White Noise

Nobody should have to write again that classical music has a race problem. We find ourselves here time and again, overseers of an all-too slow change, making the repeated case for equality. But my recent discovery of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi forum Stormfront’s penchant for classical music got me thinking a little more about how to address classical music’s accessory to racism throughout history in the present. Between outright nationalism and the slightly less visible institutional racial bias, classical music has been—wittingly and unwittingly—instrumental in the propagation of racist narratives over its hundreds of years. Even for The Guardian, the “biggest issue of all” surrounding Herbert von Karajan was how he produced his performances; his membership of the Nazi party tucked neatly away between parentheses. The jury’s still out on whether his participation was only a means of saving himself and helping his career, but at a time when plenty of Europe’s artists and musicians left the continent not only to save themselves, but to avoid being party to the persecution of others, furthering your conducting career on the back of a genocide should have been inexcusable. The paper’s decision to republish a 1960 review of Karajan at the Festival Hall only last year fails to see the slightly sick irony in praising the conductor for giving the audience “chamber of horrors music.”