Obsolete Instruments, Centuries-Old Music Offer a Cultural Alternative in South : Southern Liberals Revive Ancient Music

Those who march to a different drum in Mississippi can find liberal camaraderie in the sounds of old instruments such as sacbuts, lutes, krummhorns, cornettos and viola da gambas.

The Mississippi Academy of Ancient Music Inc. is sponsoring recitals reviving old instrumentation and period music, at the same time providing social gatherings for many who may not feel comfortable at Southern black-tie affairs, Academy President Rich McGinnis said.

The academy, organized in 1981, evolved from elaborate Thanksgiving weekend birthday parties given for civil rights activist Ernst Borinski, who died in 1983.

“It was kind of the one place where liberal Jackson could meet,” McGinnis, a Tougaloo College chemistry professor, said of the Borinski parties.

Borinski, a Polish-German Jew, fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1938. He had taught sociology at historically black Tougaloo College since 1947.

He is credited with initiating across the state during the 1950s and 1960s many academic forums at which blacks and whites met to discuss civil rights issues. The former German judge also was undergraduate mentor to many black lawyers, including Reuben Anderson, Mississippi’s only black Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction and the first black graduated from the University of Mississippi Law School.

“Borinski would always have a birthday party just after Thanksgiving. It was in a very European style,” McGinnis recalls. “He would have a little party for his friends from the college and so forth, other friends from Jackson. In fact, actually, it was a lot of civil rights people. . . .

“One time he was at an ACLU auction, and he bought an evening of music from Jean Paul, the St. Andrews (Episcopal) choir master. Jean Paul wanted to play ‘Shadow of Your Smile’ or something like that all night on the piano--but here’s a college professor, so he figures he’d better do something serious. So he brought over some music that they were doing at St. Andrews.”

Borinski liked the very old music that Jean Paul played. A month before his next birthday, he told McGinnis he would like to have a similar performance. McGinnis called on Max Garriott, a tour guide and professional musician in Vicksburg who is now vice president of the Mississippi Academy of Ancient Music.

“I knew Max had composed some Baroque-style music for parties. So he wound up composing special birthday music for Borinski--some of it adapted from Baroque music and some of it original,” McGinnis said.

The parties expanded. There were 250 to 300 guests at Borinski’s 80th birthday party in 1981, he said.

The parties were “one of the crazy things that led into all this,” McGinnis said.

“And it kind of kept that little group of people together” who support the ancient music academy.

McGinnis and Garriott said that the group now gets various grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mississippi Arts Commission and other public and private sources. It sponsors performances by about four professional groups each year before audiences of about 200.

Most of the performers come from Europe, the forefront of the movement to revive historically authentic performances on period instruments, McGinnis said. Jackson is often the groups’ only Southern stop on their American tours.

“We present music from 1200 to 1800--600 years’ worth of music. And if you go to one concert and don’t like it, or if you do like it, it doesn’t mean you’ll react the same way to the next one, which may be completely different music,” McGinnis said.