New music and humanities center holds event exploring national anthem
René Marie, a Grammy-nominated singer, performed “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (Farida Saleh/Daily Bruin)
By Stephen Liu
May 10, 2017 12:07 a.m.
The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music launched a center to combine performance with the humanities with an event on Monday.
The Center for Musical Humanities held a symposium titled “Anthem: Remixing Race and Nation.” The event featured a concert with different interpretations of the national anthem and a panel discussing the relationship between music and nationalism.
Raymond Knapp, the director of the center and a professor of musicology, said the center’s events will combine musical performance with issues that the public and academics are interested in. He added the center will involve UCLA students, both as performers and scholars.
Knapp said the department of musicology was originally within the UCLA Division of Humanities when it formed in the 1980s but joined the school of music last year. He said he worked with faculty members in the humanities to create the center because he thinks the humanities division was an enriching place for the musicology department.
“In part, the motivation of the center is … to make sure we don’t leave behind those roots in the humanities,” Knapp said.
The center’s inaugural event focused on national anthems because of the presidential election, Knapp said.
Shana Redmond, an associate professor of musicology and African-American studies who curated the event and moderated the panel, said anthems can be used to include and exclude groups of people.
“This event was a project I developed based on my long-standing interest in music as a way to express relationships to the nation … particularly amongst marginalized communities,” Redmond said.
Redmond said black athletes have used the national anthem as an opportunity to mount protests.
For example, she said football player Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem before games to protest police violence. In addition, the National Basketball Association once suspended former player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who spoke in the event’s panel discussion, for refusing to stand during the anthem.
At the event, Grammy-nominated singer René Marie sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the lyrics of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” which Redmond said is widely known as the Negro national anthem.
Marie said she reframed the national anthem to reflect her experiences, which include growing up in Virginia when Jim Crow laws were still enforced.
“I love those patriotic tunes,” Marie said. “But when I was a kid I knew that some of these words apply, but most of the sentiment of these words – they do not apply to me, they do not apply to anybody who looks like me.”
Knapp said the center will continue to bring public figures to campus and host events featuring ideas from different parts of campus. He added he hopes to have an event for each quarter of the 2017-2018 academic year.
