Racial Acoustics
Can you feel it coming on the air tonight?
NOT sure what mysterious Facebook algorithm brought me to TwinstheNewTrend, but during the fullness of COVID these two young men absolutely made my day. They’re the young 20-somethings Tim and Fred Williams from Gary, Indiana, who sat down in early 2020 to record their “first time hearing” Phil Collins’ 1981 hit “In The Air Tonight” and quickly became an Internet sensation.
Watching people watch people do stuff on the Internet (Let’s Plays and the like) was just weird to me until I experienced the joy of witnessing this pair taking in this white guy classic. Surely these two know how charming they are. But their look of genuine surprise at the famous ending drum flourish to “In The Air Tonight” is worth the 6 minutes of your life you’re never getting back.
Far more priceless, as far as I’m concerned: that these two young black teens who have never heard the music of Phil Collins, or Dolly Parton, or Janis Joplin or Adele, are willing to sit down with it upon recommendation of listeners and find genuine pleasure in this music. They’re not deep. They’re definitely not music critics. But there’s something undeniably infectious in their willingness to come to the edge of what they know, of their own musical comfort zone, to listen with an open mind and heart. I adore their capacity to find delight in our bleak times.
A typical response in their comment section:
I am a 69-year-old grandmother from Canada and I LOVE your channel. When I started watching I did not have a clue what you were saying, but the more I watch, the more I understand. You guys are smart, insightful, joyful, and just such fun to watch. I think my fav reaction to date was Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer "You got to 'preciate greatness!", but this reaction to Adele was a close second. Keep on exploring the world of music - there is a lot to 'preciate out there! God Bless!
Sure, there’s a good deal of skepticism about their You Tube gig, as is evident in SNL’s famous spoof of the twins, who, as the story goes, were raised by a Christian grandmother who disallowed television and strictly controlled their use of devices. (The grandmother must be some kind of genius.) Not surprisingly, the twins claim they’d never heard of SNL either.
But can we hang our dismissive cynicism on a hook for just a second?
Call it brilliant marketing or what you will, but during COVID this young pair gave lots of people some much needed good feels. Whether faked or real, or, likely, some combination of the two, we get to watch the human apprehension of art, two young people who cultivate an innocence of the ears, as it were, an eagerness to feel and learn and understand at least on a sensory level. What’s more, they listen to a lot of old white people’s music. Real musicians can learn from any body of music, and nothing against some of the really great music old white people enjoy, but what possible incentive does a young black man have in learning about music by Phil Collins?
Countless times, I’ve changed the dial on the radio because what comes on just isn’t my music. It made me ask myself the question: When’s the last time you were willing to sit down and listen to something foreign to your ears?
Garrett McQueen, composer
Roughly around the time when the Willliams twins were making their Internet splash, my friend Paul (I changed his name for this story) was suffering insomnia like many a COVID shut-in. Paul’s remedy was a syndicated classical music program on Minnesota Public Radio. When he couldn’t sleep he wanted something reliably soothing like Bach or Vivaldi playing softly in the background. What’s more—and this is the part he didn’t know yet—he wanted the “dulcet tones” of the female or male announcer whose soothing and reliable voice between sets helped lull him to sleep.
One night a different voice came on the program, the voice of a black announcer.
The program host played the same soothing and reliable baroque music, but Paul found the man’s tones…less than dulcet. In his restless half-sleep, he knew the voice jarred him a little. He didn’t like that he didn’t like it, but he also didn’t like that his remedy for insomnia was gone. In the light of day, Paul thought about it some more: he was used to the voice of a white man or woman, especially on a Minnesota classical radio station. Why was the voice of a black man too jarring to lull him to sleep?
As it happens, Paul is the kind of wonderful person who has spent the past several years learning as much as he could about white privilege and anti-racism—reading, taking workshops, joining bookclubs, watching films, and listening to podcasts. Suffice it to say that he knew enough to examine his own implicit bias. Culture had taught him that black voices belong on Motown, jazz or rap programs, not classical. It didn’t mean this was true, only that he unconsciously defaulted to this expectation without even fully recognizing it as such. But once aware, he certainly didn’t have to sustain that sort of prejudice. Relax, he told himself. Don’t be so close-minded.
Lo and behold, this worked. Then, come late summer, just as soon as Paul had become accustomed to hearing Garrett McQueen, that is, as soon as Mr. McQueen’s voice became as dulcet and sleep-inducing to him as the bland and anonymous voices of the previous classical radio hosts, Garrett McQueen was suddenly gone. Fired.
This was Minnesota Public Radio, mind you. In the summer of 2020.
When things happened in the news or when there were hours of programming that only represented dead white men, I would take it upon myself to change that,” said McQueen. “That always got lots of really positive feedback, but it's not exactly what protocol calls for.
—Garrett McQueen
Readers can decide for themselves what went down at MPR, starting here. There had been “several conversations” between McQueen and his higher-ups. He had received “warnings.” The warnings were “not related” to the host’s unauthorized choice to change it up a bit from solely dead white men in the wee hours of the summer nights during which the city was in an uproar about the killing of George Floyd. Nope. The real reasons MPR officials stated for McQueen’s dismissal wander off into the legal weeds.
But they got rid of him all the same.
“And let's just face it,” said McQueen, “with [the killing of] George Floyd and all of those things, there was a lot of pressure for me to engage the audience while that's happening. I'm on the air, literally while the 3rd Precinct is being burned down. So, it's my responsibility to make sure that the programming spoke to that and that's what I did.”
Minnesota Public Radio was not willing to trust listeners the way Twinsthenewtrend trusts white people and their white people music. They were not willing to trust that people could come to their acoustic edge, strap in, and prepare to be delighted. That listeners might actually seek that kind of experience as one way to learn and grow hardly seemed to occur to them. The best they could come up with was that the programming changes McQueen sought were still “10 or 15 years in the future.” But if they weren’t willing to trust an award-winning classical bassoonist, conductor, master-class instructor, adjudicator, host, musical historian and producer who has successfully navigated the worlds of traditional classical music while also trying to pry open the canon to explore beyond the confines of Western European tradition, who was it they were going to trust?
In the end, it’s MPR listeners’ loss. But this is public radio: people can and should voice their opinion about this change.
For his part, McQueen has continued his impressive work, most recently as a guest conductor for the world premiere of an opera by Leslie Burr and Brandon Gibson for Marble City Opera Company’s 2022 season. The piece is titled “I Can’t Breathe.”
OPEN-MINDED EARS
From visible body.com
WHY can a song you haven’t heard in ages flood you with the exact same emotion you felt that day when it (whatever your “it” may be) happened?
Meet your amygdala, the small but mighty part of your limbic system responsible for processing general sensory information and producing an emotional response based on what you have previously processed. It’s also responsible for Paul’s initial irritation at hearing the wrong voice at the wrong time. But remember that Paul learned to recognize and then override his earlier conditioned response to the voice of a black radio announcer by consciously intervening in that moment between stimulus and response.
This is why I have so much faith in the between, the interval that can save the world.
Between stimulus and response there’s a space, and in that space lies our power to choose our response, and in our response lies our growth and freedom.
Victor E. Frankl
A few years ago I worked on a book about diverse faith communities in my area and discovered that an active mosque had existed for decades just a few blocks from my home. As part of our project, we visited that and other mosques as well as temples and churches, synagogues and gurdwaras and even a basilica. It may be as common one day, I realized, to hear the long and plaintive call of the muezzin over the rooftops of my neighborhood as it is to hear the chime of church bells now, although hopefully they won’t happen at the same time.
Not just musical variety but languages, dialects, accents, vocal register and intonation. Not just places of worship, but the sounds of schools, workplaces, the line at the amusement park, shopping malls, other people’s kitchens. Like that grandma fangirl who couldn’t understand the English being spoken by Tim and Fred Willams when she first heard them but was drawn in by their delight at her music, there’s probably countless ways to accustom our ears to and even welcome one another’s acoustic presence.