My childhood friend Chauncey Patterson, who played quartets with me in high school when I was a violinist, sent me a link to his group's website under construction: the Miami String Quartet.
Chauncey wrote to me depressed about the election, looking for some hope. I say the Miami String Quartet is one of about a hundred thousand signs of hope in this country. Couple of reasons:
1) Let's be frank. Chauncey Patterson wouldn't be one of the top violists in this country if it weren't for the civil rights movement. We take this for granted but my school friends from North Carolina remember segregation. We're that old. The schools in Greensboro integrated when my classmates were in 3d grade, four years before I moved there. My friends remembered colored water fountains and bathrooms. My mother, of course, went to jail trying to integrate a lunch counter, before I was born.
And even in the New South, when Chauncey had to drive out to the country to play a quartet with us at some fancy mansion in a rural town in 1979, his mother drove with him and sat in the car. Young black men couldn't drive certain places alone, even if accompanied by a viola and plenty of Schubert sheet music. Maybe they still can't. Driving while Black is still a capital offense in many jurisdictions.
That's part of the past but it's part of an undercurrent in this country. Today I look at the faces in the Miami Quartet and I see the best of what this country is about. Nobody likes to make a fuss over this stuff because it's seen as possibly racist to notice, but here is a top string quartet with only 50% white Europeans (and I'm making assumptions here based on names and faces, it's possible the two folks I assume are white are just as mixed ethnicity as I am).
George W. Bush doesn't care much for classical music or Faure quartets. I believe his few gestures towards racial diversity are entirely fake. His political operatives have their knives out for the cultural riches of this country, and for the programs that made it possible to redress the effects of 3 centuries of slavery and oppression. So I see the Miami Quartet as one more piece of the quilt of resistance against W. The Quartet didn't intend to carry that political baggage, I'm sure. They are dedicated musicians, not demagogues.
My friends who are making their lives in the arts in America are part of my reasons for hoping. They are weaving the fabric of the culture I love, the America of music, art, literature, science, free inquiry and debate.
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