the population), but also to those living outside the Green Line but who are nevertheless subjected to Israeli rule.

“At the heart of the Zionist project is the struggle to reconcile these two valid but conflicting ideals,” Beinart explains. “If Israel fails in that struggle, it will either cease being a Jewish state or cease being a democratic one. Today, it is failing, and American Jews are helping it fail.”

Strong words, possible to utter in 2012 for several reasons, and not only because they are true. In recent years, as the standard-bearers of American Zionism have aged and the gulf between their defend-Israel-at-all-costs strategies and the sentiments of average American Jews has widened, the debate over the occupation and its corrosive effects on both Jews and Arabs has intensified.

Peace activists in Israel have grown more vocal, and many in America have attempted to seize control of the political discourse from an old guard that’s out of touch and in denial. Beinart himself calls on a selective boycott of all goods and services that originate within the West Bank — or, “nondemocratic Israel,” as he prefers to call it. Israel is divided into two: its legitimate democratic part and its illegitimate nondemocratic part.

“American Jews should look for every way possible to reinforce (this distinction),” Beinart writes. “We should lobby the U.S. government to exempt settler goods from its free trade deal with Israel. We should push to end IRS policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to charities that fund settlements. We should urge the U.S. government to require Israel to separately mark products from the settlements, as the European Union now demands. Then we should stop buying those products and stop investing in the companies that produce them.

But that’s not enough, according to Beinart: “Every time Avigdor Lieberman or any other prominent public figure from nondemocratic Israel comes to the United States, he should be met with pickets. Every time any American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge that it include the caveat: only within the green line.”

A big problem, he writes, is that too many Zionists have largely failed to confront the new reality of Jewish power. Gone are the days when American Jews were poor and marginalized, and gone, too, are the days when Israel was rightfully preoccupied with its survival, when surrounding Arab nations threatened annihilation and fascism in Europe culminated in the Holocaust.

Surely anti-Semitism remains a concern; certainly Jews must remain vigilant. But, Beinart insists, “we need a new American Jewish story, built around this basic truth: We are not history’s permanent victims. In a dizzying shift of fortune, many of our greatest challenges today stem not from weakness but from power.” And with power comes responsibility.

At the heart of Beinart’s argument is an insistence that American Jews, who are generally liberal politically and concerned with human rights, are increasingly abandoning the idea of Zionism, whether because their political affinities contradict the brutality of the Israeli occupation or their cultural affinities adhere less and less to Judaism.

Beinart’s genuinely worried about the newer generations of Jews in the U.S. and implications of their Zionistic apathy or disregard. Without a Jewish-American community willing to strengthen its ancient cultural ties and pass on their heritage to their children, they will increasingly cede the secular-liberal ideals of Zionist to religious fanatics and right-wing political extremists like Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he writes.

And if Israel is controlled by such people, with their talk of population transfer and insistent expansion of Israeli settlements, then it will lose forever what’s left of its democratic character as well as any legitimacy in the eyes of the world, Beinart warns.

His solution is radical and perhaps unrealistic: Beinart would have Jewish Americans throw their financial support behind the development of Jewish schools that might corral Jewish children and teach them about their history, culture and religion. By strengthening Jewish identity (the liberal, democratic, American kind), Jews in the U.S. can exercise their influence on Zionist policy, helping to reverse the self-defeating actions of recent decades and reinvigorate the democratic character of Israel.

The middle part of his important book is devoted to an original and penetrating analysis of the tense relationship between President Obama and Netanyahu. In essence, Beinart shows, Netanyahu has managed to get his way and humiliate Obama, who has allowed the Israeli leader to trample upon his long-standing sympathies with liberal Zionism and exploit the “special relationship” of the two countries.

It’s a brutal, painful accounting of Netanyahu’s stubborn self-destructiveness and Obama’s failures to save Israel from itself.

In his effort to explain the crisis of Zionism, Beinart leaves a critical issue insufficiently discussed: Whether democracy in an ethnically and religiously diverse land and Zionism ever can be reconciled. The former insists on secular egalitarianism; the latter on a state defined by its religious and ethnic identity. To remain viable, therefore, Zionism must remain an exclusive enterprise — which explains why Israeli policy remains essentially hostile towards Palestinians.

For Beinart, the answer to this dilemma seems to be a half-way solution in which the Palestinians get a state, Arab Israelis (about 20 percent of the national population) get full rights, but limits remain. Of course, where limits remain, so does conflict. But coping with some conflict is an acceptable alternative to enduring a lot of conflict, Beinart seems to suggest.

It is questionable whether the liberal Zionism that set the wheels of the Jewish state in motion, requiring the displacement of Palestinians and appropriation of their property, can also save the Jewish state. Indeed, Beinart is too quick to exonerate the secularist founders he admires such as Theodore Herzl and David Ben-Gurion. They knew very well what had to be done in order to secure the land for Jews. If you doubt it, read Ben-Gurion’s War Diaries, or the 1988 account of them called “The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities” by Simha Flapan.

A larger question is whether Liberalism itself is as benevolent as its defenders claim, for it often leads to irresolvable contradictions and social and economic damage. According to Liberalism and its social tenets of tolerance and inclusiveness, extreme religious and ideological views have as much right to sit at the table as their moderate and leftist counterparts. Liberalism, therefore, too often has the effect of defending — or at least condoning — radicalism.

For those who care deeply about Israel’s fate, “The Crisis of Zionism” is a difficult book to read. Its brutal honesty and passionate arguments are clearly the result of a life-long dedication to both Judaism and Zionism, offered by a man who no longer can remain silent. Members of the old guard in the U.S., with their outsized influence and allegiance to the Israeli government as opposed to Zionism itself, surely will attempt to discredit Beinart, but they are a fading minority.

More and more American Jews are closing their ears to the hyperbole and rant. For years the majority of American Jews has favored a two-state solution and objected to settlement growth, surveys cited by Beinart show. They have wanted the U.S. to exert more pressure on Israel to end the occupation and stop the settlements. They have objected to the disproportionate use of force. Yet American Jewish organizations such as AIPAC, often condemn anyone who dares to criticize Israel.

“There is a terrible irony here,” Beinart writes. “Perhaps no group of Jews has ever made liberalism — the belief in individual freedom and equality of opportunity, irrespective of gender, religion, race, or creed — as central to their identity as have American Jews.” This is why they tend to support candidates “most likely to give their money to the poor,” and this is why “they supported Barack Obama, a black man with a Muslim father, at roughly twice the rate of white Christians, and at a higher rate than did women, Hispanics, or lesbians and gays.”

So why is an American Jewish community so concerned with social justice represented by leadership reluctant to insist on liberal democracy in Israel?

“The answer is simple,” Beinart writes. Today’s American Jewish establishment was not born from American Jewish liberalism; it was born as a reaction against it.”

It is past time, therefore, for American Jews to step up and voice their concerns, he argues. And they better hurry, for soon it will be too late.

Perhaps it already is.

Review of 3/30/12 Magnetic South concert - in full

BY ADAM PARKER

Judging from the four works presented at Friday night’s excellent Magnetic South concert at the Simons Center Recital Hall, 20^th century classical music was mostly about rhythm — playing with it, distorting it, forcing it to comply with gesture and sentiment.
Even Arnold Schoenberg, during his Romantic years when the Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major was written (1906), made rhythm into something like the warm Gulf Stream, racing along under the alternately breezy and tumultuous surface of the sea.

The other three 20^th century composers featured, including two still living, likewise put pulse at the center of their work.

Stravinsky’s Concerto in E-flat, nicknamed “Dunbarton Oaks” for the estate owned by the Washington, D.C. couple who commissioned the work in 1937, is a rollicking neo-classical jaunt reminiscent of Bach (especially the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3) featuring lots of pluck and verve.

The Charleston Symphony Orchestra musicians, under the determined and vigorous direction of composer Yiorgos Vassilandonakis, played Dunbarton Oaks — Bach-like in the first movement, pastoral in a Russian sort of way in the second, and propulsive in the third — with a light touch, fine balance and somewhat relaxed tempo.

The more polyphonic Schoenberg followed, with its distinctive melodies shining through a dense texture. This was Romanticism at its end, being torn apart by industrialism and the flurry of musical “isms” (Serialism, Nationalism, Neoclassicism, Minimalism) which would consume much of the 20^th century.

Schoenberg’s chamber symphony, offered in one movement with five parts, sparked visions of some imaginary silent film about two lovers meeting in a train station or factory, trying to communicate their passion above the cacophony of the newly arrived century.

The piece marked both the end of a style and the beginning of a genre. Indeed, the concert was titled “Bookends: Chamber Symphony Then and Now,” meant to showcase this particular musical format.

Arvo Part’s brief “Fratres” offered instrumental variations of a folk-like melody set within a triadic harmonic structure, all floating beautifully over a long pedal tone played without vibrato.

Part, a devout Catholic, found his voice when, in the 1970s, he began to experiment with a new tonal style he called “tintinnabuli,” a chant-like circling around a particular pitch often calculated according to a numerical formula.

It seems overly intellectualized, but the effect is lovely. And the musicians succeeded in creating a hushed, almost sacred sound, sharing the shimmering melody among them.

Last came John Adams’ “Son of Chamber Symphony,” first performed in 2007. Adams is typically called a Minimalist, but this is perhaps a misnomer. His music tends to be dynamic, emotional and varied, playing with intense and syncopated rhythms and inserting elements of jazz and pop.

Here he was channeling Leonard Bernstein through a turn-of-the-century prism. Cool angular lines were accompanied by popping percussion, an oft-muffled piano, pizzicato in the strings and a full, jazzy brass section. Only in the third and last movement did one hear clearly the characteristics of Minimalism, with its driving polyrhythms and binary tonal shifts. The Adams piece seemed to reflect the entire 20^th century, with all its pulsating drive and experimental verve.

The Magnetic South series, brainchild of Vassilandonakis and his College of Charleston compositional colleague Edward Hart, is filling a gap in the city’s musical landscape, giving listeners a chance to hear modern music and players a chance to practice it.

A good thing, too, for the concert repertoire of the 20^th and 21^st centuries is vast and important. We should become better acquainted with it.