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https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/lil-nas-x-montero

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As music videos go, it hardly gets more seismic than Lil Nas X's "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)". Released on 26 March, the "Old Town Road" musician used the first song off his forthcoming album to celebrate queer sexuality in all its glory. The clip begins with the Grammy winner as Adam in the Garden of Eden, and concludes with him pole-dancing down to the gates of hell and giving a lap dance to Satan, before casually breaking Lucifer's neck and stealing his horned crown. As for the accompanying single art? It sees Lil Nas reinterpret Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" in his own magnificent style.

Naturally, certain sections of the internet ( namely, the ones still trying to get over "WAP") had some thoughts on this, but Lil Nas is having none of the homophobic backlash. In response to claims that his video is part of a "system" intended to corrupt American youth, the Georgia native responded on Twitter: "There was no system involved. I made the decision to create the music video. I am an adult. I am not gonna spend my entire career trying to cater to your children. That is your job." He also tweeted and deleted a poignant message about gun violence in America. "There is a mass shooting every week that our government does nothing to stop. Me sliding down a CGI pole isn't what's destroying society."

The 21-year-old also used the moment to speak out about his own experiences with homophobia. "I spent my entire teenage years hating myself because of the shit y'all preached would happen to me because I was gay. So I hope you are mad, stay mad, feel the same anger you teach us to have towards ourselves." On an even more emotional note, he wrote and pinned a message to his 14-year-old self on his Twitter account: "Dear 14-year-old Montero, I wrote a song with our name in it. It's about a guy I met last summer. I know we promised to never come out publicly, I know we promised to never be 'that' type of gay person, I know we promised to die with the secret, but this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist. You see this is very scary for me, people will be angry, they will say I'm pushing an agenda. But the truth is, I am. The agenda to make people stay the fuck out of other people's lives and stop dictating who they should be. Sending you love from the future. - LNX."

And that, my friends, is how you shut down the internet.
More from British Vogue:

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Lil Nas X Has Precisely Zero Tolerance For The Homophobic Backlash To His Epic "Montero" Video

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As music videos go, it hardly gets more seismic than Lil Nas X's "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)". Released on 26 March, the "Old Town Road" musician used the first song off his forthcoming album to celebrate queer sexuality in all its glory.

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https://time.com/5440824/freddie-mercury-celebrity-aids-awareness/

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Freddie Mercury Didn't Want to Be a 'Poster Boy' for AIDS - But He and Other Celebrities Played a Key Role in Its History

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Freddie Mercury of Queen was just one of the many stars who, especially in the late '80s and early '90s, played a key role in AIDS awareness

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( chy-KOF-skee; Russian: Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский, Pëtr Ilʹič Čajkovskij, IPA: [pʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪjˈkofskʲɪj] (); 7 May [O.S. 25 April] 1840 - 6 November [O.S. 25 October] 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, bolstered by his appearances as a guest conductor in Europe and the United States. He was honored in 1884 by Emperor Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension.

Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his professional relationship was mixed. Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From this reconciliation he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style-a task that did not prove easy. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music; this seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. This resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity-an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career.

Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother's early death, the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein, and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, which was his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck who was his patron even though they never actually met each other. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor, though some musicologists now downplay its importance. Tchaikovsky's sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause of death, and whether his death was accidental or self-inflicted.

While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements. In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism and said he transcended stereotypes of Russian classical music. Others dismissed Tchaikovsky's music as "lacking in elevated thought", according to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, and derided its formal workings as deficient because they did not stringently follow Western principles.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town in Vyatka Governorate (present-day Udmurtia) in the Russian Empire, into a family with a long line of military service. His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, had served as a lieutenant colonel and engineer in the Department of Mines, and would manage the Kamsko-Votkinsk Ironworks. His grandfather, Pyotr Fedorovich Tchaikovsky (né Petro Fedorovych Chaika), was born in the village of Mikolayivka, Poltava Gubernia, Russian Empire (present day Ukraine), and served first as a physician's assistant in the army and later as city governor of Glazov in Vyatka. His great-grandfather, a Ukrainian Cossack named Fyodor Chaika, distinguished himself under Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. Tchaikovsky's mother, Alexandra Andreyevna ( d'Assier), was the second of Ilya's three wives, 18 years her husband's junior and French and German on her father's side. Both Ilya and Alexandra were trained in the arts, including music-a necessity as a posting to a remote area of Russia also meant a need for entertainment, whether in private or at social gatherings. Of his six siblings, Tchaikovsky was close to his sister Alexandra and twin brothers Anatoly and Modest. Alexandra's marriage to Lev Davydov would produce seven children and lend Tchaikovsky the only real family life he would know as an adult, especially during his years of wandering. One of those children, Vladimir Davydov, whom the composer would nickname 'Bob', would become very close to him.

In 1844, the family hired Fanny Dürbach, a 22-year-old French governess. Four-and-a-half-year-old Tchaikovsky was initially thought too young to study alongside his older brother Nikolai and a niece of the family. His insistence convinced Dürbach otherwise. By the age of six, he had become fluent in French and German. Tchaikovsky also became attached to the young woman; her affection for him was reportedly a counter to his mother's coldness and emotional distance from him, though others assert that the mother doted on her son. Dürbach saved much of Tchaikovsky's work from this period, including his earliest known compositions, and became a source of several childhood anecdotes.

Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at age five. Precocious, within three years he had become as adept at reading sheet music as his teacher. His parents, initially supportive, hired a tutor, bought an orchestrion (a form of barrel organ that could imitate elaborate orchestral effects), and encouraged his piano study for both aesthetic and practical reasons. However, they decided in 1850 to send Tchaikovsky to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg. They had both graduated from institutes in Saint Petersburg and the School of Jurisprudence, which mainly served the lesser nobility, and thought that this education would prepare Tchaikovsky for a career as a civil servant. Regardless of talent, the only musical careers available in Russia at that time-except for the affluent aristocracy-were as a teacher in an academy or as an instrumentalist in one of the Imperial Theaters. Both were considered on the lowest rank of the social ladder, with individuals in them enjoying no more rights than peasants. His father's income was also growing increasingly uncertain, so both parents may have wanted Tchaikovsky to become independent as soon as possible. As the minimum age for acceptance was 12 and Tchaikovsky was only 10 at the time, he was required to spend two years boarding at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence's preparatory school, 1,300 kilometres (800 mi) from his family. Once those two years had passed, Tchaikovsky transferred to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence to begin a seven-year course of studies.

Tchaikovsky's early separation from his mother caused an emotional trauma that lasted the rest of his life and was intensified by her death from cholera in 1854, when he was fourteen. The loss of his mother also prompted Tchaikovsky to make his first serious attempt at composition, a waltz in her memory. Tchaikovsky's father, who had also contracted cholera but recovered fully, sent him back to school immediately in the hope that classwork would occupy the boy's mind. Isolated, Tchaikovsky compensated with friendships with fellow students that became lifelong; these included Aleksey Apukhtin and Vladimir Gerard. Music, while not an official priority at school, also bridged the gap between Tchaikovsky and his peers. They regularly attended the opera and Tchaikovsky would improvise at the school's harmonium on themes he and his friends had sung during choir practice. "We were amused," Vladimir Gerard later remembered, "but not imbued with any expectations of his future glory". Tchaikovsky also continued his piano studies through Franz Becker, an instrument manufacturer who made occasional visits to the school; however, the results, according to musicologist David Brown, were "negligible".

In 1855, Tchaikovsky's father funded private lessons with Rudolph Kündinger and questioned him about a musical career for his son. While impressed with the boy's talent, Kündinger said he saw nothing to suggest a future composer or performer. He later admitted that his assessment was also based on his own negative experiences as a musician in Russia and his unwillingness for Tchaikovsky to be treated likewise. Tchaikovsky was told to finish his course and then try for a post in the Ministry of Justice.

Civil service; pursuing music

On 10 June 1859, the 19-year-old Tchaikovsky graduated as a titular counselor, a low rung on the civil service ladder. Appointed to the Ministry of Justice, he became a junior assistant within six months and a senior assistant two months after that. He remained a senior assistant for the rest of his three-year civil service career.

Meanwhile, the Russian Musical Society (RMS) was founded in 1859 by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (a German-born aunt of Tsar Alexander II) and her protégé, pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. Previous tsars and the aristocracy had focused almost exclusively on importing European talent. The aim of the RMS was to fulfill Alexander II's wish to foster native talent. It hosted a regular season of public concerts (previously held only during the six weeks of Lent when the Imperial Theaters were closed) and provided basic professional training in music. In 1861, Tchaikovsky attended RMS classes in music theory taught by Nikolai Zaremba at the Mikhailovsky Palace (now the Russian Museum). These classes were a precursor to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which opened in 1862. Tchaikovsky enrolled at the Conservatory as part of its premiere class. He studied harmony and counterpoint with Zaremba and instrumentation and composition with Rubinstein.

The Conservatory benefited Tchaikovsky in two ways. It transformed him into a musical professional, with tools to help him thrive as a composer, and the in-depth exposure to European principles and musical forms gave him a sense that his art was not exclusively Russian or Western. This mindset became important in Tchaikovsky's reconciliation of Russian and European influences in his compositional style. He believed and attempted to show that both these aspects were "intertwined and mutually dependent". His efforts became both an inspiration and a starting point for other Russian composers to build their own individual styles.

Rubinstein was impressed by Tchaikovsky's musical talent on the whole and cited him as "a composer of genius" in his autobiography. He was less pleased with the more progressive tendencies of some of Tchaikovsky's student work. Nor did he change his opinion as Tchaikovsky's reputation grew. He and Zaremba clashed with Tchaikovsky when he submitted his First Symphony for performance by the RMS in Saint Petersburg. Rubinstein and Zaremba refused to consider the work unless substantial changes were made. Tchaikovsky complied but they still refused to perform the symphony. Tchaikovsky, distressed that he had been treated as though he were still their student, withdrew the symphony. It was given its first complete performance, minus the changes Rubinstein and Zaremba had requested, in Moscow in February 1868.

Once Tchaikovsky graduated in 1865, Rubinstein's brother Nikolai offered him the post of Professor of Music Theory at the soon-to-open Moscow Conservatory. While the salary for his professorship was only 50 rubles a month, the offer itself boosted Tchaikovsky's morale and he accepted the post eagerly. He was further heartened by news of the first public performance of one of his works, his Characteristic Dances, conducted by Johann Strauss II at a concert in Pavlovsk Park on 11 September 1865 (Tchaikovsky later included this work, re-titled, Dances of the Hay Maidens, in his opera The Voyevoda).

From 1867 to 1878, Tchaikovsky combined his professorial duties with music criticism while continuing to compose. This activity exposed him to a range of contemporary music and afforded him the opportunity to travel abroad. In his reviews, he praised Beethoven, considered Brahms overrated and, despite his admiration, took Schumann to task for poor orchestration. He appreciated the staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at its inaugural performance in Bayreuth, (Germany), but not the music, calling Das Rheingold "unlikely nonsense, through which, from time to time, sparkle unusually beautiful and astonishing details". A recurring theme he addressed was the poor state of Russian opera.

In 1856, while Tchaikovsky was still at the School of Jurisprudence and Anton Rubinstein lobbied aristocrats to form the RMS, critic Vladimir Stasov and an 18-year-old pianist, Mily Balakirev, met and agreed upon a nationalist agenda for Russian music, one that would take the operas of Mikhail Glinka as a model and incorporate elements from folk music, reject traditional Western practices and use non-Western harmonic devices such as the whole tone and octatonic scales. They saw Western-style conservatories as unnecessary and antipathetic to fostering native talent. Eventually, Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin became known as the moguchaya kuchka, translated into English as the "Mighty Handful" or "The Five". Rubinstein criticized their emphasis on amateur efforts in musical composition; Balakirev and later Mussorgsky attacked Rubinstein for his musical conservatism and his belief in professional music training. Tchaikovsky and his fellow conservatory students were caught in the middle.

While ambivalent about much of The Five's music, Tchaikovsky remained on friendly terms with most of its members. In 1869, he and Balakirev worked together on what became Tchaikovsky's first recognized masterpiece, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, a work which The Five wholeheartedly embraced. The group also welcomed his Second Symphony, subtitled the Little Russian. Despite their support, Tchaikovsky made considerable efforts to ensure his musical independence from the group as well as from the conservative faction at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

Growing fame; budding opera composer

The infrequency of Tchaikovsky's musical successes, won with tremendous effort, exacerbated his lifelong sensitivity to criticism. Nikolai Rubinstein's private fits of rage critiquing his music, such as attacking the First Piano Concerto, did not help matters. His popularity grew, however, as several first-rate artists became willing to perform his compositions. Hans von Bülow premiered the First Piano Concerto and championed other Tchaikovsky works both as pianist and conductor. Other artists included Adele Aus der Ohe, Max Erdmannsdörfer, Eduard Nápravník and Sergei Taneyev.

Another factor that helped Tchaikovsky's music become popular was a shift in attitude among Russian audiences. Whereas they had previously been satisfied with flashy virtuoso performances of technically demanding but musically lightweight compositions, they gradually began listening with increasing appreciation of the music itself. Tchaikovsky's works were performed frequently, with few delays between their composition and first performances; the publication from 1867 onward of his songs and great piano music for the home market also helped boost the composer's popularity.

During the late 1860s, Tchaikovsky began to compose operas. His first, The Voyevoda, based on a play by Alexander Ostrovsky, premiered in 1869. The composer became dissatisfied with it, however, and, having re-used parts of it in later works, destroyed the manuscript. followed in 1870. Only excerpts were performed and it, too, was destroyed. Between these projects, Tchaikovsky started to compose an opera called Mandragora, to a libretto by Sergei Rachinskii; the only music he completed was a short chorus of Flowers and Insects.

The first Tchaikovsky opera to survive intact, The Oprichnik, premiered in 1874. During its composition, he lost Ostrovsky's part-finished libretto. Tchaikovsky, too embarrassed to ask for another copy, decided to write the libretto himself, modelling his dramatic technique on that of Eugène Scribe. Cui wrote a "characteristically savage press attack" on the opera. Mussorgsky, writing to Vladimir Stasov, disapproved of the opera as pandering to the public. Nevertheless, The Oprichnik continues to be performed from time to time in Russia.

The last of the early operas, Vakula the Smith (Op.14), was composed in the second half of 1874. The libretto, based on Gogol's Christmas Eve, was to have been set to music by Alexander Serov. With Serov's death, the libretto was opened to a competition with a guarantee that the winning entry would be premiered by the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Tchaikovsky was declared the winner, but at the 1876 premiere, the opera enjoyed only a lukewarm reception. After Tchaikovsky's death, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote the opera Christmas Eve, based on the same story.

Other works of this period include the Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the ballet , and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Discussion of Tchaikovsky's personal life, especially his sexuality, has perhaps been the most extensive of any composer in the 19th century and certainly of any Russian composer of his time. It has also at times caused considerable confusion, from Soviet efforts to expunge all references to same-sex attraction and portray him as a heterosexual, to efforts at armchair analysis by Western biographers. Biographers have generally agreed that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. He sought the company of other men in his circle for extended periods, "associating openly and establishing professional connections with them". His first love was reportedly Sergey Kireyev, a younger fellow student at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. According to Modest Tchaikovsky, this was Pyotr Ilyich's "strongest, longest and purest love". The degree to which the composer might have felt comfortable with his sexual nature has, however, remained open to debate. It is still unknown whether Tchaikovsky, according to musicologist and biographer David Brown, "felt tainted within himself, defiled by something from which he finally realized he could never escape" or whether, according to Alexander Poznansky, he experienced "no unbearable guilt" over his sexual nature and "eventually came to see his sexual peculiarities as an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality ... without experiencing any serious psychological damage". Relevant portions of his brother Modest's autobiography, where he tells of the composer's sexual orientation, have been published, as have letters previously suppressed by Soviet censors in which Tchaikovsky openly writes of it. Such censorship has persisted in the current Russian government, resulting in many officials, including the current culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, to outright deny his homosexuality. Passages in Tchaikovsky's letters which reveal his homosexual desires have been censored in Russia. In one such passage he told of a homosexual acquaintance: "Petashenka used to drop by with the criminal intention of observing the Cadet Corps, which is right opposite our windows, but I've been trying to discourage these compromising visits - and with some success." In another one he wrote "After our walk, I offered him some money, which was refused. He does it for the love of art and adores men with beards."

Tchaikovsky lived as a bachelor for most of his life. In 1868 he met Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt. They became infatuated with each other and were engaged to be married but due to Artôt's refusal to give up the stage or settle in Russia, the relationship ended. Tchaikovsky later claimed she was the only woman he ever loved. In 1877, at the age of 37, he wed a former student, Antonina Miliukova. The marriage was a disaster. Mismatched psychologically and sexually, the couple lived together for only two and a half months before Tchaikovsky left, overwrought emotionally and suffering from an acute writer's block. Tchaikovsky's family remained supportive of him during this crisis and throughout his life. He was also aided by Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate, who had begun contact with him not long before the marriage. As well as an important friend and emotional support, she became his patroness for the next 13 years, which allowed him to focus exclusively on composition. While Tchaikovsky called her his "best friend" they agreed to never meet under any circumstances. Tchaikovsky's marital debacle may have forced him to face the full truth about his sexuality; he never blamed Antonina for the failure of their marriage.

Tchaikovsky remained abroad for a year after the disintegration of his marriage. During this time, he completed Eugene Onegin, orchestrated his Fourth Symphony, and composed the Violin Concerto. He returned briefly to the Moscow Conservatory in the autumn of 1879. For the next few years, assured of a regular income from von Meck, he traveled incessantly throughout Europe and rural Russia, mainly alone, and avoided social contact whenever possible. During this time, Tchaikovsky's foreign reputation grew and a positive reassessment of his music also took place in Russia, thanks in part to Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's call for "universal unity" with the West at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow in 1880. Before Dostoyevsky's speech, Tchaikovsky's music had been considered "overly dependent on the West". As Dostoyevsky's message spread throughout Russia, this stigma toward Tchaikovsky's music evaporated. An unprecedented acclaim for him even drew a cult following among the young intelligentsia of Saint Petersburg, including Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Sergei Diaghilev.

Two musical works from this period stand out. With the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour nearing completion in Moscow in 1880, the 25th anniversary of the coronation of Alexander II in 1881, and the 1882 Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition in the planning stage, Nikolai Rubinstein suggested that Tchaikovsky compose a grand commemorative piece. Tchaikovsky agreed and finished it within six weeks. He wrote to Nadezhda von Meck that this piece, the 1812 Overture, would be "very loud and noisy, but I wrote it with no warm feeling of love, and therefore there will probably be no artistic merits in it". He also warned conductor Eduard Nápravník that "I shan't be at all surprised and offended if you find that it is in a style unsuitable for symphony concerts". Nevertheless, the overture became, for many, "the piece by Tchaikovsky they know best"., particularly well-known for the use of cannon in the scores.

On 23 March 1881, Nikolai Rubinstein died in Paris. That December, Tchaikovsky started work on his Piano Trio in A minor, "dedicated to the memory of a great artist". First performed privately at the Moscow Conservatory on the first anniversary of Rubinstein's death, the piece became extremely popular during the composer's lifetime; in November 1893, it would become Tchaikovsky's own elegy at memorial concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In 1884, Tchaikovsky began to shed his unsociability and restlessness. That March, Tsar Alexander III conferred upon him the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class), which included a title of hereditary nobility and a personal audience with the Tsar. This was seen as a seal of official approval which advanced Tchaikovsky's social standing and might have been cemented in the composer's mind by the success of his Orchestral Suite No. 3 at its January 1885 premiere in Saint Petersburg. In 1885, Alexander III requested a new production of Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in Saint Petersburg. By having the opera staged there and not at the Mariinsky Theatre, he served notice that Tchaikovsky's music was replacing Italian opera as the official imperial art. In addition, by virtue of Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theaters and a patron of the composer, Tchaikovsky was awarded a lifetime annual pension of 3,000 rubles from the Tsar. This made him the premier court composer, in practice if not in actual title.

Despite Tchaikovsky's disdain for public life, he now participated in it as part of his increasing celebrity and out of a duty he felt to promote Russian music. He helped support his former pupil Sergei Taneyev, who was now director of Moscow Conservatory, by attending student examinations and negotiating the sometimes sensitive relations among various members of the staff. He served as director of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society during the 1889-1890 season. In this post, he invited many international celebrities to conduct, including Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák and Jules Massenet.

During this period, Tchaikovsky also began promoting Russian music as a conductor, In January 1887, he substituted, on short notice, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow for performances of his opera Cherevichki. Within a year, he was in considerable demand throughout Europe and Russia. These appearances helped him overcome life-long stage fright and boosted his self-assurance. In 1888, Tchaikovsky led the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Saint Petersburg, repeating the work a week later with the first performance of his tone poem . Although critics proved hostile, with César Cui calling the symphony "routine" and "meretricious", both works were received with extreme enthusiasm by audiences and Tchaikovsky, undeterred, continued to conduct the symphony in Russia and Europe. Conducting brought him to the United States in 1891, where he led the New York Music Society's orchestra in his Festival Coronation March at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall.

In November 1887, Tchaikovsky arrived at Saint Petersburg in time to hear several of the Russian Symphony Concerts, devoted exclusively to the music of Russian composers. One included the first complete performance of his revised First Symphony; another featured the final version of Third Symphony of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with whose circle Tchaikovsky was already in touch. Rimsky-Korsakov, with Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov and several other nationalistically minded composers and musicians, had formed a group known as the Belyayev circle, named after a merchant and amateur musician who became an influential music patron and publisher. Tchaikovsky spent much time in this circle, becoming far more at ease with them than he had been with the 'Five' and increasingly confident in showcasing his music alongside theirs. This relationship lasted until Tchaikovsky's death.

In 1892, Tchaikovsky was voted a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France, only the second Russian subject to be so honored (the first was sculptor Mark Antokolski). The following year, the University of Cambridge in England awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary Doctor of Music degree.

On 16/28 October 1893, Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique in Saint Petersburg. Nine days later, Tchaikovsky died there, aged 53. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, near the graves of fellow-composers Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, and Modest Mussorgsky; later, Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev were also buried nearby.

While Tchaikovsky's death has traditionally been attributed to cholera from drinking unboiled water at a local restaurant, there has been much speculation that his death was suicide. In the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Roland John Wiley wrote that "The polemics over [Tchaikovsky's] death have reached an impasse ... Rumors attached to the famous die hard ... As for illness, problems of evidence offer little hope of satisfactory resolution: the state of diagnosis; the confusion of witnesses; disregard of long-term effects of smoking and alcohol. We do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out ...".

Tchaikovsky displayed a wide stylistic and emotional range, from light salon works to grand symphonies. Some of his works, such as the Variations on a Rococo Theme, employ a "Classical" form reminiscent of 18th-century composers such as Mozart (his favorite composer). Other compositions, such as his Little Russian symphony and his opera Vakula the Smith, flirt with musical practices more akin to those of the Five, especially in their use of folk song. Other works, such as Tchaikovsky's last three symphonies, employ a personal musical idiom that facilitated intense emotional expression.

Tchaikovsky first visited Ukraine in 1864, staying in Trostianets where he wrote his first orchestral work, overture. Over the next 28 years, he visited over 15 places in Ukraine, where he stayed a few months at the time. Among his most favorite places was Kamianka, Cherkasy Oblast, where his sister Alexandra lived with her family. He wrote of Kamianka: "I found a feeling of peace in my soul, which I couldn't find in Moscow and St Petersburg". Tchaikovsky wrote more than 30 compositions while in Ukraine. He also visited Ukrainian composer Mykola Lysenko and attended his Taras Bulba opera performance in 1890 in the Kiev Opera House. Tchaikovsky was one of the founders of the Kiev Music Conservatory, which was later renamed after him. He also performed in concerts as a conductor in Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkiv.

American music critic and journalist Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Tchaikovsky's "sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody", a feature that has ensured his music's continued success with audiences. Tchaikovsky's complete range of melodic styles was as wide as that of his compositions. Sometimes he used Western-style melodies, sometimes original melodies written in the style of Russian folk song; sometimes he used actual folk songs. According to The New Grove, Tchaikovsky's melodic gift could also become his worst enemy in two ways. The first challenge arose from his ethnic heritage. Unlike Western themes, the melodies that Russian composers wrote tended to be self-contained; they functioned with a mindset of stasis and repetition rather than one of progress and ongoing development. On a technical level, it made modulating to a new key to introduce a contrasting second theme exceedingly difficult, as this was literally a foreign concept that did not exist in Russian music. The second way melody worked against Tchaikovsky was a challenge that he shared with the majority of Romantic-age composers. They did not write in the regular, symmetrical melodic shapes that worked well with sonata form, such as those favored by Classical composers such as Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, but were complete and independent in themselves. This completeness hindered their use as structural elements in combination with one another. This challenge was why the Romantics "were never natural symphonists". All a composer like Tchaikovsky could do with them was to essentially repeat them, even when he modified them to generate tension, maintain interest and satisfy listeners.

Harmony could be a potential trap for Tchaikovsky, according to Brown, since Russian creativity tended to focus on inertia and self-enclosed tableaux, while Western harmony worked against this to propel the music onward and, on a larger scale, shape it. Modulation, the shifting from one key to another, was a driving principle in both harmony and sonata form, the primary Western large-scale musical structure since the middle of the 18th century. Modulation maintained harmonic interest over an extended time-scale, provided a clear contrast between musical themes and showed how those themes were related to each other. One point in Tchaikovsky's favor was "a flair for harmony" that "astonished" Rudolph Kündinger, Tchaikovsky's music tutor during his time at the School of Jurisprudence. Added to what he learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory studies, this talent allowed Tchaikovsky to employ a varied range of harmony in his music, from the Western harmonic and textural practices of his first two string quartets to the use of the whole tone scale in the center of the finale of the Second Symphony, a practice more typically used by The Five.

Rhythmically, Tchaikovsky sometimes experimented with unusual meters. More often, he used a firm, regular meter, a practice that served him well in dance music. At times, his rhythms became pronounced enough to become the main expressive agent of the music. They also became a means, found typically in Russian folk music, of simulating movement or progression in large-scale symphonic movements-a "synthetic propulsion", as Brown phrases it, which substituted for the momentum that would be created in strict sonata form by the interaction of melodic or motivic elements. This interaction generally does not take place in Russian music. (For more on this, please see Repetition below.)

Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form. Its principle of organic growth through the interplay of musical themes was alien to Russian practice. The traditional argument that Tchaikovsky seemed unable to develop themes in this manner fails to consider this point; it also discounts the possibility that Tchaikovsky might have intended the development passages in his large-scale works to act as "enforced hiatuses" to build tension, rather than grow organically as smoothly progressive musical arguments.

According to Brown and musicologists Hans Keller and Daniel Zhitomirsky, Tchaikovsky found his solution to large-scale structure while composing the Fourth Symphony. He essentially sidestepped thematic interaction and kept sonata form only as an "outline", as Zhitomirsky phrases it. Within this outline, the focus centered on periodic alternation and juxtaposition. Tchaikovsky placed blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another, with what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themes, keys, and harmonies. This process, according to Brown and Keller, builds momentum and adds intense drama. While the result, Warrack charges, is still "an ingenious episodic treatment of two tunes rather than a symphonic development of them" in the Germanic sense, Brown counters that it took the listener of the period "through a succession of often highly charged sections which added up to a radically new kind of symphonic experience" (italics Brown), one that functioned not on the basis of summation, as Austro-German symphonies did, but on one of accumulation.

Partly due to the melodic and structural intricacies involved in this accumulation and partly due to the composer's nature, Tchaikovsky's music became intensely expressive. This intensity was entirely new to Russian music and prompted some Russians to place Tchaikovsky's name alongside that of Dostoyevsky. German musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar credits Tchaikovsky in his later symphonies with offering "full images of life, developed freely, sometimes even dramatically, around psychological contrasts ... This music has the mark of the truly lived and felt experience". Botstein, in elaborating on this comment, suggests that listening to Tchaikovsky's music "became a psychological mirror connected to everyday experience, one that reflected on the dynamic nature of the listener's own emotional self". This active engagement with the music "opened for the listener a vista of emotional and psychological tension and an extremity of feeling that possessed relevance because it seemed reminiscent of one's own 'truly lived and felt experience' or one's search for intensity in a deeply personal sense".

As mentioned above, repetition was a natural part of Tchaikovsky's music, just as it is an integral part of Russian music. His use of sequences within melodies ( repeating a tune at a higher or lower pitch in the same voice) could go on for extreme length. The problem with repetition is that, over a period of time, the melody being repeated remains static, even when there is a surface level of rhythmic activity added to it. Tchaikovsky kept the musical conversation flowing by treating melody, tonality, rhythm and sound color as one integrated unit, rather than as separate elements. By making subtle but noticeable changes in the rhythm or phrasing of a tune, modulating to another key, changing the melody itself or varying the instruments playing it, Tchaikovsky could keep a listener's interest from flagging. By extending the number of repetitions, he could increase the musical and dramatic tension of a passage, building "into an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity", as Brown phrases it, controlling when the peak and release of that tension would take place. Musicologist Martin Cooper calls this practice a subtle form of unifying a piece of music and adds that Tchaikovsky brought it to a high point of refinement. (For more on this practice, see the next section.)

Like other late Romantic composers, Tchaikovsky relied heavily on orchestration for musical effects. Tchaikovsky, however, became noted for the "sensual opulence" and "voluptuous timbrel virtuosity" of his orchestration. Like Glinka, Tchaikovsky tended toward bright primary colors and sharply delineated contrasts of texture. However, beginning with the Third Symphony, Tchaikovsky experimented with an increased range of timbres Tchaikovsky's scoring was noted and admired by some of his peers. Rimsky-Korsakov regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it and called it "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority". This sonority, musicologist Richard Taruskin points out, is essentially Germanic in effect. Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously (a practice called doubling) and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish".

Pastiche (Passé-ism)

In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the Variations on a Rococo Theme, Tchaikovsky showed he was highly gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European pastiche. In the ballet The Sleeping Beauty and the opera The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation. This practice, which Alexandre Benois calls "passé-ism", lends an air of timelessness and immediacy, making the past seem as though it were the present. On a practical level, Tchaikovsky was drawn to past styles because he felt he might find the solution to certain structural problems within them. His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn. (In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to Igor Stravinsky, who turned to Neoclassicism partly as a form of compositional self-discovery.) Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance.

Of Tchaikovsky's Western contemporaries, Robert Schumann stands out as an influence in formal structure, harmonic practices and piano writing, according to Brown and musicologist Roland John Wiley. Boris Asafyev comments that Schumann left his mark on Tchaikovsky not just as a formal influence but also as an example of musical dramaturgy and self-expression. Leon Botstein claims the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also left their imprints on Tchaikovsky's orchestral style. The late-Romantic trend for writing orchestral suites, begun by Franz Lachner, Jules Massenet, and Joachim Raff after the rediscovery of Bach's works in that genre, may have influenced Tchaikovsky to try his own hand at them. His teacher Anton Rubinstein's opera became a model for the final tableau of Eugene Onegin. So did Léo Delibes' ballets and for The Sleeping Beauty and Georges Bizet's opera (a work Tchaikovsky admired tremendously) for The Queen of Spades. Otherwise, it was to composers of the past that Tchaikovsky turned-Beethoven, whose music he respected; Mozart, whose music he loved; Glinka, whose opera A Life for the Tsar made an indelible impression on him as a child and whose scoring he studied assiduously; and Adolphe Adam, whose ballet was a favorite of his from his student days and whose score he consulted while working on The Sleeping Beauty. Beethoven's string quartets may have influenced Tchaikovsky's attempts in that medium. Other composers whose work interested Tchaikovsky included Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Vincenzo Bellini and Henry Litolff.

Maes maintains that, regardless of what he was writing, Tchaikovsky's main concern was how his music impacted his listeners on an aesthetic level, at specific moments in the piece and on a cumulative level once the music had finished. What his listeners experienced on an emotional or visceral level became an end in itself. Tchaikovsky's focus on pleasing his audience might be considered closer to that of Mendelssohn or Mozart. Considering that he lived and worked in what was probably the last 19th-century feudal nation, the statement is not actually that surprising. And yet, even when writing so-called 'programme music, for example his Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, he cast it in sonata form. His use of stylized 18th-century melodies and patriotic themes was geared toward the values of Russian aristocracy. He was aided in this by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, who commissioned The Sleeping Beauty from Tchaikovsky and the libretto for The Queen of Spades from Modest with their use of 18th century settings stipulated firmly. Tchaikovsky also used the polonaise frequently, the dance being a musical code for the Romanov dynasty and a symbol of Russian patriotism. Using it in the finale of a work could assure its success with Russian listeners.

Tchaikovsky's relationship with collaborators was mixed. Like Nikolai Rubinstein with the First Piano Concerto, virtuoso and pedagogue Leopold Auer rejected the Violin Concerto initially but changed his mind; he played it to great public success and taught it to his students, who included Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. Wilhelm Fitzenhagen "intervened considerably in shaping what he considered 'his' piece", the Variations on a Rococo Theme, according to music critic Michael Steinberg. Tchaikovsky was angered by Fitzenhagen's license but did nothing; the Rococo Variations were published with the cellist's amendments. His collaboration on the three ballets went better and in Marius Petipa, who worked with him on the last two, he might have found an advocate. When The Sleeping Beauty was seen by its dancers as needlessly complicated, Petipa convinced them to put in the extra effort. Tchaikovsky compromised to make his music as practical as possible for the dancers and was accorded more creative freedom than ballet composers were usually accorded at the time. He responded with scores that minimized the rhythmic subtleties normally present in his work but were inventive and rich in melody, with more refined and imaginative orchestration than in the average ballet score.

Critical reception to Tchaikovsky's music was also varied but also improved over time. Even after 1880, some inside Russia held it suspect for not being nationalistic enough and thought Western European critics lauded it for exactly that reason. There might have been a grain of truth in the latter, according to musicologist and conductor Leon Botstein, as German critics especially wrote of the "indeterminacy of [Tchaikovsky's] artistic character ... being truly at home in the non-Russian". Of the foreign critics who did not care for his music, Eduard Hanslick lambasted the Violin Concerto as a musical composition "whose stink one can hear" and William Forster Abtrop wrote of the Fifth Symphony, "The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded!"

The division between Russian and Western critics remained through much of the 20th century but for a different reason. According to Brown and Wiley, the prevailing view of Western critics was that the same qualities in Tchaikovsky's music that appealed to audiences-its strong emotions, directness and eloquence and colorful orchestration-added up to compositional shallowness. The music's use in popular and film music, Brown says, lowered its esteem in their eyes still further. There was also the fact, pointed out earlier, that Tchaikovsky's music demanded active engagement from the listener and, as Botstein phrases it, "spoke to the listener's imaginative interior life, regardless of nationality". Conservative critics, he adds, may have felt threatened by the "violence and 'hysteria' " they detected and felt such emotive displays "attacked the boundaries of conventional aesthetic appreciation-the cultured reception of art as an act of formalist discernment-and the polite engagement of art as an act of amusement".

There has also been the fact that the composer did not follow sonata form strictly, relying instead on juxtaposing blocks of tonalities and thematic groups. Maes states this point has been seen at times as a weakness rather than a sign of originality. Even with what Schonberg termed "a professional reevaluation" of Tchaikovsky's work, the practice of faulting Tchaikovsky for not following in the steps of the Viennese masters has not gone away entirely, while his intent of writing music that would please his audiences is also sometimes taken to task. In a 1992 article, New York Times critic Allan Kozinn writes, "It is Tchaikovsky's flexibility, after all, that has given us a sense of his variability.... Tchaikovsky was capable of turning out music-entertaining and widely beloved though it is-that seems superficial, manipulative and trivial when regarded in the context of the whole literature. The First Piano Concerto is a case in point. It makes a joyful noise, it swims in pretty tunes and its dramatic rhetoric allows (or even requires) a soloist to make a grand, swashbuckling impression. But it is entirely hollow".

In the 21st century, however, critics are reacting more positively to Tchaikovsky's tunefulness, originality, and craftsmanship. "Tchaikovsky is being viewed again as a composer of the first rank, writing music of depth, innovation and influence," according to cultural historian and author Joseph Horowitz. Important in this reevaluation is a shift in attitude away from the disdain for overt emotionalism that marked half of the 20th century. "We have acquired a different view of Romantic 'excess,'" Horowitz says. "Tchaikovsky is today more admired than deplored for his emotional frankness; if his music seems harried and insecure, so are we all".

Horowitz maintains that, while the standing of Tchaikovsky's music has fluctuated among critics, for the public, "it never went out of style, and his most popular works have yielded iconic sound-bytes [], such as the love theme from Romeo and Juliet". Along with those tunes, Botstein adds, "Tchaikovsky appealed to audiences outside of Russia with an immediacy and directness that were startling even for music, an art form often associated with emotion". Tchaikovsky's melodies, stated with eloquence and matched by his inventive use of harmony and orchestration, have always ensured audience appeal. His popularity is considered secure, with his following in many countries, including Great Britain and the United States, second only to that of Beethoven. His music has also been used frequently in popular music and film.

According to Wiley, Tchaikovsky was a pioneer in several ways. "Thanks in large part to Nadezhda von Meck", Wiley writes, "he became the first full-time professional Russian composer". This, Wiley adds, allowed him the time and freedom to consolidate the Western compositional practices he had learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with Russian folk song and other native musical elements to fulfill his own expressive goals and forge an original, deeply personal style. He made an impact in not only absolute works such as the symphony but also program music and, as Wiley phrases it, "transformed Liszt's and Berlioz's achievements ... into matters of Shakespearean elevation and psychological import". Wiley and Holden both note that Tchaikovsky did all this without a native school of composition upon which to fall back. They point out that only Glinka had preceded him in combining Russian and Western practices and his teachers in Saint Petersburg had been thoroughly Germanic in their musical outlook. He was, they write, for all intents and purposes alone in his artistic quest.

Maes and Taruskin write that Tchaikovsky believed that his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his contemporaries in The Five. Maes adds that, like them, he wanted to produce music that reflected Russian national character but which did so to the highest European standards of quality. Tchaikovsky, according to Maes, came along at a time when the nation itself was deeply divided as to what that character truly was. Like his country, Maes writes, it took him time to discover how to express his Russianness in a way that was true to himself and what he had learned. Because of his professionalism, Maes says, he worked hard at this goal and succeeded. The composer's friend, music critic Hermann Laroche, wrote of The Sleeping Beauty that the score contained "an element deeper and more general than color, in the internal structure of the music, above all in the foundation of the element of melody. This basic element is undoubtedly Russian".

Tchaikovsky was inspired to reach beyond Russia with his music, according to Maes and Taruskin. His exposure to Western music, they write, encouraged him to think it belonged to not just Russia but also the world at large. Volkov adds that this mindset made him think seriously about Russia's place in European musical culture-the first Russian composer to do so. It steeled him to become the first Russian composer to acquaint foreign audiences personally with his own works, Warrack writes, as well as those of other Russian composers. In his biography of Tchaikovsky, Anthony Holden recalls the dearth of Russian classical music before Tchaikovsky's birth, then places the composer's achievements into historical perspective: "Twenty years after Tchaikovsky's death, in 1913, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring erupted onto the musical scene, signalling Russia's arrival into 20th-century music. Between these two very different worlds, Tchaikovsky's music became the sole bridge".

On 7 May 2010, Google celebrated his 170th birthday with a Google Doodle.

Tchaikovsky's voice

The following recording was made in Moscow in January 1890, by Julius Block on behalf of Thomas Edison.

Anton Rubinstein: What a wonderful thing.
J. Block: Certainly.
E. Lavrovskaya A disgusting...how he dares slyly to name me.
Vasily Safonov : (Sings).
P. Tchaikovsky: This trill could be better.
E. Lavrovskaya: (sings).
P. Tchaikovsky: Block is a good fellow, but Edison is even better.
E. Lavrovskaya: (sings) A-o, a-o.
V. Safonov: (In German) Peter Jurgenson in Moscow.
P. Tchaikovsky: Who just spoke? It seems to have been Safonov. (Whistles)

According to musicologist Leonid Sabaneyev, Tchaikovsky was not comfortable with being recorded for posterity and tried to shy away from it. On an apparently separate visit from the one related above, Block asked the composer to play something on a piano or at least say something. Tchaikovsky refused. He told Block, "I am a bad pianist and my voice is raspy. Why should one eternalize it?"

1. Often anglicized as ^ Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, also standardized by the Library of Congress. His names are also transliterated as Piotr or Petr; Ilitsch or Il'ich; and Tschaikowski, Tschaikowsky, Chajkovskij, or Chaikovsky. He used to sign his name/was known as P. Tschaïkowsky/Pierre Tschaïkowsky in French (as in his afore-reproduced signature), and Peter Tschaikowsky in German, spellings also displayed on several of his scores' title pages in their first printed editions alongside or in place of his native name.

2. Tchaikovsky had four brothers (Nikolai, Ippolit, Anatoly and Modest), a sister (Alexandra) and a half-sister (Zinaida) from his father's first marriage (Holden, 6, 13; Warrack, ^ Tchaikovsky, 18). Anatoly would later have a prominent legal career, while Modest became a dramatist, librettist, and translator (Poznansky, Eyes, 2).

3. Tchaikovsky ascribed Rubinstein's coolness to a difference in musical temperaments. Rubinstein could have been jealous professionally of Tchaikovsky's greater impact as a composer. ^ Homophobia might have been another factor (Poznansky, Eyes, 29).

4. An exception to Rubinstein's antipathy was the ^ Serenade for Strings, which he declared "Tchaikovsky's best piece" when he heard it in rehearsal. "At last this St. Petersburg pundit, who had growled with such consistent disapproval at Tchaikovsky's successive compositions, had found a work by his former pupil which he could endorse," according to Tchaikovsky biographer David Brown (Brown, Wandering, 121).

5. Rubinstein had actually been operating under the assumption that Tchaikovsky might leave from the onset of the composer's marital crisis and was prepared for it (Wiley, ^ Tchaikovsky, 189-90). However, his meddling in the Tchaikovsky-von Meck relationship might have contributed to the composer's actual departure. Rubinstein's actions, which soured his relations with both Tchaikovsky and von Meck, included imploring von Meck in person to end Tchaikovsky's subsidy for the composer's own good (Brown, Crisis, 250; Wiley, Tchaikovsky, 188-89). Rubinstein's actions, in turn, had been spurred by Tchaikovsky's withdrawal from the Russian delegation for the 1878 Paris World's Fair, a position for which Rubinstein had lobbied on the composer's behalf (Brown, Crisis, 249-50; Wiley, Tchaikovsky, 180, 188-89). Rubinstein had been scheduled to conduct four concerts there; the first featured Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto (Wiley, Tchaikovsky, 190).

6. The piece also fulfilled a long-standing request by von Meck for such a work, to be performed by her then-house pianist, ^ Claude Debussy (Brown, New Grove (1980), 18:620).

7. As proof of Wagner's influence, Botstein cites a letter from Tchaikovsky to Taneyev, in which the composer "readily admits the influence of the ^ Nibelungen on Francesca da Rimini". This letter is quoted in Brown, Crisis, 108.

Asafyev, Boris, "The Great Russian Composer". In Russian Symphony: Thoughts About Tchaikovsky (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947). ISBN n/a.

Bullock, Philip Ross (2016). Pyotr Tchaikovsky. London, U.K.: Reaktion Books. ISBN 9781780236544. OCLC 932385370.

Cooper, Martin, "The Symphonies". In Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946), ed. Abraham, Gerald. ISBN n/a. OCLC 385829

Druckenbrod, Andrew, "Festival to explore Tchaikovsky's changing reputation". In Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 30 January 2011. Retrieved 27 February 2012.

Kozinn, Allan, "Critic's Notebook; Defending Tchaikovsky, With Gravity and With Froth". In The New York Times, 18 July 1992. Retrieved 27 February 2012.

Lockspeiser, Edward, "Tchaikovsky the Man". In Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1946), ed. Abraham, Gerald. ISBN n/a. OCLC 385829

Maes, Francis, tr. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002). ISBN 0-520-21815-9.

Steinberg, Michael, The Concerto (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Steinberg, Michael, The Symphony (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Taruskin, Richard, "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich", The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London and New York: Macmillan, 1992), 4 vols, ed. Sadie, Stanley. ISBN 0-333-48552-1.

Volkov, Solomon, Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf House, 2011), tr. Bouis, Antonina W. ISBN 0-307-27063-7.

Zhitomirsky, Daniel, "Symphonies". In Russian Symphony: Thoughts About Tchaikovsky (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947). ISBN n/a.

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( chy-KOF-skee ; Russian: Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский, Pëtr Ilʹič Čajkovskij, IPA: [pʲɵtr ɪlʲˈjitɕ tɕɪjˈkofskʲɪj] (); 7 May [O.S. 25 April] 1840 - 6 November [O.S. 25 October] 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period.

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https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/2019/03/27/omnibus-lists-tom-smiths-top-5-lgbt-jazz-musicians/

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LGBT musicians have made vast contributions to the jazz world, both in composition and performance fields - many of the best known songs were written and sung by LGBT musicians, and yet there has until relatively recently been a culture of homophobia within the jazz scene. Many of these musicians weren't out and proud until late in life as they were worried about losing work, record deals and fans, and there are surely many musicians who never came out about their sexuality at all for this very reason.

The situation is getting better in the jazz scene, however there are still musicians worried about being themselves, so now's the time to talk about how incredible these musicians were and promote acceptance and love!

Here are five of my favourite LGBT jazz musicians in no particular order→

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Omnibus Lists | Tom Smith's Top 5 LGBT Jazz Musicians - Omnibus Theatre

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"Many of the best known songs were written and sung by LGBT musicians and yet there has until relatively recently been a culture of homophobia within the jazz scene." Queertet's Tom Smith shines a light on five of his faves.

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https://www.out.com/today-gay-history/2015/4/29/billy-strayhorn-duke-ellingtons-gay-composer

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Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's Gay Composer

You've likely never heard Strayhorn's voice, but you've heard his work: From the early 1940s to his death in 1967, the composer, arranger, and pianist helped Duke Ellington craft his greatest hits, including "Chelsea Bridge" and "Take The 'A' Train."

Strayhorn was born in 1915 in Dayton, Ohio. One of the very few openly gay jazzmen of his (or any) time, he studied at the Pittsburgh Music Institute, and, while still in his teens, began composing the songs "Something to Live For" and "Life Is Lonely", later renamed "Lush Life", which opens with the line "I used to visit all the very gay places."

Though the word "gay" had a different meaning at the time, sexual freedom and personal individuality were a big part of jazz music. Some blues women already alluded to homosexual love in their songs, and Strayhorn's own lyrics reflected his passions, always in a nuanced and poetic way. "It's major to know that Strayhorn wrote 'Lush Life' as a prolifically gifted, gay black male teenager living in Jim Crow America," says Candice Hoyes, a soprano jazz singer who recently released her debut album, On a Turquoise Cloud, a compilation of rare Duke Ellington songs that includes two Strayhorn compositions. "Everyone marvels at how wise beyond his years, how introspective the melody and words are. But when you consider his work, you get it."

Strayhorn met Ellington in December 1938, when the musician and his band performed in Pittsburgh. After the show, Strayhorn got Ellington's attention by telling him how he would have re-arranged his songs --and then, he proceeded to show him. Impressed by the young man's skills, Ellington invited Strayhorn to meet the band again in New York. It marked the beginning of a collaboration that spanned three decades.

Strayhorn (left) with Duke Ellington (Photo: The Duke Ellington Center)

"Strayhorn and Ellington had a soul connection," Hoyes says. "Strayhorn's musical genius with melody, lyrics, and his classical training, all combined with Ellington's assertiveness and vision to make some perfect music." Ellington was particularly fond of Strayhorn, referring to his acolyte as "my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine." Ellington was also a father figure for him: Strayhorn's own father was abusive, and Ellington saw and embraced his genius early on, when Strayhorn was only 23.

Among his friends in the New York jazz scene, Strayhorn had the most influence on singer Lena Horne, who wanted to marry him and considered him to be the love of her life. Strayhorn used his classical background to improve Horne's singing technique, and they eventually recorded songs together, but, to Horne's dismay, Strayhorn was in a committed ten-year relationship with Aaron Bridgers, a jazz pianist who eventually moved to Paris (alone) in 1947.

Left: Strayhorn (center) with his partner Aaron Bridgers (left) and singer Billy Holiday (right). Right: Bridgers and Strayhorn at a party in Harlem. Pictures via queermusicheritage.com

In the 1950s, Strayhorn left Ellington to pursue a solo career, coming out with a few albums and revues. He was also a champion of civil rights: An ally to Martin Luther King, Jr., Strayhorn wrote activist compositions that honored King and his movement, including "King Fit the Battle of Alabama" for the Ellington Orchestra, which was part of the historical revue (and album) My People, released in 1963 and dedicated to King.

A few months before King's assassination, Strayhorn died from esophageal cancer, at 51. He was in the company of Bill Grove, then his partner of three years. Devastated after hearing the news, Ellington recorded a memorial album, And His Mother Called Him Bill, which included Strayhorn's beautiful piano balad "Thank You For Everything", also known as "Lotus Blossom." Ellington performed the song alone while the rest of his band was packing up, leaving him to reminisce about his creative soul mate, and the timeless music they made together.

For more information on Billy Strayhorn, go to BillyStrayhorn.com.
Candice Hoyes's album On a Turquoise Cloud, including Strayhorn's "Violet Blue" and "Thank You For Evertyhing", is available now at Onaturquoisecloud.com

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Today in Gay History: Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's Gay Composer

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Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's Gay Composer You've likely never heard Strayhorn's voice, but you've heard his work: From the early 1940s to his death in 1967, the composer, arranger, and pianist helped Duke Ellington craft his greatest hits, including "Chelsea Bridge" and "Take The 'A' Train." Strayhorn was born in 1915 in Dayton, Ohio.

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As response to my feedback from the formative, I deemed it important to ensure I gather a variety of research from past and present to tackle the idea of 'progression' in my question.

Therefore my research explores the representation of LGBT+ and the queer community from the early 1800's to examples of Freddie Mercury in the late 1900's to present day examples such as; Lil Nas X, Kim Petras and Troye Sivan

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https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids

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When the HIV/AIDS epidemic began in the 1980s, the Reagan administration's first reaction was chilling: It appeared to treat the epidemic as a joke.

In a new documentary short by Scott Calonico called When AIDS Was Funny, posted by Vanity Fair, audio of press conferences reveals Ronald Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, and members of the media joking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic - which they called "gay plague" - and laughing about one of the reporters potentially having it.

Here's the first exchange between Speakes and journalist Lester Kinsolving from 1982, when nearly 1,000 people had died from AIDS:

Lester Kinsolving: Does the president have any reaction to the announcement by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?

Larry Speakes: AIDS? I haven't got anything on it.

Lester Kinsolving: Over a third of them have died. It's known as "gay plague." [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this.

Larry Speakes: I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?

Lester Kinsolving: You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry! [Press pool laughter.]

Larry Speakes: Do you?

Lester Kinsolving: No, I don't.

Larry Speakes: You didn't answer my question. How do you know? [Press pool laughter.]

Lester Kinsolving: Does the president - in other words, the White House - look on this as a great joke?

Larry Speakes: No, I don't know anything about it, Lester.

Later exchanges include more joking and apathy about AIDS, including from members of the press, even after more was known about the seriousness of the epidemic. Here is audio from 1984, when more than 4,200 had died:

Larry Speakes: Lester is beginning to circle now. He's moving up front. Go ahead.

Lester Kinsolving: Since the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta report is going to... [Press pool laughter.]

Larry Speakes: This is going to be an AIDS question.

Lester Kinsolving: ...that an estimated...

Larry Speakes: You were close.

Lester Kinsolving: Can I ask the question, Larry? That an estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which can be transmitted through saliva. [This is false; HIV can only be transmitted through blood, semen, pre-cum, rectal fluids, vaginal fluids, and breast milk.] Will the president, as commander in chief, take steps to protect armed forces, food, and medical services from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS in the same manner that they bed typhoid fever people from being involved in the health or food services? [Through this question, laughter can be heard coming from the press pool.]

Larry Speakes: I don't know.

Lester Kinsolving: Is the president concerned about this subject, Larry?

Larry Speakes: I haven't heard him express concern.

Lester Kinsolving: That seems to have evoked such jocular reaction here. [Press pool laughter.]

Unidentified person: It isn't only the jocks, Lester.

Unidentified person: Has he sworn off water faucets now?

Lester Kinsolving: No, but I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry?

Larry Speakes: Lester, I have not heard him express anything. Sorry.

Lester Kinsolving: You mean he has expressed no opinion about this epidemic?

Larry Speakes: No, but I must confess I haven't asked him about it.

Lester Kinsolving: Will you ask him, Larry?

Larry Speakes: Have you been checked? [Press pool laughter.]

Unidentified person: Is the president going to ban mouth-to-mouth kissing?

Lester Kinsolving: What? Pardon? I didn't hear your answer.

Larry Speakes: [Laughs.] Ah, it's hard work. I don't get paid enough. Um. Is there anything else we need to do here?

The exchanges are hugely revealing. For one, they show just how little was known about the disease when the epidemic first broke - people thought it was exclusive to gay people, and thought that it could be transmitted through saliva, even though HIV can only be transmitted through blood, semen, pre-cum, rectal fluids, vaginal fluids, and breast milk.

The exchanges also demonstrated that Reagan and his administration didn't take the epidemic very seriously, for which the Reagan administration is still heavily criticized. His successors eventually acted, albeit often very slowly, on the crisis - leading to much more research, programs like the Ryan White CARE Act that connect people to care, and the development of antiretroviral medication that increases the life expectancy of a person living with HIV by decades.

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The Reagan administration's unbelievable response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic

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When the HIV/AIDS epidemic began in the 1980s, the Reagan administration's first reaction was chilling: It appeared to treat the epidemic as a joke.

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https://www.racetoacure.org/post/the-importance-of-representation-in-media

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The Importance of Representation in Media

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The comfort of finding a character you relate to. The pride of seeing your beliefs, culture, and traditions embraced on the big screens. The joy of seeing a hero that looks just like you. How many of us have experienced this, and how many have not? Media, especially in the form of film and televisio…

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/03/recorded-homophobic-hate-crimes-soared-in-pandemic-figures-show

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Police chiefs have urged victims of homophobic and transphobic abuse to come forward after figures showed the number of hate crimes soared to their highest monthly level since the beginning of the pandemic, after lockdown restrictions were eased at the beginning of summer.

Reports of sexual orientation hate crimes recorded by UK police forces rose from an average of 1,456 a month from January to April this year to 2,211 on average from May to August.

From January to August this year, at least 14,670 homophobic hate crime offences were recorded, compared with 11,841 in the same period of 2020 and 10,817 in 2019. During the same time period, police recorded 2,129 transphobic offences - well above the 1,606 offences in 2020 and 1,602 in 2019.

Homophobic and transphobic hate crime recorded by police in the UK rose sharply after the lockdown

Transphobic attacks also soared during that same period, from an average of 208 a month from January to April to 324 for May to August. England's third national lockdown began on 6 January, with the "stay at home" order being lifted on 29 March.

Campaigners say the real hate crime figures are likely to be higher due to under-reporting and that they were a "stark reminder" that LGBTQ+ people are "still at risk of attack because of who we are".

The data, released under freedom of information legislation, was obtained by the PA Media news agency from 37 of the UK's 46 forces.

They show hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community were at their highest volume in June, the same month that saw the lifting of most legal restrictions on coronavirus rules.

Police forces recorded 2,389 homophobic and 371 transphobic offences, the highest number of any calendar month in the past three years. This equates to about 80 homophobic and 12 transphobic offences a day, roughly double the 38 and six per day in January.

Hate crime is defined by the Home Office as "any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic".

This year homophobic hate crimes and violent transphobic crimes are on course to exceed the totals for 2019 and 2020

LGBTQ+ organisations suggested there could be many reasons for the rise, including an increased number of people being out and about, and the reopening of the night-time economy.

Same-sex couples were also more visible when out in public during periods of restrictions, according to Leni Morris, the chief executive of the LGBT anti-violence charity Galop.

"What we saw in the pandemic was LGBT+ people experiencing forms of abuse and violence that were either exacerbated by the pandemic itself or caused by it," she said.

"We have some people who were victims of abuse and attacks because of being blamed for the pandemic itself, either because perpetrators thought the pandemic was an act of God - because of the existence of LGBT+ people - or because of the community's association with the last major pandemic in people's minds, and that's the HIV Aids pandemic."

Increases in hate crime offences may reflect improvements in how they are recorded and greater public awareness of how to report offences, some forces suggested.

The National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC), which represents the leadership of local forces, said officers will "always pursue action against perpetrators of hate crime where there is the evidence to do so".

But Deputy Chief Constable Mark Hamilton, the NPCC lead for hate crime, admitted that with more people moving their abuse online in recent years, it may not be possible to bring a charge if a suspect cannot be identified.

Eloise Stonborough, an associate director of policy and research at Stonewall, described the rise as worrying. She said: "LGBTQ+ people have struggled throughout the pandemic, with many not having access to vital support networks and spaces during lockdowns.

"It's always worrying to see an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime, particularly at a time when our communities were more isolated than ever."

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Recorded homophobic hate crimes soared in pandemic, figures show

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Police chiefs have urged victims of homophobic and transphobic abuse to come forward after figures showed the number of hate crimes soared to their highest monthly level since the beginning of the pandemic, after lockdown restrictions were eased at the beginning of summer.

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How far has LGBT+ and queer representation improved within the music industry?

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- Racism in the music scene

- Lack of LGBT+ and queer representation

- Sexism in music

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https://uniteuk1.com/2020/09/lgbtq-representation-in-the-music-industry/

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LGBTQ+ Representation in the Music Industry - Unite UK

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With the focus this week on Unite being aimed at representation, I wanted to put a lens up to the music industry and hear directly from LGBTQ+ artists their opinions on equality in music. I asked a series of LGBTQ+ identifying artists/musicians a series of questions, and here were a few of their rep…

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Many artists have challenged the idea of gender roles and sexuality.

The 20th century saw a significant rise in the queer art movement, with an increasing amount of representation for the community. While the earlier part of the century was shaped by the ones need to 'conceal' their identity, the latter half was largely promoted in visibility, justice and acceptance.

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Songs connected to social justice, freedom and civil rights

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https://eu.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/01/12/best-civil-rights-protest-songs/6602985002/

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Martin Luther King Jr. had a deep respect for music as an instrument of change.

The March on Washington in 1963, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, featured live performances by Peter, Paul and Mary, Harry Belafonte, Marian Anderson, Mahalia Jackson, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, just to name a few.

In a piece he wrote for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, King had this to say about the role of music in our lives:

"God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create, and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations."

Music clearly played a starring role in the civil rights movement. People marched to freedom songs while artists from Sam Cooke to Dylan took the message to the masses in recordings as enduring as "A Change is Gonna Come" and "Blowin' in the Wind."
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King considered the Impressions' song "People Get Ready" the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement.

Many of the songs that people marched to in the '60s have retained their relevance, with people singing "We Shall Overcome" in the streets as recently as 2020.

And people are still adding new songs to that folk tradition, from Lauryn Hill's "Black Rage," to Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," a hip-hop song that emerged as a popular choice for people marching for their rights at Black Lives Matter protests.
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Here's a look at 20 of the most enduring civil rights songs, from the song known as the Black National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," and Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" to Lamar's "Alright."
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25. Arrested Development, 'Revolution' (1992)

These alternative hip-hop heavyweights recorded "Revolution" for use in the Spike Lee biopic on Malcolm X, who earns a shout-out here alongside Marcus Garvey and Harriet Tubman, among other social activists. The track begins with a spoken dedication to "all my ancestors who were raped, who were killed and hung because of their plight for freedom and for dignity." Aerle Taree takes the first verse, rapping, "I have marched until my feet have bled/And I have rioted until they called the feds/'What's left?,' my conscience said." What's left is revolution. As Speech frames the issue, "There's got to be action/If you want satisfaction/If not for yourself/For the young ones."

24. The Game, 'Don't Shoot' (2014)
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In response to the fatal shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, by a white police officer, the Game recruited an all-star cast of fellow rappers to join him in this poignant protest track. DJ Khaled sets the tone with a prayer for protection "as we keep our hands up high and scream for justice." And after a fiery final verse from Problem, who's tired of screaming and ready to rage, the Game passes the mic to his daughter for one final chorus, her young voice adding to the chilling impact. "Time to take a stand and save our future like we all got shot, we all got shot," she sings. "Throwing up our hands, don't let them shoot us 'cause we all we got, we all we got. God ain't put us on the Earth to get murdered, it's murder." Then, after repeating that line about murder, she ends with a simple request: "Don't point your weapons at me."
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23. Marvin Gaye, 'Inner City Blues (Make Me Holler)' (1971)

"What's Going On" was perhaps the socially relevant album of its era, a soulful song cycle that finds the Motown star responding to a litany of social ills, from poverty to drug abuse, environment issues and the war in Vietnam. On "Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)," the singer speaks directly to the economic disparity experienced by those struggling to carve out a life for themselves in America's inner cities while questioning the government's priorities. In the opening verse, he sets the tone by rhyming "Rockets, moon shots" with a call to "spend it on the have-nots." In the second verse, he sings of families sending children off to war as a way to make ends meet. And before the song is through, he weighs in on the "trigger happy policing" in response to crime increasing when desperate people turn to crime as solution to their economic problems.

22. Nina Simone, 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black' (1970)

Nina Simone has said she and her musical director Weldon Irvine hoped to write a song that would inspire young black children all over the world to feel good about themselves and celebrate their blackness. That's exactly what this song accomplishes, a joyous gospel tune that tells those children, "In the whole world you know there are a million boys and girls who are young, gifted and Black. And that's a fact!" Simone's song shares a title with a play about the life of Lorraine Hansberry, a friend of hers who wrote "A Raisin in the Sun," the first show on Broadway to be written by a Black woman. Within two years of the song's release, Aretha Franklin and Donnie Hathaway had both recorded their own versions.

21. The Staple Singers, 'I'll Take You There' (1972)

This gospel-flavored funk jam finds the Staple Singers dreaming of a better place where "ain't nobody cryin', ain't nobody worried, ain't no smilin' faces lyin' to the races" with an oft-repeated chorus hook that promises to "take you there." There's really not much else to say, so they just ride the groove out, testifying their way to salvation, performed as a call-and-response with occasional breaks for instrumental solos. The song was written by Stax Records president Al Bell and inspired by the fatal shooting of his younger brother, the third sibling he'd lost to gun violence.

20. Bob Marley, 'Redemption Song' (1981)

The final track on the final album Bob Marley recorded before his death in 1981, this intimate solo acoustic recording begins with a reference to Africans being sold as slaves to merchant ships. The chorus asks the listener "Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom?" And the second verse finds Marley referencing a speech by Marcus Garvey, urging listeners to "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds." Like many of the freedom songs the chorus references, "Redemption Song" responds to the pain of oppression with a spiritual promise of better days to follow. "But my hand was made strong by the hand of the Almighty," Marley sings. "We forward in this generation triumphantly."

19. The Roots, 'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around' (2012)

This organ-driven reinvention of the spiritual "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around" was the Roots' contribution to "Soundtrack For a Revolution," a 2012 compilation of contemporary artists doing traditional Civil Rights-era freedom songs (with an assist from Brooklyn art-rock legends TV on the Radio. The music video offsets black-and-white footage of 20th-century protests with full-color clips of The Roots performing in the studio. Like many freedom song of the era, it's designed to be easily learned and sung at marches, a single refrain with slightly altered lyrics each time it's repeated, each chorus building to the same conclusion, which in this case is, "I'm gonna keep on a-walkin', keep on a-talkin' / Marchin' on to freedom land."

18. Kendrick Lamar, 'Alright' (2015)

This highlight of "To Pimp a Butterfly" had emerged by the end of 2015 as what the New York Times declared "the unifying soundtrack to Black Lives Matter protests nationwide." In that same article, Lamar told the Times he could see what the kids who were chanting his song in the streets were hearing. "Simple phrase," he said. "We gon' be alright. It's a chant of hope and feeling." Although many of the struggles he addresses in the song are on a more personal scale than systemic oppression, "Alright" is one of three times on the album he references the 40 acres and a mule that formerly enslaved people were promised but didn't receive when the Civil War ended. And he touches on the root cause of those Black Lives Matter protest with "And we hate po-po / Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho.'"

17. Stevie Wonder, 'Living For the City' (1973)

Stevie Wonder won a Grammy for this gritty portrait of a boy who's "born in Hard Time, Mississippi, surrounded by four walls that ain't so pretty." His parents do their best to keep him moving in the right direction while working hard to barely make a dollar. But the harsh realities of living for the city, where "to find a job is like a haystack needle because where he lives, they don't use colored people," prove too much for him to bear. When someone offers him five bucks to run a package across the street, he spends the next 10 years in jail, which leaves him wandering the streets, convinced there's no solution. It's a cautionary tale that ends with a suggestion that it's up to all of us to break the cycle of systemic poverty. "I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow," Wonder sings. "And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow/This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder/If we don't change, the world will soon be over."

16. Lauryn Hill, 'Black Rage' (2014)

Setting her words to the tune of "My Favorite Things" on an ominous bed of hip-hop beats and acoustic guitar, Lauryn Hill traces the roots of Black rage through American history to its tragic beginnings with "Black human packages tied up in strings." She also examines the ongoing sins of systemic oppression that continue to define the Black experience for far too many people in the age of Black Lives Matter. "Black Rage is founded on blatant denial," she sings. "Squeezing economics, subsistence survival / Deafening silence and social control / Black Rage is founded on wounds in the soul." When she first shared a lo-fi recording of "Black Rage" in 2014, it was dedicated to the people fighting for racial equality in Ferguson, Missouri.

15. Pete Seeger, 'We Shall Overcome' (1963)

This was one of the civil rights movement's most popular songs, an unofficial anthem so pervasive that President Lyndon B. Johnson slipped the title phrase into a speech to Congress in March of 1965 in the wake of violent attacks on civil rights demonstrators during the march from Selma to Montgomery. Two years prior to that speech, a young Joan Baez led a crowd of 300,000 in singing the gospel song at the Lincoln Memorial during A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington. Among the more notable artists to have covered the song are Mahalia Jackson and Pete Seeger, who played a key role in weaving the gospel song into the cultural fabric as a song leader at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. His "We Shall Overcome" is in many ways the definitive version.

14. Fannie Lou Hamer, 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' (1963)

The original lyrics of this 19th Century spiritual celebrate the birth of Jesus. By the early '60s, both Fannie Lou Hamer and Peter, Paul & Mary were doing a version that subbed in "Let my people go" for "Jesus Christ is born." Hamer was deeply involved in the civil rights movement, a community organizer known for her use of spirituals who organized the Freedom Summer Project, a volunteer campaign in 1964 to register as many black voters as possible in Mississippi. Hamer's version of the song is a cappella gospel with Hamer's emotional testifying backed by handclaps and a joyous choir.

13. Sam Cooke, 'This Little Light of Mine' (1964)

The earliest known recording of this gospel song of unknown origin is a field recording done in 1934 by John and Alan Lomax of Jim Boyd at the State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. It was widely used in Black churches by then and emerged as a civil rights anthem in the '50s and '60s thanks to the efforts of Zilphia Horton, Fannie Lou Hamer and Bettie Mae Fikes. It's a simple declaration of self-empowerment with an oft-repeated chorus of "This little light of mine/I'm gonna let it shine." Sam Cooke's recording on 1964's "Sam Cooke at the Copa" is especially uplifting - joyous even - serving as a perfect segue into the soul singer's equally joyous rendition of Bob Dylan's civil rights anthem "Blowin' in the Wind."

12. Gil Scott-Heron, 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' (1971)

More a spoken-word performance set to music than an actual song, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was written in response to the spoken-word piece "When the Revolution Comes" by the Black Poets, whose track begins with "When the revolution comes, some of us will probably catch it on TV." Gil Scott-Heron uses that line as a starting point to argue that "You will not be able to stay home, brother" when the revolution comes. "You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out / You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip out for beer during commercials." As the track goes on, he unleashes a stream of satirical pop culture references to illustrate the many ways in which the revolution will not be provided for your passive entertainment value, ending with "The revolution will be no re-run, brothers / The revolution will be live."

11. Bob Dylan, 'Blowin' in the Wind' (1963)

In Martin Scorsese's documentary "No Direction Home," Mavis Staples recalls her first impression of this song and how she couldn't understand how a young white man could write something that captured the frustrations of the Black experience as powerfully as Dylan does here. Sam Cooke was impressed enough to add it to his repertoire and wrote "A Change Is Gonna Come" in part because he wished that Dylan's song had been composed by a person of color. Although the lyrics aren't exclusively concerned with civil rights - in the opening verse, Dylan sings, 'Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they are forever banned - it's easy to hear how it came to be embraced as a civil rights anthem. In the opening line, he asks, How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" And later, he wonders "And how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?"

10. Kim Weston, 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' (1972)

Kim Weston's emotional reading of this life-affirming gospel song emerged as a defining moment of Wattstax, a concert held on the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where many in the crowd of more than 100,000 raised a fist in the air as she sang. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who introduced her as "Sister Kim Weston," called "Lift Every Voice and Sing" the Black National Anthem that day. And he wasn't the first or last to call it that. Based on a poem by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson, the song was first performed in 1900 by a choir at a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida, as part of a birthday celebration for President Abraham Lincoln.

9. Public Enemy, 'Fight the Power' (1989)

This hip-hop classic was written to order for "Do the Right Thing," a Spike Lee joint from 1989 exploring racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood. In an interview with Time, Lee talked about how he was looking for a song to underscore the film's climactic riot scene. "I wanted it to be defiant, I wanted it to be angry, I wanted it to be very rhythmic," he said. "I thought right away of Public Enemy." Mission accomplished. Fueled by the Bomb Squad's incendiary production, Chuck D raps about fighting the powers that be with tossed-off references to James Brown, Malcolm X and their own first album. And before the song is through, he's trashed two paragons of white pop culture, Elvis Presley and John Wayne, accusing both of racism. He's since walked back his thoughts on Presley, saying it was more about the racists that anointed him the King of Rock 'n' Roll at the expense of the black artists who inspired much of what he did.

8. Mavis Staples, 'We Shall Not Be Moved' (2007)

"Like a tree that's planted by the water, we shall not be moved." Several folk acts recorded this uplifting spiritual in the '50s and '60s, from England's King of Skiffle Lonnie Donegan to Pete Seeger and the Seekers. Mavis Staples slowed it down to dramatic effect on a deeply soulful rendition she cut for 2007's "We'll Never Turn Back," a concept album of songs related to the civil rights movement produced by Ry Cooder. Like many spirituals, its word are based in scripture, in this case, the Book of Jeremiah. In 2017, students at Howard University, a historically Black university, sang "We Shall Not Be Moved" to protest former FBI director James Comey taking the stage to deliver a convocation address.

7. The Staple Singers, 'Freedom Highway' (1965)

Driven by a gritty blues guitar lick and thundering handclap, "Freedom Highway" begins with a call to "March up freedom's highway/ March each and every day." And for those who may have wondered what it was that had the Staple Singers marching up that highway each and every day, they laid in on the line in more explicit terms than most: "There is just one thing I can't understand, my friend / Why some folk think freedom was not designed for all men." Mavis Staples revisited that highway on 2008's "Live: Hope at the Hideout," which also featured such civil rights anthems as "We Shall Not Be Moved" and "This Little Light of Mine."

6. Nina Simone, 'Mississippi Goddam' (1964)

Nina Simone has said she wrote this song in a rush of fury, hatred and determination upon learning of four young Black girls murdered in the bombing of the 16 Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sept. 15, 1963. It was also inspired in part by the racially motivated murder that same year in Jackson, Mississippi, of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. The song was first released as a live recording on "Nina Simone in Concert," done in the style of an upbeat show tune, complete with the comic aside, "This is a show tune but the show hasn't been written for it yet." Simone has called "Mississippi Goddam" her first civil rights song, to be followed by further classics as enduring as "Four Women" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black."

5. Bob Dylan, 'The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964)

The title track to Bob Dylan's most topical album was a deliberate attempt to write an anthem for the changing times, which is exactly what this song became. Dylan never explicitly references race in a folk song warning congressmen and senators, "The battle outside ragin' will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls." But it captured the mood of the moment, embraced by the civil rights movement, inspiring covers by Nina Simone and Odetta. In the liner notes to "Biograph," the singer explained to Cameron Crowe what he was going for: "I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way."

4. Billie Holiday, 'Strange Fruit' (1939)

Ahmet Ertegun, the co-founder and president of Atlantic Records, once referred to Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," a song she first performed in early 1939, as "the beginning of the civil rights movement." Written in 1937 by Abel Meeropol, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, it offers an unflinching portrait of the horrors of lynching as a form of racial terrorism, comparing the victims' bodies to a "strange and bitter crop." It's as unsettling as it is profound and therein lies its power, setting the scene, "Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." It only gets darker from there, as shocking decades later as it had to be in 1939. And Holiday's suitably chilling delivery completes the mood.

3. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud' (1968)
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley. Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.
This Black pride anthem is somehow every bit as funky as it is empowering. And it is pretty damn empowering. But this is James Brown in his prime as a trailblazing funk pioneer. Of course it's funky, complete with a crowd-pleasing chorus set up as a spirited call and response between the legend and his backup singers for the day, a group of young children. "Say it loud," he demands. "I'm Black and I'm proud," they respond. Brown pulls no punches here, setting the tone for the first verse with "Some people say we've got a lot of malice / Some say it's a lot of nerve / But I say we won't quit moving until we get what we deserve." But the record's most quotable moment comes later, when he rhymes, "We're people; we like the birds and the bees" with "We'd rather die on our feet than be living on our knees."

2. The Impressions, 'People Get Ready'

No lesser an authority than Martin Luther King, Jr. named this Curtis Mayfield gospel song the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement, even though the lyrics don't address the state of race relations as explicitly as other songs that may be vying for that title. There's a reason King so often turned to Mayfield's message of deliverance with its promise of a train a-comin' to motivate his fellow marchers. Whether you believe that train for which "you don't need no ticket; you just thank the Lord" is bound for heaven (the most likely destination) or a better life on earth, there's no doubt many listeners found it easy to imagine their oppressors in the verse that starts, "There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his own."

1. Sam Cooke, 'A Change is Gonna Come' (1964)

First performed in February 1964 on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," this civil rights anthem draws much of its timeless appeal from the power of Sam Cooke's impassioned delivery, underscored by gorgeous orchestration. You can feel him feeling every word. Although it only briefly touches on discrimination ("I go to the movie and I go downtown / Somebody keep telling me 'don't hang around'"), it couldn't be more obvious what kind of change he's after when he hits you with that gospel-flavored chorus of "It's been a long, a long time comin' but I know a change gonna come / Oh yes it will." The song was partially inspired by an incident in which Cooke and his bandmates tried to register at a "whites only" motel in Shreveport, Louisiana, and partially inspired by Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind."

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25 songs of civil rights, social justice, freedom and hope for Black History Month 2023

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February is Black History Month. Here are iconic songs from Sam Cooke, The Impressions, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar and more.

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Fashion as resistance

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Billie was released from her contract especially to record this song.

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Billie's performance of 'Strange Fruit' was the first time a black artist had sung such controversial lyrics. Atlantic Recorder founder considered the song "a declaration of war [...] the beginning of the civil rights movement".

Although Billie did not write the song, when reflecting upon the idea of authenticity, Billie first hand had experience of racism in a segregated society. Her personal relation with the song, despite it not being original, echoes a powerful statement especially to the U.S government at the time.

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The continued cycle of excluding diversity, inclusion, and ignoring mainstream representation in the entertainment industry (i.e the music scene) showcases the importance of broadcasting visibility for marginalised communities and cultures.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/caitlinkelley/2019/02/06/music-industry-study-annenberg-gender-equality/?sh=781def1f5f81

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The American entertainment industry is in the middle of an ongoing reckoning against high-profile abusers, the pay gap and lack of representation. But the latest investigative report by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative shows dismal numbers as far as gender equality in the music industry goes.

Led by Dr. Stacy L. Smith, the " Inclusion in the Recording Studio" report marks the Initiative's second annual investigation into the music industry. To study the gender and race of the industry's core professions, the researchers looked at the 700 top songs on Billboard's year-end Hot 100 chart between 2012 and 2018.

Across the three creative roles highlighted in the study, women make up 21.7 percent of artists, 12.3 percent of songwriters and 2.1 percent of producers.

Released just five days ahead of this year's Grammys, the report once again proves that last year's #GrammysSoMale hashtag trended for good reason. Data for the nominees of the biggest awards -- Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best New Artist and Producer of the Year -- shows that men are vastly overrepresented at the awards ceremony.

Only 10.4 percent of nominees between 2013 and 2019 were women. Women were most represented in the Best New Artist category at 41.1 percent. Meanwhile, about 37 percent of all female nominees from this period were women from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.

Researchers also interviewed 75 female songwriters and producers to gain insight into the "lived experiences of women in music." Over 40 percent of respondents admitted their colleagues dismissed or discounted their work or skills. Meanwhile, 39 percent have experienced stereotyping and sexualization. A third said the music industry is male-dominated. A quarter experienced being the only woman in the recording studio.

"What the experiences of women reveal is that the biggest barrier they face is the way the music industry thinks about women," Dr. Smith said in a press release. "The perception of women is highly stereotypical, sexualized, and without skill. Until those core beliefs are altered, women will continue to face a roadblock as they navigate their careers."

Statistics about artists reveal a deep gender disparity on the charts. Only 21.7 percent of artists who put out the top 700 songs since 2012 were female. Among the 1,455 artists studied, there is a gender ratio of 4.8 male artists to every one female artist. However, there were some gains for underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Male performers were 52 percent non-white, while 73 percent of female performers were women of color.

"Once again this year we see a lack of female voices in popular music," Dr. Smith said. "However, one positive finding is that of the female performers in 2018, 73 percent were women of color. This seven-year high point reveals that the music industry is including women of color in ways that other forms of entertainment are not."

But the disparity between representation on the stage and behind the scenes is stark, to say the least. Only four out of 871 producers were women of color. Out of 400 songs and 871 producers, only 2 percent were female. "The gender ratio of male producers to female music producers is 47 to 1," the report said.

When it comes to songwriters, 57 percent of the songs studied did not credit a woman. Meanwhile, only three tracks (counting as less than 1 percent) did not credit a male songwriter. Among female songwriters, 43.3 percent are women of color.

Men outdid women when it came to songwriting credits on the Hot 100 over the past seven years. Max Martin had the most credits at 39, while Nicki Minaj topped the list of female songwriters with 18 credits. A quarter of the songs were written by the top 10 male songwriters.
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The Music Industry Still Has A Long Way To Go For Gender Equality

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The American entertainment industry is in the middle of an ongoing reckoning against high-profile abusers, the pay gap and lack of representation. But the latest investigative report by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative shows dismal numbers as far as gender equality in the music industry goes. Led by Dr. Stacy L.

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"Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier" 

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"Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier" 

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(Bourdie, 1984 p6)

Bourdie argued that taste was a form of embodied knowledge, socially and culturally particular.

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"Authentic music explores a wide range of human emotions, perspectives and situations i.e anything you genuinely feel and experience"

Some people consider exclusive music to be authentic as mass-consumable music arguably loses exclusivity and thus become inauthentic.

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Examples; Electronic Dance Music, Rock Music, Jazz, Dubstep, Rhythm and Blues, Techno, Country, Electro, Indie Rock, Pop Music

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Fish Tank (2009) Andrea Arnold

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Analysing subculture through the perspective of film, in particular Meadows' 'This is England', we begin to correlate the idea of subculture with trends in society such as fashion and music. For example, the 'Mod' subculture portrayed in This is England which originated in London in the 1950's, has a history of young men termed 'modernists' who listened to 'modern jazz' - elaborating further with soul, rhythm and blues, ska and later frank beat

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Trainspotting (1996) Danny Boyle

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This is England (2007) Shane Meadows

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"A cultural group within a larger culture, often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture"

Examples include: 'Goths', 'Punks', 'Hippies' etc

This reminds me of the likes of the British Social Realist genre which usually focuses on topical issues alive within a modern society represented by different ideologies. One example of this is the working-class background of which is depicted in movies such as; Shane Meadows' (2007) 'This is England' and Danny Boyle' (1996) 'Trainspotting' where the use of subculture is reflected throughout.