GlassReichBryars

So two weeks ago I went to see a performance of pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reichs and Gavin Bryars at the Annenberg Center in Philly. I never really grasped that the Annenberg existed until this year, which is too bad, or Orchestra 2001, which joined Relâche and the Philadelphia Singers for the Reichs piece, but they are all pretty cool.

The entire program consisted of premieres--Philadelphia in the cases of the Reichs and the Bryars, and world in the case of the Glass. The Bryars piece consisted of two laude (songs) from his Cycle Lauda Cortonese, for solo female chorus. Let me just say, the ladies of the Philadelphia Singers are really, really good. I went to a college well-known for its music program, which had the side effect of making me a horrible snob about such things as quality of performance and whether the audience knows not to clap between movements and is too undiscerning with standing ovations, but all three of the ensembles were just really good. I particularly liked Relâche, but I thought Orchestra 2001, who only play contemporary music and who all wore a crimson accessory of some kind during their performance, were also great.

( Laude Cortonese, You Are (Variations), Persephone )

Speak loud, if you speak aca

In other words, the still-pervasive notion that folktales, especially fairy tales, are primarily "kids' stuff" owes a great deal to 19th-century racism, classism, and religious bigotry.

Endemic to this line of theorizing is the assumption that the folklorist, the one collecting and interpreting folklore, is not of the folk: the folk are always the Other. Traditional folklorists were educated bourgeois outsiders who traveled to rural areas in their own lands—or, better yet, foreign locales—since one cannot find folklore among one's own group, because only "they" have folklore—"we" have Culture (Toelken 1979, 3–7, 265). This did not change until Alan Dundes redefined the folk as "any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor" (Dundes 1965, 2)—thus including everyone, including educated bourgeois folklorists, in the category of the "folk." […] [note 7]

note 7: This distinction between the "folk" and the "not-folk"—as well as the revision of these definitions—is of obvious relevance to fandom studies. Fans have traditionally been figured as the Other, responding in unofficial and often "bizarre" ways to the official culture industry. The rise of the "aca-fan" as a category has gone a long way toward dispensing with these problematic assumptions.

--Catherine Tosenberger, "Kinda Like the Folklore of Its Day: Supernatural, fairy tales, and ostension"
(Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 4, 2.6-7)

It's not that this is news, necessarily, but I do like it when people are able to synthesize so cogently and pointedly. And in the next paragraph there are some very perceptive comments on class (and folklore) in The X-Files. Oh, TWC, I ♥ you.