by Jaime Díaz, MFA
Abstract
Content warning: Rape, abuse, harassment, white supremacy
I write this article in response to a letter and survey sent out on 31 August 2023 by North Carolina WCPE's general manager Deborah S. Proctor. I also write this article to compliment the Tsioulcas (2023) article in which Tsioulcas and NPR gave Proctor a national platform without challenging or contextualizing Proctor's white supremacist behaviour. This could have been for a number of reasons and I do not mean to disrespect Tsioulcas. Journalists face many restrictions when writing articles from word limits, forming trust with an informant, how much they were paid, time constraints, and an editor's preferences and restrictions. Below, I will quickly contextualize Proctor's behaviour within the white supremacist history of the US and look at how white supremacy has and continues to operate in classical music. This is a quick and dirty article because I am a busy PhD researcher in my last year and will be travelling this week touring a small show in the outer Hebrides.
I am the first to admit that Proctor's behaviour hit me personally as a
neuroqueer, nonbinary, Mexican sound artist that hopes to write an opera one day. I will try my best to be as objective as possible but please know that I do not excuse Proctor's white supremacist behaviour and sometimes my anger seeps through.
1: In the beginning was Whiteness, and the Whiteness was with God, and the Whiteness was God.
Proctor's behaviour is hypocritical at best. While claiming that she has a 'moral decision to make' in regards to WCPE's programming she does not really analyze how her moral compass is defined. She presents it as a universal between herself and her constituents. She worries about a child hearing 'discordant, and dificult music' and places herself on a white, quasi-religious pedal stool while proclaiming, 'When I stand before Jesus Christ on Judgement Day, what am I going to say?' (ibidem). I hope she can be honest with Jesus and herself so when her Judgement Day does come she can proudly say, 'My Jesus, I blasted 'The Marriage of Figaro' on WCPE which is about a count exercising his so-called right to rape his servants. My Jesus, I blasted 'Carmen' on WCPE which is about femicide. My Jesus, I blasted 'Don Giovanni' on WCPE which starts with a rape scene.' One of the first broadcasts WCPE did was 'Tosca' which 'involves an attempted rape by coercion...' (San Francisco Opera Staff, 2022).
In a letter and survey to her constituents, Proctor writes, 'We strive to broadcast the classics which have earned the highest standing above all others, which are outstanding in their nature, quality, and eminence; and, have stood the test of long-standing and widespread popularity, widely recognized as true classics.' While this may seem like a 'noble' cause to undertake, in practice it is an excuse that has been used by white supremacists to uphold white supremacy--in this case, a specific form of Christian white nationalism and supremacy. Whether Proctor's actions are conscious or subconscious, I think it is important to take a step back and contextualize Proctor's actions within the history of white supremacy in the US and in classical music. Nowhere in her letter or interview does she give an indication about who and how opera classics are defined. Based on her list of acceptable operas which include Carmen, L'Elisir d'Amore, Orfeo, Romeo et Juliette, The Magic Flute, Le Nozze di Figaro, La Boheme, Turandot, La Rondine, Madam Butter y, Die Fledermaus, Verdi Requiem, Nabucco, Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino, and Tannhauser, we can extrapolate that her list of classics are very much from a specific cis, het, male, white gaze.
Proctor is not the first person to try and use religion, whiteness, and canon fundamentalism to defend one's actions. (I define canon fundamentalism here as the belief in a group of works that has been primarily defined by cis, het, white men.) Ian Pace and Norman Lebrecht regularly use similar arguments to defend canon fundamentalism on social media. Phyllis Schlafly, a now dead conservative grass-roots advocate from the 70s and on, used similar logicas to kill the Equal Rights Amendment. Both Proctor and Phyllis consistently paint 'worst-case scenarios' (Kennedy,2020) in their 'noble' crusades for white purity. Proctor's interview (Tsioulcas,2023) and letter (Proctor,2023) are filled with 'what if' scenarios impregnated with biblical, guilt ridden, end-of-days language to manipulate her constituents into complicity for her own white supremacist Christian agenda--one which is not even consistent with itself! Despite stating that she cannot in good faith program violence, as I have shared above, she continues to program operas from the white canon that have rape and femicide as pivotal plot points but in a language other than English.
I also question the construction of the survey. I was not able to view the whole survey but the questions that were on the letter posted to X were extremely leading and biased toward Proctor's own views she shared in the NPR interview. I have a hard time believing her survey would pass through any ethics board. I say this now having been through an institutional ethics process for surveys and interviews twice in my time as a PhD researcher at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I would argue that Proctor's letter and survey is more of a white supremacist call-to-action than an objective survey looking at the programming concerns of the station's constituents. She reveals her concerns in the letter, which align with white, Christian, nationalism, and therefore risks confirmation bias in the responses as well as ignitingany anxieties people may or may not have due to Trumpism and longheld white supremacist viewers within our current social-political lives.
2: Keeping things white
There is nothing new about the tactics Proctor is using at the WCPE radio station to exclude Black and Mexican composers (and even a white composer!). White people and people who live in whiteness have used laws, cultural norms, and capital to uphold white supremacy. One of the strangest examples I have found outside of classical music are racial covenants. Minnesota Libraries (nodate) notes that 'Racial covenants are clauses that were inserted into property deeds to prevent people who were not White from buying or occupying land.' Thompson and others (2021) and Jones-Correa (2000) have written extensively about the generational oppression and damage these covenants had on Black, brown, and Indigenous people within the US. Collectively as a nation, I think we enjoy forgetting that the civil rights movements was in the 1960s with Black citizens not having the right to vote until 1965. Yet despite the civil rights movement, covenants still play a role today. Even in times of disaster, FEMA loans tend to favour white people and white neighbourhoods (Flavelle,2021).
The psychological effects of covenants and white supremacy are rarely if ever discussed amongst someone who is actively involved in white supremacist behaviour such as Proctor. While she regularly cries out about protecting white children and white families, she cannot, or chooses not to, talk about the damage she is causing to the careers of Black and Mexican composers by excluding their music, history, culture, and stories from her station and listeners. It is the children's ears which must be protected at all costs, a refrain historically used by white,cis, het, Christian women. Reynolds (2014) notes that,
From around the middle of the 18th century, many people in Britain began to think about childhood in new ways. Previously, the Puritan belief that humans are born sinful as a consequence of mankind's `Fall' had led to the widespread notion that childhood was a perilous period. As a result, much of the earliest children's literature is concerned with saving children's souls through instruction and by providing role models for their behaviour.
There is a direct line from this 18th century Puritan belief to Proctor and I wonder if she knows this? I do not have time to dig into how white, cis, Christian women have weaponized childhood for their own agendas in society but I do argue that that is one of the things Proctor is doing here. Why it is so hard for a certain white demographic to talk to their children about sex, slavery, and Black and Mexican culture is beyond me but definitely a part of white ignorance. I see this as a mechanism for her to ignore the psychological damage she is doing to Black and Mexican composers by actively excluding them from the station. I highly recommend the show 'them' from 2021 which depicts the horror of racial covenants from the perspective of a Black family moving to California in the 1950s. It is forms of oppression such as the racial covenants that empower Proctor to be who she is and do what she is doing. Historically, this is how white people continue to support white supremacy whether it be passively or actively. To keep her and her listeners safe from any supposed aural attacks, she must always be vigilant of any sort of noise that may affect delicate white ears.
3: Delicate white ears
During the interview with Tsioulcas, Proctor begins to cry as she summons biblical language and guilt to defend what she is doing. Her tears may signify many things but the one I want to focus on is how her tears expose her white fragility and oppress the Black and Mexican composers. When she cries, she makes herself the centre of the conversation and someone who needs to be tended to and helped. She may act as if she has been wronged or attacked when in reality it is the Black and Mexican composers who are being wronged but Proctor's tears have completely wiped them from the conversation. Accapadi (2007) writes in her article titled 'When white women cry: how white women's tears oppress women of color', 'Our societal norms inform us that crying indicates helplessness, which triggers automatic sympathy for the White woman'. What I do not think Proctor realizes, and in fact most white people when confronted with their racist behaviour, is that 'White people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail' (Dyer,2005). Proctor has stated what her standards are for what she willand will not broadcast and these criteria are essentially impossible for many contemporary composers to meet for many reasons having to do with but not limited to equity, money, mentors, and access to classical music training. In recent US orchestral seasons, BIPOC women have had less than 4% of performance time while white men enjoyed over 60% (Deemer and Meals,2022). The Metropolitan Opera only in 2021 commissioned its first Black composer. I cannot help but to make connections between the actions of Proctor and the actions of other gatekeepers in our industry. Proctor and her listeners are more than complicit in their white supremacy.
Proctor tries to justify and rationalize her actions by using her religious beliefs and the responses from her survey. These act as a code for 'I am not racist' and in some ways she tries to unburden herself from her racist behaviour by crying. Her actions and tears re-centre herself and her whiteness and essentially de-racializes the bubble her and her constituents live in. When Proctor speaks about faith, and values, and needing to have decent programming for a general audience, she ignores the history of classical music's white supremacy. She is able to ignore the systemic diffculties BIPOC composers experience in the profession. She cannot be racist because she is protecting families from diviance. She is a saint. But she wrongly assumes that we are all treated equally in a society and industry that regularly keep us out (Allami, 2021; Coyne, 2020; Deemer and Meals, 2022; Dharmoo, 2019; Díaz, 2023; Doolittle, 2018; Du Bois and Holloway 2015; Ewell, 2023; Fanon, 1967; Kendall, Kisiedu and Lewis, 2021; Lewis and Polzer, 2020; Robbins, 2023; Schumann, 2023). 4: Whiteness, Noise, and Discordant Hate I do not have time to dive into the issue of how 'noise' has been weaponized by white people against BIPOC communities but this is an issue that comes up in both Proctor's interview and letter. One of the criteria she has for music played on the station is that it cannot be 'modern, discordant, and dificult' music. This really hits home for me as many white people labelled my own family as 'loud' while I was growing up. Coyne (2020), Stoever (2016) and Wagner (2018) and many others have written about how noise and silence has been weaponized against BIPOC communities and Stoever (2016) in particular describes 'a racialized process in which certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds.' Proctor fails to realized that her definition of music is not universal. As a station general manager I argue that her criteria are highly unethical especially as a publically funded radio station. That someone can take public dollars and only play music that aligns with their white, Christian, nationalist values is quite disgusting to say the least. That she is allowed to be a white supremacist with tax dollars is appalling.
HaCohen (2013) in her book 'The Music Libel Against the Jews' 'shows how, since the rst centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise.' HaCohen traces 'the tensions between Jewish noise" and idealized Christian harmony and their artistic manifestations from the high Middle Ages through Nazi Germany and beyond.' This is the same historical argument Proctor is using today against Black and Mexican composers and it is tiring, disgusting, and full of white supremacy.
Another angle Proctor's actions can be understood through is that of mastery. She uses aesthetics steeped in white supremacy to reassert control and mastery over her world, the radio station. I understand the need of any arts and entertainment institution needing to hold onto their audiences--especially ones like WECP which have been built over several decades. But I think another thing Proctor's survey fails to account for is the white hegemony amongst her constituency. Is anything really going to change if you are in a room full of white supremacists unable to see and admit to their white supremacy?
I think it has been historically almost impossible to convince a white supremacist that they are white supremacist. I do not expect Proctor or her listeners to change especially if they are left unchallenged. But here I see another connection between Proctor's actions and how white people used mastery to segregate and reclaim urban spaces for themselves immediately following the US civil war. In his article 'Walk with me in white' Steedman lays out a theoretical framework to understand a historical and contemporary 'concept and practice of political autonomy centered on a notion of “mastery,” which is inextricably linked to race, gender, and class hierarchy.' Steedman uncovers that during the period of 1880-1910 Atlanta was a place where Southern Progressives used systematic tactics to civilize the recently freed slaves. White Southern Progressives thought that, 'Under the guidance of a paternalist state, Black Southern-ers might, over a sufficiently long time span, be brought to the level of civilization Whites were thought already to have achieved (341).' Proctor, who has situated herself as a paternalistic leader, uses similar racist tacticts at her station in order to uphold what she defines as civility and music. She, like her white supremacist ancestors, labels the actions of Black and Mexican composers as noisy, not art, not good enough for her and her constituents, and as subpar. Despite us having learn and master the master's language of English, this is even used against us by Proctor. In order to be a composer worthy of Proctor's radio station, I would have had to have learned yet another language and written in a style not of my own and that is apartheid whether she accepts it or not.
5: Conclusion I hope have been able to quickly show how damaging Proctor's behaviour and actions are to BIPOC composers and evens some white ones like Philip Glass. The history and narrative empowering Proctor to silence, exclude, and segregate her and her listeners from BIPOC composers is not new. It can be traced back to 18th century notions of white, Christian childhoods as well as how Jews were perceived by Christians as 'noisy' from the Middle Ages and on. Her tactics were used by Nazis to silence all those opposed to them. I cannot help but wonder what Proctor's Jesus will say to her should she continue to choose ignorance. I do hope more people, especially journalists and national organizations such as NPR, will challenge white supremacy when it comes up. We cannot let white supremacist's behaviour seem as neutral becauseit is not.
If you are interested in getting to know and supporting BIPOC,LGTBQ+,
and disabled composers do check out any one of the many data-bases for marginalised composers that have been constructed in the past 10 years. I think now more than ever we need to continue to support and share the art making of marginalized composers. Not everyone who is a contemporary
composer composes 'harsh' and 'dissonant' music. To assume that all composers today write in one style is stupid and narcissistic. Some of the databases to know include:
African-American Sheet Music - Brown University
African Diaspora Music Project
Afrocentric Voices in "Classical" Music
American Viola Society: Underrepresented Composers Database
American Composer's Alliance
A Seat at the Piano
The Aria Access Project
Black Opera Research Network - Works
Boulanger Initiative
Cintas Database
Composers of Color Resource Project
Choral Music Pages
Corelia Project
Composer Diversity Collective
Donne's 'The BIG LIST'
The Da odil Perspective
Expanding the American Canon: A Conductor's Compendium of Black American Orchestral Composers
The encyclopedia of native music by Brian Wright-McLeod
The F-List
Institute Composer Diversity
Hathi Trust: Women Composer's Collection
Inclusive Early Music
Jon Silpayamanant's Lists
Kaleidoscope: Contemporary Music Collection
Music by Black Composers
The MUGI project
New Muses Project
No Broken Links by BrandonRumsey
plainsightSOUND
Piano Music SheWrote
Scottish MusicCentre
Say can you deny me: a guide to surviving music by women from the 16th through the 18th centuries
TRILLOQUY/TrillWerks Media
About the author
Jaime Díaz is a doctoral researcher at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Their research focuses on how western European classical notation and live coding a ects the notions of selfhood amongst sound artists in the Latina/o/x diaspora.
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