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| Girma Yifrashewa The Ethiopian pianist and composer played classical fare and his own works at the Issue Project Room on Saturday night. |
Girma Yifrashewa, Pianist-Composer, at Issue Project Room
“Classical music is music without Africa,” Brian Eno bluntly declared in a 1995 interview published in Wired magazine. “It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control,” he said. An art-rock provocateur, Mr. Eno managed to patronize two cultures in a single blow, fetishizing a free-floating independence in African art that he found lacking in rigid European traditions.
Yet if Mr. Eno’s statement oversimplified a complicated global exchange, relatively little evidence indicates that the Western classical tradition has held as much sway in Africa as it has in other parts of the globe, from Venezuela to China. So Girma Yifrashewa, a 45-year-old Ethiopian pianist and composer who performed at the Issue Project Room in Downtown Brooklyn on Saturday night, offers a rare and fascinating example of aesthetic adaptation and convergence.
“Classical music is music without Africa,” Brian Eno bluntly declared in a 1995 interview published in Wired magazine. “It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control,” he said. An art-rock provocateur, Mr. Eno managed to patronize two cultures in a single blow, fetishizing a free-floating independence in African art that he found lacking in rigid European traditions.
Yet if Mr. Eno’s statement oversimplified a complicated global exchange, relatively little evidence indicates that the Western classical tradition has held as much sway in Africa as it has in other parts of the globe, from Venezuela to China. So Girma Yifrashewa, a 45-year-old Ethiopian pianist and composer who performed at the Issue Project Room in Downtown Brooklyn on Saturday night, offers a rare and fascinating example of aesthetic adaptation and convergence.
