University of Michigan

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares189 Views

    Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94

    by

    She wrote of peasants, unsung women, border crossers and, most popularly, Martin Guerre, a 16th-century village impostor recalled in a 1980s movie.Natalie Zemon Davis, a social and cultural historian whose imaginative and deeply researched investigations of the lives of marginalized figures — peasants, long-forgotten women, border crossers of all sorts — profoundly influenced the discipline, died on Saturday at her home in Toronto. She was 94.The cause was cancer, Aaron Davis, her son, said.Drawing on insights from anthropology and literary criticism, as well as meticulous archival digging, Professor Davis both represented and inspired an emerging approach to history in the second half of the 20th century, often by filling in gaps in the historical record with informed speculations based on deep immersion in the period under study.Her best-known book was “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1983), based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who for several years successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Her book was a kind of follow-up to a 1982 movie by the same title, which was directed by Daniel Vigne and starred Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye. Professor Davis, who had published a groundbreaking collection of essays, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France” (1975), was the historical adviser to Mr. Vigne and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière while they were working on the film.But with the release of “Le Retour de Martin Guerre” in theaters in France and elsewhere (it had its U.S. premiere in 1983), Professor Davis recognized that the movie could not convey the nuances of the story and so decided to give “this arresting tale,” as she put it in a preface to the book, “its first full-scale historical treatment, using every scrap of paper left me by the past.”Professor Davis’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” is based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Harvard University PressThe book was warmly received. In The New York Review of Books, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called it a “major work of historical reconstruction.”Most earlier accounts focused on Arnaud du Tilh, the Gascon peasant who passed himself off as Martin Guerre. Those accounts assumed that Guerre’s abandoned wife, Bertrande de Rols, had been fooled by the false Martin. They made Arnaud du Tilh “the inventive figure in the tale,” Professor Davis wrote.For her, though, Bertrande was central to the story. “By the time she had received him in her bed,” Professor Davis wrote of the impostor, “she must have realized the difference.” Bertrande, in Professor Davis’s telling, “knew the truth” and colluded in the masquerade until it became impossible to sustain.In the book’s introduction, Professor Davis wrote that “what I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.”A scene from the 1982 movie “The Return of Martin Guerre,” starring Gérard Depardieu (in the doorway). The director, Daniel Vigne, is second from right. Professor Davis was the film’s historical adviser. European International, via Everett CollectionHer next book, “Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France” (1987), examined stories that common people accused of homicide told in order to secure a pardon from the king. After 1990, her work embraced outsiders and border-crossers around the world.“Women on the Margins” (1995) presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname. In The New York Times Book Review, the historian Arthur Quinn called the book “a stylishly sketched 17th- and 18th-century biographical triptych” that was “yet another exploration of how the modest in early modern Europe strove to fashion identities for themselves.”Professor Davis published two books in 2000. “The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France” is an anthropological look at how gift-giving and reciprocal obligation helped structure society, and “Slaves on Screen” examined the portrayal of slavery, and resistance to it, in five movies, from “Spartacus” (1960), set in ancient Rome, to “Beloved” (1980), an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel rooted in the American South. Professor Davis said history films offered “thought experiments” about the past, but she criticized their use of fictions that misled viewers.Professor Davis’s 1995 book presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname.Harvard University PressAfter 2001, Professor Davis turned her attention to researching a 16th-century diplomat for the sultan of Fez, al-Hasan al-Wazzan al-Gharnati al-Fasi, who was kidnapped by Christian pirates in 1518 and taken to Rome. He converted to Christianity and lived there for nine years, writing books for Europeans in Italian and Latin about North Africa and Islam, most familiarly under the name Leo Africanus. He was best known as the author of the first geography of Africa published in Europe, in 1550.Her resulting book, “Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds,” was published in 2006.Africanus, Professor Davis said, had a “double identity and vision, a Muslim curious about Christianity, a North African interested in exploring the world of Rome and Italy.” But hard documentation about him was sparse; to figure him out, she said, she had to develop “a plausible life story from materials of the time.” As she had in the case of Martin Guerre, she speculated about Africanus’s behavior based on the practices in the world from which he came.Natalie Zemon was born in Detroit on Nov. 8, 1928, to Julian and Helen (Lamport) Zemon, both American-born children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father worked in the textile business, and her mother was a homemaker. Natalie was one of only a few Jews at Cranbrook Kingswood, a girls’ finishing school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Although she was popular and successful there, she felt like an outsider, by her account. Enrolling at Smith College in Massachusetts, she became involved in left-wing politics, participating in a Marxist study group and protesting racial discrimination. In 1948, she met Chandler Davis, a mathematics graduate student. They married six weeks later. After pursuing studies in social and cultural history, Ms. Davis graduated from Smith with a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and pursued a master’s at Radcliffe, where she was exposed to the research techniques of social history.She worked on her doctorate at the University of Michigan after her husband was offered a job there in 1950. But after he was held on charges of distributing Communist literature, the government seized their passports in 1952, preventing her for a time from going to France to pursue her chosen area of concentration, 16th-century French society.In 1954, after refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee on First Amendment grounds, Mr. Davis was cited for contempt. He was fired by Michigan and blacklisted. Afterward, the couple, who by then had three children, eked out a living through part-time teaching and journal editing. Professor Davis did not receive her Ph.D. until 1959.Her career, like those of most academic women of her generation, was shaped in part, and stalled, by her husband’s. She and her family moved again, in 1962, when Mr. Davis obtained a teaching job at the University of Toronto.But while teaching part-time, she continued her research, publishing the results in essays and papers and presenting her work at conferences. (“Sometimes I typed with a child on my lap,” she said.) She held a faculty position at Toronto from 1963 to 1971.In 1971, she and a colleague, Jill Ker Conway, shook up Toronto’s conservative history department by teaching a course on the history of women and gender, one of the first in North America. (Dr. Conway went on to become the first woman to be named president of Smith College.)President Barack Obama presented Professor Davis with the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2013. Pete Marovich/Getty ImagesThat same year, at 42, Professor Davis landed her first tenure-track teaching post, at the University of California, Berkeley; she was the first woman in the university’s history department. Four years later, she published her first book, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France.” This strikingly original collection of essays reflected her “remarkable breadth of learning,” one reviewer wrote.Professor Davis moved to Princeton in 1978 and stayed for 18 years, succeeding Lawrence Stone as director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. In 1996, she retired as the Henry Charles Lea professor of history. She had helped found women’s studies programs at both Princeton and Berkeley.Returning to Canada, she was named a professor emerita in the University of Toronto’s history department.Professor Davis became president of the American Historical Association in 1987, only the second woman to hold that position. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2012 and was presented with the 2012 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.Chandler Davis died of a stroke last year. In addition to her son, Professor Davis is survived two daughters, Hannah Taïeb and Simone Davis; a brother, Stanley Zemon; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Professor Davis was a charismatic teacher well loved in the profession. “At conferences and round tables, Dr. Davis is usually the most senior and well-known face in the room,” an article about her in a University of Toronto magazine said, “yet she’ll often pull aside grad students to ask about their work — and how they’re juggling it with family.”In a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies, Professor Davis told of how her years of study had given her confidence in the resilience and adaptability of societies.“No matter how bleak and constrained the situation,” she said, “some forms of improvisation and coping take place. No matter what happens, people go on telling stories about it and bequeath them to the future.” She added, “The past reminds us that change can occur.”Alex Traub More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Sphinx Was Ahead of the Curve on Diversity in Classical Music

      by

      It was the late 1990s, and Afa Sadykhly Dworkin saw a woman crying backstage at a concert hall in Michigan.Dworkin was there helping to run a competition for young artists started by the Sphinx Organization, a newly founded group devoted to fostering diversity in classical music. When she spied the woman in tears, she assumed that a bow or string had broken. But when she tried to help, the woman waved her off, saying that although her child had lost the competition, her tears were happy ones.“I’m crying because we thought my daughter was the best,” Dworkin recently recalled the woman telling her. “There’s no one who lives near us who plays at her level, so we came assuming we were going to win. And we didn’t win anything, but she has a family now. She has all these sisters and brothers now.”Sphinx, which turns 25 this year, has come a long way since that first competition. While the prize-awarding event remains at the core of its activities, the organization, which Dworkin now leads, has also started training programs and ensembles, and has pushed for more diverse repertory and orchestra rosters. It has promoted young soloists and arts administrators, and operates an ever-expanding annual conference. With a burst of new attention to phrases like diversity, equity and inclusion over the past two years, Sphinx’s steady, patient work has come to seem prescient.“They were raising the profile of the critical importance of diversity in orchestras before almost anybody was,” said Simon Woods, the chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “And before the League. They were there before everybody.”But perhaps Sphinx’s most fundamental and meaningful achievement has been its simplest one, the part that crying mother caught onto: creating a community of people who had thought they were the only one of their kind, or close. Forming what those in the Sphinx network call “la familia.”From left, members of the Sphinx Virtuosi, Hannah White, Alex Gonzalez, Clayton Penrose-Whitmore and Thierry Delucas Neves, at Carnegie.Rafael Rios for The New York Times“It’s so much more than our life’s work,” Dworkin, 46, the organization’s president and artistic director, said in an interview in October, the morning after Sphinx’s 25th-anniversary gala concert at Carnegie Hall. “It’s a family. It’s a society.”When Sphinx started, Dworkin was an undergraduate violin student at the University of Michigan. Raised in Baku, Azerbaijan, she had come to the United States as a teenager, when her father feared that political shifts at home might not be friendly to mixed-heritage part-Jews.Her parents were well educated — her father a chemical engineer and her mother an academic — but music wasn’t on their radar as a career option. Dworkin begged to play an instrument, though, so at 7 she entered the Soviet Union’s tightly organized music education program, and chose the violin. It quickly became her passion.The move across the Atlantic was a shock; she spoke no English. But with the help of a devoted teacher, she began to piece the language together. Then Aaron Dworkin, a transfer student from Penn State, enrolled in her teacher’s studio at Michigan.“We started talking immediately,” she said. “He’d zeroed in on something more than his own fiddle playing. He was interested in repertoire.”The child of a white mother and Black father, Aaron had been adopted by a Jewish family and raised in New York City. He introduced Afa to Black composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and told her about the negative assumptions people had made about his artistry as almost always the only person of color in classical music settings. (After a decade as friends, then colleagues, they married in 2005.)Xavier Foley, a bassist and composer whose piece “An Ode to Our Times” was performed at the gala.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesAmaryn Olmeda, the winner of the Sphinx Competition’s junior division in 2021, rehearsed Carlos Simon’s solo “Between Worlds.”

      Rafael Rios for The New York Times“He had a problem with the world,” she said, “and he was going to do something about it.”What he had in mind was a competition — with the goal of discovering the musicians of color who were out there, and of building camaraderie among them. He was fearless about fund-raising and asking for assistance, and with the university as a partner and Afa working frenetically on the side of her violin teaching and playing, the inaugural Sphinx Competition took place in Ann Arbor in 1998.“It was never designed to be an affirmative action mechanism,” Aaron Dworkin said in an interview. “We told our jurors, ‘If you find no one rises to the right level, don’t give it.’ And there have been a couple of years of the competition in which we didn’t give certain awards.”The organization grew organically as issues presented themselves. “They have been really good at creating programs or initiatives where there is a gap,” said Blake-Anthony Johnson, the chief executive of the Chicago Sinfonietta and an alumnus of Sphinx LEAD, which is aimed at fostering arts administrators of color. “They have found all the crevices of nationwide issues, and tried to home in on them.”Some parents complained that their children had to play on cheap, borrowed instruments, so Sphinx organized higher-quality loans. Scholarships were arranged with prominent summer programs. Early on, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington offered performance opportunities for competition winners.Sphinx began to serve as something of a management firm, and also started a summer program of its own, the Sphinx Performance Academy; a large orchestra; a training structure for young children, Sphinx Overture; an elite touring chamber ensemble, now called the Sphinx Virtuosi; the annual conference, SphinxConnect; Sphinx LEAD; and a regranting program to support others’ projects, the Sphinx Venture Fund.Deborah Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said: “I’m very positive about Sphinx because they actually do something. Sphinx isn’t theoretical. They provide specific, effective programs.”What they have not ever wanted to do was create their own edifices. “One option would have been to start a kind of Sphinx Conservatory, but the vision was never separate but equal,” Afa Dworkin said. “It was how do we nurture, empower, lift up and create on-ramps within the existing structure. Aaron knew the talent was out there, so he wanted to find it, nurture it, give it a level playing field. He didn’t want a new Juilliard; he wanted Juilliard to look like New York.”In 2015, Aaron became the dean of the School of Music, Theater and Dance at the University of Michigan. It was a potentially uncomfortable moment for Sphinx: Finding a successor to an organization’s founder is always delicate, and in this case the most obvious candidate was the founder’s wife.“I have to give the board credit,” Afa said. “They didn’t just say, ‘Oh, you’ve always been around.’ They looked at other things out there, and took a six- or seven-month process to see if I was the right person.”She has remained in charge even though, two years after starting, Aaron stepped down as dean, saying in a statement it was “necessary for me to have the opportunity to focus more on my family.” (Afa said that his packed schedule at Michigan had been “taking a toll” on their two children.)“There are definitely things we disagree on,” she said of her husband. “Direction, choices. We have different aesthetics relative to music. I really love new music, and Aaron has an absolute dedication to the Romantic era. But he has given me plenty of space; I can’t think of one place where he overstepped.”The Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie. The group made its international debut in Brazil, and will perform next year in England.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesHer days in New York last month leading up to the Carnegie gala were a swirl of meetings, coffees and lunches with donors, alumni, staff, musicians and composers. Everyone had advice to give and receive, and logistical challenges to present to her. Most pressing, the Sphinx Virtuosi was then about to make its international debut in Brazil, and has also been planning events next year in England, as well as recording projects. She fielded everything with the calm humor and gentle decisiveness of a den mother.“She has no vanity about her,” said Victoria Robey, a member of the organization’s board. “She just wants to see Sphinx be the best it can be. And she’s fantastic at fund-raising. She doesn’t do it in an aggressive, transactional way; she does it in an organic way. Donors want to have the mission explained to them; they don’t just want to plop down their money and disappear. She builds with warm cohesiveness.”Alexa Smith, an associate vice president at the Manhattan School of Music, said, of her fellow Sphinx LEAD alumni: “One of the things we have all agreed has been impactful has been having the community, having people all over the country, where we can lean on each other. It’s somehow not competitive. And that’s a cultural thing that comes from Afa.”There have been debates, both within Sphinx and from outside, about the organization’s tactics. The Dworkins’ preference for quietly lobbying legacy institutions has struck some as old-fashioned in a culture dominated by call-outs fueled by social media. And although string players have always had a home at Sphinx, some in the field wish that there were more programs for other types of instrumentalists, too.The violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery, who has been involved with Sphinx from its early years, said that she has observed the musical level and socioeconomic status of the average Sphinx Performance Academy student steadily rise. Is the program, in that case, truly opening doors for those who would otherwise lack opportunities?And racial diversity in orchestras, dismal when Sphinx was founded, remains stubbornly low, though there are profound disagreements in the field about how to address the problem. Sphinx, true to its tradition of working within existing institutional bounds, has resisted calling for the elimination of the prevailing system of blind auditions, instead starting the National Alliance for Audition Support to offer financial assistance, coaching and other resources.Both the pandemic pause on performances and the broad push for racial justice in 2020 brought Sphinx more attention and resources. The mood was celebratory at the Carnegie gala, which featured a spirited performance by Sphinx Virtuosi members and a precociously poised solo from the 14-year-old violinist Amaryn Olmeda, who won the competition’s junior division in 2021. Nine years ago, Aaron Dworkin had taken the Carnegie stage for a speech in which he sharply criticized the field’s stagnancy; but this year, brought on as the 25th-anniversary honoree, he offered an uplifting, optimistic slam poem.“I think we owe them a lot,” said Woods, from the League of American Orchestras. “Not only for having a vision, but for plugging away at that vision year after year. For me what is really interesting is, it feels like their time has come. The work that they’ve been doing is now beginning to translate into meaningful change.”Even to the point where its leader can speculate — however hypothetically — about a world in which Sphinx would not be necessary.“On a practical level, is there enough talent today for that to be true, for Sphinx to become superfluous?” Afa Dworkin said. “Absolutely. Is our society and sector ready for it? No, not totally.”“I just think,” she added with a smile, “we have a little ways to go.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Galileo Forgery’s Trail Leads to Web of Mistresses and Manuscripts

      by

      The unmasking of a fake Galileo manuscript this summer brought renewed attention to a colorful, prolific early-20th-century forger named Tobia Nicotra.When the University of Michigan Library announced last month that one of its most prized possessions, a manuscript said to have been written by Galileo around 1610, was in fact a 20th-century fake, it brought renewed attention to the checkered, colorful career of the man named as the likely culprit: Tobia Nicotra, a notorious forger from Milan.Nicotra hoodwinked the U.S. Library of Congress into buying a fake Mozart manuscript in 1928. He wrote an early biography of the conductor Arturo Toscanini that became better known for its fictions than its facts. He traveled under the name of another famous conductor who had recently died. And in 1934 he was convicted of forgery in Milan after the police were tipped off by Toscanini’s son Walter, who had bought a fake Mozart from him.His explanation of what had motivated his many forgeries, which were said to number in the hundreds, was somewhat unusual, at least according to an account of his trial that appeared in The American Weekly, a Hearst publication, in early 1935.“I did it,” the article quoted him as saying, “to support my seven loves.”When the police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan, several news outlets reported, they found a virtual forgery factory, strewn with counterfeit documents that appeared to bear the signatures of Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Warren G. Harding and other famous figures.Investigators had also found a sort of shrine to his seven mistresses, at least according to The American Weekly. The article described a room with black velvet-covered walls, with seven panels featuring paintings, sketches and photographs of the women — one of whom was said to be a “novelty dancer,” and another an “expert swimmer” — with fresh flowers in front of each. “The pictures in some cases displayed their physical attractions with startling frankness, but they were in general highly artistic,” the article noted.“Incidentally,” the publication added, “he had a wife.”Over the years Nicotra’s counterfeits have fooled collectors and institutions, sown confusion, and been denounced by the esteemed Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who collected musical manuscripts and who wrote an article in 1931 naming Nicotra as a forger. Now Nicotra is back in the news, thanks to the Galileo forgery in Michigan, which was unmasked by Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University who showed that the paper it had been written on had a watermark dating from the late 18th century, more than 150 years after Galileo supposedly wrote it. He also linked it to several other Nicotra forgeries.“Either he thought he was just invincible, or he was maybe just incredibly desperate,” Wilding, who is working on a biography of Galileo, said of Nicotra. While other forgers have been more prolific, Wilding said, few have been as daring — or as talented.“Everything Nicotra does is plausible; there are no jarring anachronisms,” he said. “He knows enough to try and get it right.”This manuscript was one of the University of Michigan Library’s most prized possessions when it was thought to be by Galileo. It was unmasked this summer as a 20th-century forgery, most likely by Nicotra.via University of Michigan LibraryThere is relatively little concrete information about Nicotra, and, given that he was a professional forger, the existing documentary evidence must be taken with a grain of salt. “The facts just seem to slip away from him,” Wilding said. While some accounts say he was 53 at the time of his trial, a birth certificate suggests he may have been 44. Contemporary news accounts, and interviews with several scholars who have studied him, however, begin to give some sense of the man and his prolific career.A courtroom sketch of Nicotra that appeared in The American Weekly portrays him as a balding, thin-faced man with glasses perched on a pointy nose, sporting a mustache and goatee, and wearing either a thick scarf or some kind of furry, Astrakhan-like collar on his coat.Nicotra cast a wide net in the types of documents he counterfeited, and seems to have possessed real talent and learning. He forged a poem he claimed was by the Italian Renaissance poet Tasso, musical manuscripts by leading composers, and was even said to have started a minor international incident by creating a fake Columbus letter identifying his birthplace as Spain, not Italy, prompting the mayor of Genoa to write a lengthy rebuttal reaffirming Columbus’ Italian ancestry.An account of his 1934 conviction by The Associated Press, which ran in The New York Times under the headline “Autograph Faker Gets Prison Term,” described how Nicotra operated: “His method was to visit the Milan Library and tear out the fly leaves of old books or steal pages of manuscript and write on them the ‘autographs’ of famed musicians. The librarians of Milan testified that he had ruined scores of their books.”In 1928, he sold what appeared to be a signed Mozart aria called “Baci amorosi e cari,” supposedly written by the composer at age 14, to the Library of Congress.“It was so special because first of all it was unknown, so it wasn’t reported in any of the thematic catalogs of Mozart at that time,” Paul Allen Sommerfeld, a music reference specialist at the Library of Congress, said in an interview. “He claimed that he found this manuscript and then published the song.”The library paid $60 for the document, which was later believed to have been composed by Nicotra himself.Nicotra said he was the son of a botany professor, and he wrote in one letter that he had graduated with a music degree from a conservatory in Naples in 1909. “We don’t know whether that’s a true fact or not,” Wilding said.When he published his biography of Toscanini in 1929, early critics noted that it contained a number of errors. It is seen as even more unreliable today.“It’s mostly invented conversations and so on,” said Harvey Sachs, the author of a definitive 2017 biography, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience.” “Just made-up stuff.”His conviction in 1934 made headlines around the world, including in The New York Times.In 1932, Nicotra toured the United States while masquerading as Riccardo Drigo, an Italian conductor and composer who had been the conductor of the Imperial Ballet in Russia and who may be best remembered for the arrangement of “Swan Lake” he created after Tchaikovsky’s death. (The Associated Press reported that Nicotra had been “feted widely in the United States as the former orchestra conductor of the Czar of Russia.”) Apparently no one realized that Drigo had died two years earlier, in 1930.“My main way of characterizing him would be ‘bold,’” said Erin Smith, who wrote her master’s thesis on Nicotra at the University of Maryland in 2014. “He was able to carry on with this for a good number of years.”Nicotra was also known for forging works by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, an early-18th-century composer who died at the age of 26 and whose posthumous fame attracted forgers. One Pergolesi forgery wound up in the collection of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. When Christie’s auctioned it in 2017, it described it as an “intriguing forgery, once thought to belong to the hotly debated Pergolesi canon” and cited authorities who list it as “created by the prolific forger Tobia Nicotra.” It fetched $375.The discovery of the Galileo leaves open the question of what happened to the many other forgeries Nicotra created, which he was quoted as saying could number as many as 600.“I don’t know if he did 600, but I’m sure he did more than the little we’ve found so far,” said Richard G. King, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Music, who has been researching Nicotra. “I don’t think people are willfully hiding these things, but it’s just hard to find them.”Unless an institution has a record of buying documents from Nicotra, Wilding said, it may be hard to identify other forgeries. He suggested that documents by figures Nicotra habitually forged that lack clear provenance before the 20th century “are probably really worth looking at very, very closely.”Nicotra eventually ran afoul of the law after selling the fake Mozart manuscript to Walter Toscanini, who persuaded detectives in Milan to investigate the case. Nicotra was convicted, fined 2,400 lire and sentenced to two years in prison.Some accounts suggest that Nicotra was let out of prison early, because the Fascist government wanted his help forging signatures. That story, notes Wilding, “is just too good to be ignored, and maybe too good to be true.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      A Blackface ‘Othello’ Shocks, and a Professor Steps Back From Class

      by

      Students objected after the composer Bright Sheng showed the 1965 film of Laurence Olivier’s “Othello” to his class at the University of Michigan.It was supposed to be an opportunity for music students at the University of Michigan to learn about the process of adapting a classic literary text into an opera from one of the music school’s most celebrated professors, the composer Bright Sheng.But at the first class meeting of this fall’s undergraduate composition seminar, when Professor Sheng hit play on the 1965 film of Shakespeare’s “Othello” starring Laurence Olivier, it quickly became a lesson in something else entirely.Students said they sat in stunned silence as Olivier appeared onscreen in thickly painted blackface makeup. Even before class ended 90 minutes later, group chat messages were flying, along with at least one email of complaint to the department reporting that many students were “incredibly offended both by this video and by the lack of explanation as to why this was selected for our class.”Within hours, Professor Sheng had sent a terse email issuing the first of what would be two apologies. Then, after weeks of emails, open letters and canceled classes, it was announced on Oct. 1 that Professor Sheng — a two-time Pulitzer finalist and winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant — was voluntarily stepping back from the class entirely, in order to allow for a “positive learning environment.”The incident might have remained just the latest flash point at a music program that has been roiled in recent years by a series of charges of misconduct by star professors. But a day before Professor Sheng stepped down, a long, scathing Medium post by a student in the class rippled across Twitter before getting picked up in Newsweek, Fox News, The Daily Mail and beyond, entangling one of the nation’s leading music schools in the supercharged national debate over race, academic freedom and free speech.To some observers, it’s a case of campus “cancel culture” run amok, with overzealous students refusing to accept an apology — with the added twist that the Chinese-born Professor Sheng was a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, during which the Red Guards had seized the family piano.To others, the incident is symbolic of an arrogant academic and artistic old guard and of the deeply embedded anti-Black racism in classical music, a field that has been slow to abandon performance traditions featuring blackface and other racialized makeup.The Olivier “Othello,” from 1965, was controversial even when it was new; the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock in The New York Times that the actor “plays Othello in blackface.” Warner BrothersIn an email to The New York Times, Professor Sheng, 66, reiterated his apology. “From the bottom of my heart, I would like to say that I am terribly sorry,” he said.“Of course, facing criticism for my misjudgment as a professor here is nothing like the experience that many Chinese professors faced during the Cultural Revolution,” he wrote. “But it feels uncomfortable that we live in an era where people can attempt to destroy the career and reputation of others with public denunciation. I am not too old to learn, and this mistake has taught me much.”Professor Sheng, who joined the Michigan faculty in 1995 and holds the title Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor, the highest rank on the faculty, was born in 1955 in Shanghai. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, to avoid being sent to a farm to be “re-educated,” he auditioned for an officially sanctioned folk music ensemble, and was sent to Qinghai province, a remote area near the Tibetan border, according to a university biography.After the universities reopened in 1976, he got a degree in composition from Shanghai University, and in 1982, he moved to the United States, eventually earning a doctorate at Columbia University.His work, which includes an acclaimed 2016 opera based on the 18th-century Chinese literary classic “Dream of the Red Chamber,” blends elements of Eastern and Western music. “When someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, ‘100 percent both,’” he said earlier this year.The Olivier film was controversial even when it was new. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock that Olivier “plays Othello in blackface,” noting his “wig of kinky black hair,” his lips “smeared and thickened with a startling raspberry red” and his exaggerated accent, which he described as reminiscent of “Amos ‘n’ Andy.” (To “the sensitive American viewer,” Crowther wrote, Olivier looked like someone in a “minstrel show.”)Professor Sheng, in his emailed response to questions from The Times, said that the purpose of the class had been to show how Verdi had adapted Shakespeare’s play into an opera, and that he had chosen the Olivier film simply because it was “one of the most faithful to Shakespeare.” He also said that he had not seen the makeup as an attempt to mock Black people, but as part of a long tradition — one that has persisted in opera — which he said valued the “music quality of the singers” over physical resemblance.“Of course, times have changed, and I made a mistake in showing this film,” he said. “That was insensitive of me, and I am very sorry.”But to the students — for some, it was their very first class at the university — it was simply a shock. “I was stunned,” Olivia Cook, a freshman, told The Michigan Daily, adding that the classroom was “supposed to be a safe space.”Bright Sheng’s work includes an acclaimed 2016 opera based on the 18th-century Chinese literary classic “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which was performed at the San Francisco Opera in 2016.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA week after the video was shown, Professor Sheng signed on to a letter from six of the composition department’s seven professors, which described the incident as “disappointing and harmful to individual students in many different ways, and destructive to our community.” He also sent another, longer, apology, saying that since the incident, “I did more research and learning on the issue and realized that the depth of racism was, and still is, a dangerous part of American culture.”Professor Sheng also cited discrimination he had faced as an Asian American and listed various Black musicians he had mentored or supported, as well as his daughter’s experience performing with Kanye West. “I hope you can accept my apology and see that I do not discriminate,” he wrote.That apology provoked fresh outrage. In an open letter to the dean, a group of 33 undergraduate and graduate students and nine staff and faculty members (whose names were not made public) called on the school to remove Professor Sheng from the class, calling his apology “inflammatory” and referring to an unspecified “pattern of harmful behavior in the classroom” which had left students feeling “unsafe and uncomfortable.”(“In retrospect,” Professor Sheng wrote in his email to The Times, “I should have apologized for my mistake without qualification.”).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}On Sept. 30, a senior in the class, Sammy Sussman, posted the long Medium essay, outlining what he saw as Professor Sheng’s “disregard for students” (which, he wrote, included walking out in the middle of Mr. Sussman’s audition for the program several years earlier). Mr. Sussman, who in 2018 was the first to report allegations of sexual misconduct against another music faculty member, Stephen Shipps, also linked the case to what he said was a broader failure of the university and the classical music industry to hold prominent figures to account.After Mr. Sussman posted a link to the essay on Twitter, it was retweeted by another composition professor, Kristin Kuster, who cited the need for “conversations about pedagogical racism and pedagogical abuse,” and tagged a number of musicians, as well as the Pulitzer Prize board and the MacArthur Foundation. (Both Mr. Sussman and Professor Kuster declined to comment on the record.)Some accused the students, and the school, of overreacting. In an article in Reason, Robby Soave, an editor at the magazine, argued that Professor Sheng’s apology “ought to have been more than sufficient” and argued that he now deserves an apology himself.“The University of Michigan is a public institution at which students and professors deserve free speech and expression rights,” he wrote. “It is a violation of the university’s cherished principles of academic freedom to punish Sheng for the choices he makes in the classroom. Screening a racially problematic film in an educational setting is neither a racist act nor an endorsement of racism.”A spokesman for the university, Kim Broekhuizen, confirmed that the incident had been referred to the university’s Office of Equity, Civil Rights and Title IX for investigation, but emphasized that Professor Sheng had stepped down from the class voluntarily, was still teaching individual studios, and was scheduled to teach next semester.“We do not shy away from addressing racism or any other difficult topic with our students,” Ms. Broekhuizen said in an email to The Times. But “in this particular instance, the appropriate context or historical perspective was not provided and the professor has acknowledged that.”Some scholars who teach blackface traditions questioned the quickness of some to denounce the students, or to mock their insistence on contextualization as a demand for “trigger warnings.”“Gen Z is unbelievably right on when they say, ‘If you’re not going to give us the context, we shouldn’t have to watch it,’” said Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University who has written extensively on Shakespeare and race.Professor Thompson, the author of the recent book “Blackface” and a trustee of the Royal Shakespeare Company, declined to comment on the details of Professor Sheng’s case. But she said that when it comes to “Othello” and blackface minstrelsy, the connections aren’t incidental, but absolutely fundamental.Contrary to widespread belief, she said, blackface wasn’t an American invention, but sprang from older European performance traditions going back to the Middle Ages. And it was at an 1833 performance of “Othello” featuring a blacked-up actor that T.D. Rice, the white American performer seen as the father of minstrelsy, claimed to have been inspired to get up at intermission and put on blackface to perform “Jump Jim Crow” for the first time.“Whenever you’re teaching Shakespeare, period, the history of performing race should be part of the discussion,” Professor Thompson said. “Everyone has a responsibility to give the full history.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Past Students Say Professor of Rock ’n’ Roll Sexually Harassed Them

      by

      Six former University of Michigan students have filed legal papers accusing a former lecturer of sexually harassing them and the school of not doing enough to protect them.During 16 years teaching at the University of Michigan, Bruce Conforth stocked his lectures with tales from a life filled with boldfaced names: He had rubbed elbows with Bob Dylan, played music alongside B.B. King, apprenticed for the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning and befriended the poet Allen Ginsberg.Students clamored to enroll in his courses on blues music and the American counterculture, later raving about how he had changed their lives.A musician, scholar and founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Mr. Conforth was a riveting lecturer who, in his trademark black vest and jeans, could discuss everything from Buddhism to psychedelics, and who, in 2012, was chosen teacher of the year by students.“There was almost a celebrity-like aura around him,” said Amelia Brown, who took a Conforth class called “Beatniks, Hippies and Punks” in 2016. “It wasn’t a normal class. He would go on these long tangents about life and spirituality.”But there was a dark side to Mr. Conforth, according to Ms. Brown and other women who said the teacher used his charisma and, sometimes, Svengali-like manipulation to sexually harass his students.Six of the former Michigan students have filed court papers saying they plan to sue the school, asserting it failed to protect them from sexual harassment.  Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesIn 2008, one recent graduate complained to the university that Mr. Conforth, a lecturer in the American Culture Department, had propositioned her when she was a student. The university put him on formal notice but quietly resolved the complaint. Two more women came forward, though, in 2016, to report that Mr. Conforth had worked to engage them in sexual relationships when they were his students, and, in the midst of the university’s investigation, he agreed to quietly leave his faculty position.Now six former Michigan undergraduates — the three women who previously complained and three others — have filed court papers announcing their intention to sue him and the university, asserting he engaged in a litany of sexual misconduct and the school failed to protect them.“He should have been fired,” said Isabelle Brourman, one of the women. “But they allowed him to thrive. They allowed him to win awards.”Ms. Brourman says, according to the court papers, that Mr. Conforth pressured her into a series of sexual encounters, some of them in his campus office, and later, after she had graduated, raped her in his Ann Arbor apartment.A second former student, Ms. Brown, said she was pressured into a sexual encounter with Mr. Conforth after he told her he had feelings for her and pursued her for several weeks. A third woman said he aggressively kissed her. The other plaintiffs say Mr. Conforth propositioned them to have sexual relationships, at times sending them sexually-charged messages or emails and persisting even after they said no. One woman said he gave her a raccoon penis, suggesting it was a talisman.Mr. Conforth declined to discuss the accusations. “I’ve tried to move on with my life,” he said in a brief phone conversation. “This is a past issue.”The university said it handled the 2008 complaint against Mr. Conforth appropriately and set firm restrictions on his behavior. When the subsequent complaints came in, it said it took swift action to investigate and that Mr. Conforth would have faced dismissal proceedings if he hadn’t agreed to retire in early 2017.“You will note in the separation agreement that the university took immediate and lasting action to assure that Mr. Conforth would not be in any further contact with U-M students, even after his employment ended,” a university spokesman said.Sexual misconduct allegations at universities across the country have sparked calls for policies that hold faculty and student offenders accountable. Last year, Michigan fired David Daniels, an opera star and voice professor, after he and his husband were charged with sexually assaulting a singer.Also last year, the university reached a $9.25 million settlement with women who accused Martin Philbert, then the school’s provost, of sexual harassment.The university said it is constantly working to improve its sexual misconduct policies in a statement that cited a number of changes it has made in recent years.Mr. Conforth arrived at Michigan in 2001 with a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Indiana University and a résumé that included his work as the founding curator with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which he left in 1993.Since leaving Michigan, Mr. Conforth, 70, has co-written an award-winning biography of the blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson and helped narrate a Netflix documentary about the musician.While at Michigan, Mr. Conforth was so popular that students chose him as the winner of the “Golden Apple” teaching award in 2012.But four years earlier, Katherine McMahan, a recent university graduate, had told the school about a disturbing incident the previous fall. Ms. McMahan, then 22, said she had attended a blues concert connected to Mr. Conforth’s course and, at a bar after the concert, she said he cornered her outside the bathroom, put his hand around her waist, pulled her closer to him and asked her to come home with him to sleep over. She said she declined but that he persisted until she pushed him away. (Ms. McMahan is a New York Times employee who works outside the newsroom.)Katherine McMahan, left, and Isabelle Brourman, both accuse their former teacher, Bruce Conforth, of sexual misconduct.Kholood Eid for The New York TimesMs. McMahan later received an email from a Michigan official that said the university was taking steps that “it feels are likely to deter future behavior of this nature towards students.” University records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that after McMahan’s complaint, the school had Mr. Conforth sign a “Last Chance” agreement, which stipulated requirements he would need to fulfill to avoid termination.Other former students recount similar experiences, though they did not report them to the university. Cassie McQuater said that in 2007, when she was 20, Mr. Conforth, who was not her teacher and whom she had met only briefly, began sending her emails, declaring his love. In one, she said, he included an erotic drawing of a man and a woman with her name at the bottom. When she eventually agreed to get dinner with him, he asked her to return home with him; she declined.Lauren Lambert, who said she plans to join the intended lawsuit, said that starting in 2011, while she was his student and afterward, Mr. Conforth sent her sexually charged messages, saying he had fantasies about her.Two women said that as part of the effort to engage with them sexually, Mr. Conforth had employed the ruse of suggesting he was a member of the so-called “Order of the Illuminati,” a secret society whose mysteries were popularized in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels & Demons.” The women, Ms. Brourman and her friend, Maya Crosman, said they believed he was responsible for emails they received, purportedly from Illuminati leadership, that recommended they engage in relationships with Mr. Conforth, whom the emails called the “Chosen One.”Ms. Crosman kept a copy of one of the emails — sent from an email address designed to be anonymous — in which a person who identified themselves as Grandmaster Setis recommends she return the “intensely profound love” that Mr. Conforth had for her.The women said they thought Mr. Conforth had the potential to be a kind of spiritual and artistic mentor, but then things grew strange. In legal papers filed in a Michigan court, Ms. Brourman said Mr. Conforth invited them to an arboretum on campus where he engaged in a mysterious ritual that involved cutting off pieces of their hair and giving Ms. Brourman a series of objects, including the raccoon penis, seeds and some kind of medallion. She was warned to keep them with her, or there would be “repercussions,” the court papers said.Both women said they received what appeared to be homemade horoscopes in which it was predicted they were romantically compatible with Mr. Conforth.Ms. Crosman said Mr. Conforth inundated her with messages online, declaring his love. One included a Pablo Neruda poem that said, “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.” At the end of the semester, she said he forcibly kissed her and stuck his tongue in her mouth during a visit to his office.The two women said they feared reporting their encounters to the university at the time.“We were trying to protect ourselves in ways where we didn’t have to insult him, we didn’t have to fight him,” Ms. Crosman said.Maya Crosman, left, and Cassie McQuater, said that Mr. Conforth inundated them with messages, declaring his love. Ms. Crosman said he aggressively kissed her.Joyce Kim for The New York TimesThe court papers say Brourman felt intimidated by the strange emails she received, including ones that directed her to “service” Mr. Conforth. In 2014, she said they had a sexual encounter in his office on campus. After that encounter, Ms. Brourman and Mr. Conforth met regularly for “spiritual lessons” that required sex beforehand, the papers said. Ms. Brourman said in an interview that at the time, she was confused and thought she might have feelings for Mr. Conforth, but in retrospect, she said she recognizes that she was being manipulated.In fall 2017, after she had graduated, Ms. Brourman said in court papers that Mr. Conforth raped her at his apartment in Ann Arbor. She did not report it, she said, because she feared retaliation, but in February filed a complaint with the police.The two women whose complaints played a role in Mr. Conforth’s departure from Michigan approached the university after learning about each other’s accounts. Shaina Mahler had been 22 in 2014 when she said Mr. Conforth, her favorite teacher, began sending her messages on Facebook. She was flattered at first, but then the messages escalated into expressions of how attracted he was to her.When Ms. Mahler told him that she was starting to feel “confused and anxious” about his messages, Mr. Conforth apologized and said they could be friends, writing, “Please please don’t ruin my life here.” But a few days later, Mr. Conforth sent her more sexually charged messages, saying he wanted to “kiss” and “touch” her, according to court papers.Ms. Mahler let it slide until two years later, when she spoke with Ms. Brown, who recounted a nearly identical experience of being pursued by Mr. Conforth. Ms. Brown, then 21, told him several times his advances were “inappropriate,” according to notes taken by a Title IX coordinator who interviewed her. But one day in his office, when he insisted they hug, they ended up kissing too, she said.That semester, their interactions escalated into a sexual encounter in his office, and Ms. Brown told the coordinator that, at first, she believed it was consensual. She acknowledged having feelings for Mr. Conforth but told the coordinator that she quickly became anxious and conflicted after their sexual encounter. She soon recognized, she said, that she had been manipulated, especially after learning from a friend — another student in his class at the time — that Mr. Conforth had left a note for her saying that he found her attractive.Ms. Brown and Ms. Mahler reported their interactions with Mr. Conforth to the university at the end of 2016 and he retired shortly thereafter.The university said its policy is to share the school’s investigative findings with complainants and that it could not comment on individual cases. But both of the women said that the university did not alert them to the outcome of its review until last year, when Ms. Mahler said she checked in after hearing complaints from other women.“I let it go for a while,” she said, “but I always wondered.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More