A YouTube video, more or less, featuring what’s purported
to be a live performance of “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” with the
composer himself at the keyboard, circa 1912. It’s billed
as a selection from the “Welte-Mignon Piano Roll #2733 Children’s Corner No. 6
’Golliwogg’s Cakewalk.’” We haven’t had the time to confirm
its authenticity, but it does reveal a performance that,
in many ways, varies considerably from contemporary
performances of the same popular piece.
[Source: In Series' evocative Debussy salon. Washington Times,
December 8, 2012. By Terry Ponick]
I heard the piece above recently on the radio.
Below is an article by a musician writing about how he explained the piece to his student. I think he gets too dramatic, and sanctimonious. Golliwoggs may have been caricatures of blacks, but Debussy's piece is a fun, playful and also musically sophisticated piece. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see what others say about those difficult racial works, and many resort to a confused lecturing, while at the same time praising those artistic endeavors.
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The original cover of Debussy's suite: Children's Corner
Golliwog's Cakewalk
By Charles T. Downey
One of my piano students has recently begun to work on Claude Debussy's rag-inspired piece "Golliwog's Cakewalk," the last movement in his petite suite pour piano called Children's Corner (1906–1908)...I had not practiced this piece myself since I was in high school, and I now have the chance to remember how much fun it was for me to learn as my student works on it.
When this student expressed an interest in the piece, I felt that I had to explain what it was about: in other words, I had to show him what golliwog and cakewalk meant. An excellent online essay on the history of this disgusting racist image (The Golliwog Caricature, by Ferris State University sociology professor David Pilgrim, who is the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia there) gives a detailed history of the golliwog and shows numerous images. Artists have been fascinated with the golliwog image, such as Damali Ayo...and Kara Walker. The Golliwog character was made into a very popular children's doll, owned by the young Nabokov and by Debussy's daughter, which was the inspiration for the composer's drawing on the original cover and for the piece itself.
The cakewalk was a sort of dance or stepping competition for a prize of cake, sponsored by a plantation owner and featuring his own slaves who were allowed to mock the airs of their masters. This entertainment was often reproduced in minstrel shows, those horrible sentimentalizing idealizations of plantation life, featuring white actors in blackface, which were one very important influence on the creation of American musical theater...
It's hard for me to know what to do when I get to the point in a survey class that deals with 19th-century America. Some people think that we should just allow this part of music history to disappear into oblivion: don't let students play "Golliwog's Cakewalk" any more and don't teach them anything about the minstrel show. I admit that it does bother me to teach these subjects and have the students be exposed to these worst expressions of American institutional racism and find them funny. Maybe it really would be better just never to introduce today's students to these parts of the past. Ultimately, however, I value truth too much to edit these things out of our understanding of history.
When I looked through the catalogue of Debussy's works, I discovered that Debussy, perhaps to capitalize on the popularity of "Golliwog's Cakewalk," also composed another cakewalk pour piano in 1909 called Le petit nègre (The little negro), which I have never heard or played.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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