Post #2477843
2023-09-26 20:00 UTC
The deletionist's point, ' "Of color" is a very American-centric phrase that essentially categorizes people as "white" or "not", smushing everyone in the "not" category into one homogenous mass with no respect to actual cultural differences that may be relevant.' is at least partly valid.
The entire genre of music has a history of serious whitewash, however. Schaeffer is is often credited as an inventor, but his Railway Study came four years after Halim El-Dabh's The Expression of Zaar. Electroacoustic music was invented in Africa.
And not secretly. El-Dabh moved to the US and was a central figure in a bunch of scenes you've heard of, even if you've never heard of him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halim_El-Dabh
So yeah, it's smooshing him in - because he was smooshed out by racism.
Replies (1)
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@celesteh@post.lurk.org 2023-09-26 20:29
El-Dabh's wikipedia page mentions Schaeffer, but Schaeffer's page doesn't mention El-Dabh. Systemic eracism and Euro-supremacy is still impacting textbooks. In the struggle to get recognition for women's musical work, people wrote books that were just short canned bios and lists of works by women. This became a resource for people writing articles and textbooks. Today, we can write books or we can just use existing resources to create a useful compendium.