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Last week Pasternak, this week Shostakovitch. Real Clear History writes on how Dmitri survived Stalin and the rest of the Russian true believers in powerful government.
Consider a Russian born in 1900 with a natural 70-year lifespan. What are his chances of survival? He would have to endure the First World War, the Revolution, Civil War and famine, Stalinist terror in the 1930s, the invasion of Hitler, the remainder of Stalin’s life, the Khrushchev years, and the first part of the Brezhnev stagnation.
The remarkable Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), personal target of Joseph Stalin and Party censors, managed to survive all these periods while maintaining his artistic integrity. …
… The artistic constraints imposed on the composer forced him to think deeply about how to express himself truthfully within an external guise of Party orthodoxy. A public figure’s survival in the Stalin era required an astute political eye, adaptability, and a measure of plain luck. Shostakovich was fortunate to have all three of these. What made him particularly successful, in a cultural and historical sense, was that he deployed these gifts within an unforgiving environment while remaining faithful to his creative impulses. …
… The Seventh Symphony in C Major (1942, “Leningrad”) is ostensibly a musical testament to the suffering of the Russian people during the war, but features a significant double meaning. The circumstances of the invasion permitted Shostakovich to skillfully express his true feelings toward the Party and its leader while simultaneously inspiring Soviet citizens, and indeed other Allied citizens, to defy Hitler’s armies.
The Seventh Symphony received worldwide praise as a work of resistance against Nazi totalitarianism; it is this, but it is dually an indictment of Stalin’s brutality. Shostakovich wrote, damningly, that the symphony was about the Leningrad that “Stalin destroyed and Hitler merely finished off.” Thus, Shostakovich was able to condemn two different, albeit comparably terrible, tragedies in one artistic statement, and in so doing received exaltation as a hero. …
Turning our attention to another musical genre, The Village Voice has the story about Dave Robinson, the record producer who made Bob Marley a household name.
At the time of his death, in May 1981, Bob Marley was 36 years old, reggae’s biggest star, and the father of at least eleven children. He was not, however, a big seller.
For Dave Robinson, this presented an opportunity.
Two years after Marley’s passing, Chris Blackwell, the founder of Marley’s label, Island Records, brought Robinson in to run his U.K. operation. Robinson’s first assignment was to put out a compilation of Bob Marley’s hits. He took one look at the artist’s sales figures and was shocked.
Marley’s best-selling album, 1977′s Exodus, had only moved about 650,000 units in the U.S. and fewer than 200,000 in the U.K. They were not shabby numbers, but they weren’t in line with his profile. …
… “My vision of Bob from a marketing point of view,” Robinson says, “was to sell him to the white world.”
The result of that coolly pragmatic vision was Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers, an album that became one of the top-selling records of all time, far exceeding even the ambitious goals Robinson had set for it. Unlike the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached and many other best-selling albums in recent decades, Legend isn’t a time capsule of a passing musical fad. Selling roughly 250,000 units annually in the U.S. alone, it has become a rite of passage in pop-music puberty. It’s no wonder that on July 1 Universal released yet another deluxe reissue of the album, this time celebrating its 30th anniversary.
Few artists have hits collections that become their definitive works. But if you have one Bob Marley album, it’s probably Legend, which is one reason members of his former backing band, the Wailers, are performing it in its entirety on the road this summer. Legend also defines its genre unlike any other album, introducing record buyers to reggae in one safe and secure package. In fact, it has been the top-selling reggae album in the U.S. for eight of the past ten years. …
A few years ago, Nicholas Kristoff went to an island of the coast of Kenya seeking to answer questions grown out of the legend of an ancient (1421) Chinese shipwreck on the coast of Africa.
From the sea, the tiny East African island of Pate, just off the Kenyan coast, looks much as it must have in the 15th century: an impenetrable shore of endless mangrove trees. As my little boat bounced along the waves in the gray dawn, I could see no antennae or buildings or even gaps where trees had been cut down, no sign of human habitation, nothing but a dense and mysterious jungle.
The boatman drew as close as he could to a narrow black-sand beach, and I splashed ashore. My local Swahili interpreter led the way through the forest, along a winding trail scattered with mangoes, coconuts and occasional seashells deposited by high tides. The tropical sun was firmly overhead when we finally came upon a village of stone houses with thatched roofs, its dirt paths sheltered by palm trees. The village’s inhabitants, much lighter-skinned than people on the Kenyan mainland, emerged barefoot to stare at me with the same curiosity with which I was studying them. These were people I had come halfway around the world to see, in the hope of solving an ancient historical puzzle.
“Tell me,” I asked the first group I encountered, “where did the people here come from? Long ago, did foreign sailors ever settle here?”
The answer was a series of shrugs. “I’ve never heard about that,” one said. “You’ll have to ask the elders.”
I tried several old men and women without success. Finally the villagers led me to the patriarch of the village, Bwana Mkuu Al-Bauri, the keeper of oral traditions. He was a frail old man with gray stubble on his cheeks, head and chest. He wore a yellow sarong around his waist; his ribs pressed through the taut skin on his bare torso. Al-Bauri hobbled out of his bed, resting on a cane and the arm of a grandson. He claimed to be 121 years old; a pineapple-size tumor jutted from the left side of his chest.
“I know this from my grandfather, who himself was the keeper of history here,” the patriarch told me in an unexpectedly clear voice. “Many, many years ago, there was a ship from China that wrecked on the rocks off the coast near here. The sailors swam ashore near the village of Shanga — my ancestors were there and saw it themselves. The Chinese were visitors, so we helped those Chinese men and gave them food and shelter, and then they married our women. Although they do not live in this village, I believe their descendants still can be found somewhere else on this island.”
I almost felt like hugging Bwana Al-Bauri. For months I had been poking around obscure documents and research reports, trying to track down a legend of an ancient Chinese shipwreck that had led to a settlement on the African coast. My interest arose from a fascination with what to me is a central enigma of the millennium: why did the West triumph over the East?
For most of the last several thousand years, it would have seemed far likelier that Chinese or Indians, not Europeans, would dominate the world by the year 2000, and that America and Australia would be settled by Chinese rather than by the inhabitants of a backward island called Britain. The reversal of fortunes of East and West strikes me as the biggest news story of the millennium, and one of its most unexpected as well.
As a resident of Asia for most of the past 13 years, I’ve been searching for an explanation. It has always seemed to me that the turning point came in the early 1400′s, when Admiral Zheng He sailed from China to conquer the world. Zheng He (pronounced jung huh) was an improbable commander of a great Chinese fleet, in that he was a Muslim from a rebel family and had been seized by the Chinese Army when he was still a boy. Like many other prisoners of the time, he was castrated — his sexual organs completely hacked off, a process that killed many of those who suffered it. But he was a brilliant and tenacious boy who grew up to be physically imposing. A natural leader, he had the good fortune to be assigned, as a houseboy, to the household of a great prince, Zhu Di. …
The voyages of Zheng He have led to a theory propounded in Gavin Menzies’ book 1421:The Year China Discovered America. The blog How Stuff Works have examined Menzies’ claims and finds them wanting.
… From its introduction in 2003, Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory has come under assault. The writing that seeks to disprove Menzies is at least as long as his book. One question perhaps looms largest when approaching the 1421 theory: If the Chinese had a presence in the Americas prior to Christopher Columbus, then why isn’t their mark left indelibly on the face of American civilization?
The Norse, who sailed as far west as Newfoundland in their travels across the Atlantic, left remnants of their visits to North America. Their folklore includes accounts of the Vikings’ encounters with Native Americans. The crumbling remains of the stone outposts they built during their stay can still be seen. This was 1,000 years ago, and 500 years before Columbus’ voyage. Yet the Vikings brief settlement in North America is still evident. If the Chinese had such a thorough impact on societies in the Americas just 70 years before Columbus’ arrival, then why isn’t evidence of their presence everywhere?
What’s more, there’s a distinct lack of cross-cultural pollination between the new world and China. When the Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought with them things that have never before been seen in the continents, like steel and horses. But more importantly, they took back exotic treasures from the new world. Maize and tomatoes, along with vast amounts of plundered gold, found its way to Europe upon the ships of returning explorers. Where’s the Incan gold or the corn of the Aztecs in China? …
The Economist posts on the days when New York City becomes ManhattanHenge.
WHEN traffic lights changed to red on the evening of July 11th, hundreds of New Yorkers raced out to the middle of Manhattan’s roads, cameras in hand, safety be damned. They faced west, where the setting sun was lighting up the sky. The skyscrapers and high-rises framed the firey orb which lit up the surrounding glass, brick and stone buildings spectacularly. For the next 15 minutes or so, the pattern repeated. Traffic lights changed, the sun worshippers took to the street to capture the stunning sight, until the sun disappeared. The cosmic phenomenon is known as Manhattanhenge, or the Manhattan Solstice. …
… The phenomenon is not designed by gods or man. The perfect alignment is a cosmically happy accident. Manhattan’s street grid was designed for 1m people in 1811, when the population was only 100,000. It runs east to west from the East River to the Hudson River and roughly north to south—28.9 degrees east of north, to be exact. Because the street grid is not strictly laid out to true north, Manhattanhenge takes place around May 28th and again around July 11th, each date roughly three weeks before and after the summer solstice. The relatively low topography in New Jersey across the Hudson River to the west, coupled with Manhattan being an island, means the horizon is mostly unobstructed. The best places to view the sun and the blazing skyscrapers are at 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd and 57th Streets. …