Obituary

Donovan R. Walling, born January 9, 1948, in Kansas City, Missouri, died May 5, 2017. He was the son of Donovan Ernest and Dorothy (nee Goyette) Walling. A lifelong educator, Walling taught school in Wisconsin and Germany, was a curriculum administrator in Wisconsin and Indiana, and served as director of publications for the education association Phi Delta Kappa, retiring in 2006. He continued to work as a writer and editorial consultant in retirement, and was a senior consultant for the Center for Civic Education. Walling was the author or editor of numerous books in education and also wrote fiction and poetry. He was preceded in death by his wife Diana (nee Eveland) in 1991. He is survived by his husband Sam Troxal; his children, Katherine, Donovan David, and Alexander; and several grandchildren.

In light of Donovan’s lifelong commitment to education, his family requests memorial contributions be made to the Walling-Troxal Endowed Scholarship Fund at First United Church. A celebration of his life will be held Saturday, June 16 at 7pm at First United Church, 2420 E Third Street in Bloomington, Indiana.

Scholder's Expressionist Americans

The American Indian
Oil on linen, 1970

A quote that I noticed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this week, juxtaposed with Inauguration Day coming at the end of the week, set me thinking about our nation’s first true citizens. King said, “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.” My train of thought barreled on, eventually arriving at a Native American artist whom I have long admired: Fritz Scholder.

Scholder (October 6, 1937 – February 10, 2005), who was one-quarter Luiseño, a California Mission tribe, was an Abstract Expressionist. The imagery in his paintings invariably drew on Native American themes and individuals. Several paintings, like the one shown above, were of native figures draped in the American flag.

King, to expand the quote, went on to say, “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.” King was speaking half a century ago, but his remarks are still pertinent.

Scholder tapped all of this history, weaving it into his extravagantly colorful paintings. I discovered Scholder’s work when I was attending college as an undergraduate art major in the late 1960s. Since that time, whenever I have visited a museum, I’ve always kept an eye peeled for a Scholder painting. Occasionally, though far too seldom, I have been rewarded. Sometime in the late 1970s, on a winter trip to Phoenix, Arizona, I wandered into a gallery that handled Scholder’s work. It was a spellbinding moment, to be surrounded, literally, by his paintings. The images ranged from fierce to whimsical. It was difficult to drag myself away.

Fritz Scholder is represented in numerous museums and galleries. Perhaps nearest my own location in southern Indiana, visitors to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis can enjoy one of his works. Scholder’s paintings are worth contemplating, both from the standpoint of artistic expression and as a reflection of the interwoven themes of Native American history and the evolving place of Native Americans, minority individuals, and immigrants—all “othered” too often, instead of accepted as the true warp and woof of our national fabric.

With a fraught Inauguration Day approaching this week, such contemplation is timely. If you can’t find a Scholder painting in a nearby museum, google his name and explore the images online. I guarantee a rich visual experience.

Franckaphilia

That was the title of a faculty recital I attended on a recent evening.

César Franck

Fully, it was “Franckaphilia: The Complete Organ Works of César Franck – Part I: From Palace to Paradise,” performed by Janette Fishell, IU Jacobs School of Music Organ Department Chair. She performed in Auer Hall on the magnificent and relatively new (dedicated in 2010) Fisk organ, named the Maidee H. and Jackson A. Seward Organ. A Part II recital has been scheduled for January 2017.

Born in Liège, in what is now Belgium, César Franck (1822 – 1890) spent his adult life in Paris working as a pianist, organist, and composer. His work is typical of late Romantic musical compositions, but very enjoyable even if one isn’t predisposed to the Romantic period. This recital was composed of two sections. The first was “Trois pièces: No. 1 Fantaisie in A Major, No. 2 Cantabile, No. 3 Pièce héroïque,” followed, after a brief pause, by “Trois chorals: No. 1 in E Major, No. 2 in B Minor, No. 3 in A Minor.” Of all of repertoire, my favorite, and generally a crowd-pleaser, was the truly heroic, even bombastic, “Pièce héroïque.”

Fisk Organ in Auer Hall
IU Jacobs School of Music

I have been told that the Auer Hall organ is particularly well suited to Romantic music. I wouldn’t know. I have enjoyed a number of recitals and concerts there, including the evening previous to this concert, when a young Mexican harpist of our acquaintance played his senior recital there. It’s a wonderful, contemporary, mid-size (400-seat) concert hall—a fine facility in a very fine school of music.

Franck himself was associated with a fine organ. In 1858 he became the organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a basilica church on the Rue Las Cases in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, and kept that position for the rest of his life. A year later the church acquired its famous Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ, played by Franck and a number of later well-known composers. Franck subsequently became a French national and in 1872 was appointed to a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire.

Who knows whether I’ll manage to take in Part II of Franckaphilia, but if it happens I’m sure it will be equally enjoyable.

Political Theater of the Absurd

P.T. Barnum portrayed as a
"Hum-Bug": a cartoon by H. L. Stephens (1851)

Let’s be honest: Political campaigns often are as much about entertainment as serious stumping, regardless of party. At least in the beginning. At the start of the season candidate Donald Trump, now widely considered a fatal mistake for and by the Republican Party, could be compared to P.T. Barnum. Showman extraordinaire, Barnum (1810-1891) was America’s penultimate purveyor of humbug during the second half of the 19th century. “I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me,” he said. Barnum also made a brief, unsuccessful foray into politics. He was a fitting model for Trump.

In the beginning Trump was a P.T. Barnum for our time. He might as well have adopted Barnum’s famous (though erroneously attributed) maxim: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And the suckers flocked to him. No matter how outrageous his rhetoric, Trump’s adherents cheered.

But a gradual metamorphosis took place. Trump ceased to be funny. He became vicious. He attacked persons of color, immigrants, women, military veterans, the disabled, Muslims and Mexicans, even crying babies. He displayed a shocking disregard for the Constitution, law, and basic civility. Suddenly comparing Trump to Hitler, once regarded as political hyperbole, took on an air of prescience. The Barnum for our time shed his comedic cocoon to reveal a xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, duplicitous proto-fascist, whose key supporters aligned themselves with the KKK and other white supremacist groups.

One often wonders, when watching Theater of the Absurd, where the line runs between reality and fantasy. It’s the theatrical equivalent of surrealism. Why are those clocks melting? Could clocks melt in real life?

We wait for Trump to say, “Just kidding! Surely you weren’t taking me serious.” But he does indeed seem to be serious. Thankfully many of the saner members of his own party have awakened to the imminent and very real danger of a Trump presidency and are turning against him. Sadly, even when the November election rings down the curtain on this absurd political theater, as it must, America will still have to deal with those in his audience who stayed to stand and cheer.

A Tale of Two Sidneys

Sidney Bechet at Jimmy Ryan's Club
in New York City, 1947 

Sidney Chambers, the troubled vicar of Grantchester in the PBS Mystery series that bears the name of this actual Cambridgeshire village, is fond of jazz music. So every now and then when Sidney is in a reflective mood, viewers are treated to a few snatches, which often happily feature the unmistakable trembling soprano sax tones of the incomparable Sidney Bechet.

I cannot recall when I discovered Bechet; it seems as though his special sound has always resided at least at the edge of memory whenever I’m not actually listening to one of his recordings.

The improbably handsome actor James Norton portrays the 30-something Anglican priest, a Cambridge graduate and former Scots Guards officer assigned to pastor Grantchester. But Sidney Chambers is hardly a simple country vicar, as the plots of these stories invariably revolve around the complex Reverend Chambers’ involvement in some crime or other. Bechet’s alternatingly poignant and playful sound complements the often fraught character of Sidney Chambers.

The series is set in the 1950s. When Sidney spins a Bechet LP on his turntable, lights up a cigarette, and leans back in his study chair with a tumbler of amber liquor, he listens to the jazz artist in his prime. New Orleans-born Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was largely self-taught and was recognized fairly early in his career as perhaps the first notable jazz saxophonist, although he played several instruments.

Bechet played mainly clarinet professionally in New Orleans and elsewhere during the Teens and then about 1920 traveled to London, where he discovered the straight soprano sax. The instrument would be used to produce his signature sound. Critics called it “emotional,” “reckless,” and “large.” His sound featured a broad vibrato, a technique common to some New Orleans clarinetists at the time.

Bechet’s reckless, erratic behavior was career limiting. For example, he was imprisoned in London for several days in 1922, having been convicted of assaulting a woman, and was subsequently deported back to the United States. Consequently Bechet did not truly rise to fame until the 1940s. After performing at the Paris Jazz Festival, he moved permanently to France in 1950, and his popularity surged there. The next year he married Elisabeth Ziegler in Antibes.

Sadly, Sidney Bechet died of lung cancer in Garches, near Paris, on May 14, 1959, his sixty-second birthday. Fortunately his recordings live on so that we, like Grantchester’s other Sidney, Reverend Chambers, can still get lost in the trembling tones of Bechet’s sax. I recommend “Petite Fleur,” Bechet’s own composition, which he recorded In 1952: http://youtu.be/wMwckuWpxDs. You will fall in love with the sound.