I rarely just post a link to another entry without much annotation – it’s something I try to generally avoid, as many blogs seem to devolve into link repositories. However, sometimes an article really sticks with me and I’d like to share it here. And, often, I either don’t have much of anything to add to it or don’t have the time to hash out my own “take” on it.

One month later, this article by Bob Shingleton at On An Overgrown Path keeps popping in my head. (I’ve read On An Overgrown Path for a number of months now – soon to be a year, I’m sure.) It’s an informed, thoughtful roundup of “forbidden musics” that doesn’t limit itself to time and place. The easy target is of course the artistic propaganda crusade of the Nazi regime (e.g., Entartete Musik). However, Shingleton steps back here and surveys this horrific trend with a wider perspective. He writes, “This failure to even recognise the existence of a huge corpus of forbidden music outside Nazi Germany brings the risk of mono-culturalism.”

FULL ARTICLE HERE: “We need to widen the definition of forbidden music”

As a “bonus,” I also learned here of the Basilica of Saint Adalbert in nearby Grand Rapids. I may have to pay a visit.