Richard Morrison

The perils of cultural appropriation in classical music

Until a few weeks ago it was all going so well for Roomful of Teeth. Founded a decade ago, this eight-strong vocal ensemble had rocked the choral world – well, in the US anyway – by integrating different vocal techniques into its performances. And I don’t mean just the avant-garde techniques you hear in Berio’s Sinfonia or Stockhausen’s Stimmung. Roomful of Teeth (great name!) also incorporates alpine yodelling, Inuit and Tuvan throat singing, Bulgarian belting, death-metal howling and Christian chanting into a great melting-pot of vocal sounds.

So it’s a choir for our eclectic times, in which all genres and traditions feed off each other, and composers cross over the old demarcation lines between classical and jazz, rock and soul, pop and rap, tonality and atonality, past and present. Roomful of Teeth has been acclaimed for this pioneering work: earlier this year The New Yorker, no less, devoted thousands of words to the group ‘revolutionising choral music’.

Then the ship hit the rocks. Back in 2013 one of the choir’s singers, Caroline Shaw, wrote a piece called Partita for 8 Voices which meshed diverse musical elements, including a traditional Inuit throat-song duet, the Love Song. So appealing and intriguing was the work that it won a Grammy and a Pulitzer.

In October this year, however, a leading Canadian Inuit throat singer, Tanya Tagaq, publicly rebuked Roomful of Teeth for including the Love Song without properly crediting its origins or the Inuit teachers who had coached the performers in this throat-singing technique, known as katajjaq. A small but intense social-media storm followed, in which other members of the Inuit community went further in their condemnation. To them, any attempt by non-inuit performers to sing katajjaq material – whether properly credited or not – is ‘disrespectful’.

In vain did Roomful of Teeth argue that its use of throat-singing techniques in Partita was ‘sufficiently distinctive from katajjaq to constitute something new’. Indeed, so fierce was the criticism that it was forced to issue a public apology. ‘Thanks to the many voices we have heard in the past two weeks we understand that we cannot be the arbiters of that distinction,’ the statement said. ‘We have work to do.’ That work will apparently include reading aloud a list at the start of every concert ‘honouring explicitly named traditional cultures’ essential contributions to our music’.

On one level that sounds absurd. Imagine that French composers such as Bizet or Chabrier had to read aloud a public acknowledgement of all the Spanish dance forms they plundered to compose Carmen and España. Or that Mendelssohn had to apologise to the crofters of the Highlands because his ‘Scottish’ Symphony sounded, well, Scottish. Or that Puccini had to bow to Japanese sensibilities and remove all the oriental tunes from Madam Butterfly.

But times change. Today, one of the worst artistic crimes you can be accused of, especially in the US, is ‘cultural appropriation’. The campaign against that goes a lot further than banning white people from playing black, Hispanic or oriental roles in films, theatre and opera – though that coercive trend has already stopped a student operatic company in New York from staging The Mikado because they had too few Asian-americans in the cast. No, a much more worrying development is the attempt by certain ethnic groups to claim complete ownership, for ever, of their traditional music and literature.

I understand why they do it. They feel threatened. They fear their culture will be diluted, polluted, assimilated or outright obliterated if they don’t enforce bans on outsiders ‘borrowing’ from it. But they are wrong. First, international copyright extends for only 70 years or so after an author’s death for a good reason: so that humanity’s greatest creations end up belonging to everybody. That should apply as much to the traditional art and music of minority ethnic groups as to the masterpieces of Western civilisation.

Second, cross-fertilisation doesn’t destroy cultures; it enriches them. And thirdly, on a purely pragmatic level, far more people will be made aware of minority cultures if they are referenced by non-specialist performers. And those newcomers might well be sufficiently intrigued to search out the ‘real thing’. The Inuit should be delighted, not offended, that – thanks to Roomful of Teeth – thousands of people have experienced katajjaq, or pastichekatajjaq, for the first time. Imitation is not appropriation. Nor is it disrespectful. It’s the sincerest form of flattery.

The Inuit should be delighted, not o ended, that thousands more have now heard katajjaq