by David Byrne
Photo by Monika Rittershaus
But is it even right to think of classical music as a business? Or are we to believe it has a higher civic purpose? Even with all that private and governmental support, a lot of symphonies are struggling to hold on to their audiences and make ends meet. In October of 2010, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra wanted to require their players to work for community outreach programs: engagement, education, and chamber music services, among other adaptations to the financial squeeze they found themselves in. This would have brought an unprecedented number of symphony musicians into classrooms and art centers. The contract would also allow for greater accessibility through streaming options, CD releases, and digital downloads. The musicians, however, wanted things to remain pretty much as they were, and they went on strike for twenty-six-weeks. Well, have you seen Detroit in the last couple of decades? The symphony lies on the edge of the center of downtown, beyond which lies a wasteland. From the symphony building one can see empty lots and crumbling, abandoned houses, formerly elegant hotels and boarded-up mansions. More than half the city population has left. Few of those who remain in the city center are symphony patrons. The tax base that would normally fund a symphony hall along with private donors isn’t there anymore. In April of 2011, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra musicians agreed to the new terms and ratified the contract.
Other cities have followed the same pattern. The Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy in the spring of 2011. Joseph Swensen, a violinist and conductor, wrote in to the New York Times with his thoughts on this state of affairs.
[The big orchestras] have become symbols not only of Western civilization at its best, but of prosperity and the quality of life in the cities, which they serve. But these huge institutional orchestras are like imperialist armies that have over-extended themselves… [Their musicians are] overworked, fanatically dedicated, highly trained and highly paid people… [They are confronted with] the realities of absurdly limited rehearsal time, an abysmally limited repertoire, incredibly high expectations for consistent technical perfection and little possibility for anything one could call personal or individual creativity and what do you get? Well, in addition to very low job satisfaction, you get performances which inspire the phrase: “Once you’ve heard one major American symphony orchestra’s Beethoven 5 these days, you’ve pretty much heard them all!22
Photo by Claudia Uribe
In his recent books, Alex Ross has been delicately pointing out that a lot of North American orchestras are indeed stuck in the mud as far as their repertoire goes. His unspoken assumption is that some more adventurous fare might draw a younger generation of listeners and keep some of these places from going under as their subscription audience ages into oblivion. I’m not sure it would work, not in those traditional venues anyway. The venues are physically and acoustically made for a particular kind of music and a very specific way of enjoying it. To this end, the New York City Opera that used to be based in the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center tried doing some wonderful and adventurous programming that I really enjoyed—I saw a John Zorn piece there! But the noble intentions of the director may just be swimming against the tide. The $3 million generated in ticket sales didn’t come anywhere near covering the annual $31 million budget for the opera series in that building. They have moved out now, and are looking for somewhere else to mount their productions. These kinds of venues also have a well-established reputation for being staid and conservative, while the programming of adventurous fare in funkier and smaller venues like Le Poisson Rouge, Julliard’s Merkin Hall, and elsewhere have, in a limited way, been more successful as far as getting a new generation in the door to hear something other than pop songs in a club setting. These programmers feel free to mix and match with complete disregard for any idea of high and low music. I saw tUnE-yArDs do a show at Merkin that consisted of Merrill Garbus accompanied by a ten-piece a cappella group called Roomful of Teeth. The walls really are coming down—a little.
THE BILBAO EFFECT
New concert halls and museums went up like crazy all around the world during the economic bubble. It was not the programming that was drawing audiences in many cases, but the buildings themselves. That’s what happened when the Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain: tourists had a reason to visit a place that many had never heard of before. It was truly amazing to behold how a new museum and a Calatrava bridge could change a whole town. The museum recently had a show of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work (which had been previously exhibited in New York’s own Guggenheim), along with a permanent-collection hodgepodge—not exactly reasons to make a special trip. But people do. The city was a port and industrial backwater that had seen better days, and now the whole town has enjoyed a revival thanks to high-end culture. Other cities tried to copy this model—if you build it, they will come.
Based on the Bilbao experience, one answer to the question “What good are the arts?” seems to be, “They can revitalize a whole town.” LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall looks almost exactly like the Bilbao Guggenheim. New York almost built one in lower Manhattan, a place that hardly suffers from a shortage of tourists. Everybody wanted one. Famous architects drew up plans for wild new edifices in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Dallas, Ft. Worth, and St. Petersburg. Alice Walton (an heiress to the Walmart fortune) just opened a massive museum to show off her collection in Bentonville, Arkansas; and Russian “businessman”-in-exile Roman Abramovich has funded his girlfriend Dasha’s new contemporary art museum in Moscow. This is all fine. If the oligarchs of the world want to build their own culture palaces, symphony halls, and opera houses and fund the work that goes in them, great—who could possibly complain? It’s their money, and why shouldn’t they spend it on what are largely harmless showcases for their newfound good taste? I was surprised to learn that the amount of state support for a place like Lincoln Center—the whole complex of which has an annual operating budget of close to half a billion dollars—is relatively small. Twenty million or so. The place is open to the public, and there are reasonably priced seats for all, but it is still essentially a massive clubhouse for a certain set.
Since the crash, most cities know that their hopes for new culture palaces will have to be deferred, but the ideal of a museum, symphony hall, or similar showcase as a symbol of the soul of a city remains potent and popular. A bunch of LA museums were given a bailout by real estate king Eli Broad, but not every city has a Broad who can come to the rescue.
NURTURING AMATEURS
In Guadalajara, Mexico, there’s a former movie theater called the Roxy that has just reopened as a combination bar, gallery, and performance space. It’s a pretty raw, dusty, bare-bones space, but if the walls could talk they would speak of some pretty memorable days when Radiohead or local punk bands played there.J
The culturally dispossessed felt welcome at the Roxy. Rogelio Flores Manríquez, who ran it, wrote in a press release celebrating the reopening of the space, “Culture is formed by tortas ahogadas, Mickey Mouse, television, advertising, pop music, opera and the expressions, traditions, and customs that embody and provide a sense of identity to a given community.”23 This inclusive approach to culture can not only make more people happy than the traditional models, but it can act as an insurance policy against all kinds of alternatives. Kids who have nowhere else to channel their pent-up energy often turn it against their own communities, or even against themselves. If they are culturally excluded and don’t feel like a part of society, then why obey its rules?
We should broaden our idea of what culture is. In Japan, there used to be no word for art. There, the process of making and drinking a pot of tea evolved into what we in the West might say is an art form. This ritualized performance of a fairly mundane activity embodied a heightened version of a ubiquitous attitude—that utilitarian objects and activities, made and performed with integrity, consciously and mindfully, could be art. The Zen philosopher Daisetz Suzuki said, “Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom, I am swallowing the whole u
niverse with it, and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space.”24 That’s a lot for a cup of tea, but one can see that elevation of the mundane in a lot of areas and daily activities in the East. The poets, writers, and musicians of the Beat generation were inspired by this Eastern idea. They too saw the transcendent in the everyday and saw nobility in the activities of ordinary people. This is an almost Cagean view of the arts—that it’s all around you if you merely adjust the way you look and listen.
Ellen Dissanayake tells us that some African societies have the same word for “art” and “play.” Even in English, we “play” an instrument. This attitude toward art and performance is in complete opposition to the Western idea of monuments and great works. It views culture as ephemeral and fleeting, like music. It’s an experience (again, like music), not an unchangeable fixed image. Music, in this view, is a way of living, a way of being in the world, not a thing you hold in your hand and play on a device.
Dissanayake writes that art that engages the mind and hands, that is not just passive connoisseurship, can act as an antidote, for our contentious and alienated relationship to our own societies. She sees art-making as capable of instilling self-discipline, patience, and the ability to resist immediate gratification. You invest your time and energy in your future. This all reminds me of the recent rise of “maker” culture—Etsy and a host of other popular companies and fairs around the world that encourage amateur creation. There’s a growing movement, a real turning away not just from the passive absorption of culture, but from art and music as mere vehicles for expressing concepts. The hand has been brought back into the lives of a new generation. The head is still there, but there is an acknowledgement that part of our understanding and experience of the world comes through and from our bodies.
Carlinhos Brown from A Tarde Online
In some communities, music and performance have successfully transformed whole neighborhoods as profoundly as the museum did in Bilbao. In Salvador, Brazil, musician Carlinhos Brown established several music and culture centers in formerly dangerous neighborhoods. In Candeal, where Brown was born, local kids were encouraged to join drum groups, sing, and compose songs and stage performances in homemade costumes.K
The kids, energized by these activities, began to turn away from dealing drugs. Being malandros was no longer their only life option—being musicians and playing together in a group looked like more fun and was more satisfying. Little by little, the crime rate dropped in those neighborhoods; the hope returned. And some great music was made, too.
A similar thing took place in the Vigário Geral favela located near the airport in Rio. It had been the scene of a massacre in which a police helicopter opened fire and killed scores of kids during a drug raid. Life in that favela was about as dead end as you could get. A cultural center eventually opened under the direction of José Junior and, possibly inspired by Brown’s example, they began to encourage the local kids to stage musical events, some of which dramatized the tragedy that they were still recovering from. The group AfroReggae emerged out of this effort, and, as with the Brown projects in Salvador, life in the favela improved. The dealers left; their young recruits were all making music. That, to me, is the power of music—of making music. Music can permanently change people’s lives in ways that go far beyond being emotionally or intellectually moved by a specific composition. That happens too, then it passes, and often something else lingers. Music is indeed a moral force, but mostly when it is part of the warp and woof of an entire community.
I visited José Junior’s center and, to be honest, the music I heard was not always among the best stuff I’ve ever heard in Brazil. That’s not the point though. I worked with Junior recently on music for a documentary about alternatives to the war on drugs. Maybe the specific work, the individual song, isn’t always what’s most important. Maybe it’s not essential that the music is always of the very top-most quality, as Keynes insisted. Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed or how immaculately tight a band is.
In San Francisco, a former elementary school teacher named David Wish became frustrated when the music curriculum was cancelled in some Bay Area schools. He started a program called Little Kids Rock that encourages children to learn how to play songs they already like, usually on the guitar. “The first thing I eliminated was the canon,” he said. No more following the ingrained program that made kids learn “Little Brown Jug” before graduating to more complicated, often classical pieces. Only the few kids who had extraordinary abilities and stamina or parental encouragement have persevered with the traditional approach. The rest abandoned learning to play an instrument. Another radical thing Wish did was to “eliminate the use of musical notation.”25 I have to admit that I do often wish I could read music way better than I do. But I, too, was thrilled when I first began to pick out tunes and riffs by ear based on the pop songs I loved. That rapid and profound feedback—hearing myself playing something cool that I loved—was exciting, and it spurred me to continue playing. Wish’s next innovation was to add two elements that had never even been considered as part of the music curriculum before—improvisation and composition. The kids were encouraged to make up solos and to eventually write their own songs, sometimes alone and often collaborating.
Critics complained that teaching kids simple pop tunes was dumbing down their repertoire and would spell the death of classical music, which they’d never discover otherwise. The justification for this argument is that pop music is everywhere, kids will hear it anyway, and alternatives that they might not otherwise encounter need to be introduced. However, this seems to be a fallacy— as one LKR teacher and classical guitar player in LA said, “Rock music turned me on to classical music, not the other way around.”26 Wish showed that most kids have a vast reservoir of creativity just waiting for permission to come out, waiting for a forum, a context—just like when someone opens a music club!— within which their feelings and ideas can be expressed. It seems to me that here is where funding should go.
Maybe the most successful music education program in the world originated in a parking garage in Venezuela in 1975. It’s called El Sistema (the system), and it was begun by economist and musician José Antonio Abreu with just eleven kids. Having now produced high-level musicians, two hundred youth orchestras, 330,000 players, and quite a few conductors (Gustavo Dudamel was a product of this program), it is being adopted by countries all over the world. When Sir Simon Rattle first witnessed El Sistema, he said, “I have seen the future of music.”27
This program starts with kids as young as two or three years old, and though they don’t play instruments at that age, they begin to learn rhythm and body coordination. There is no testing or admissions policy—all are welcome. The focus, though, is mainly on kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.
90 percent of the students in the Venezuelan branch of El Sistema are poor, and the program is entirely free. If the kids get to be really good, to the level where they can play professionally, then they begin to receive a stipend so they don’t have to miss classes because of work.
Of course, this system has a huge effect on the lives of the kids and their communities, far beyond their enjoyment of music. As Abreu says, “Essentially this is a system that fights poverty… A child’s physical poverty is overcome by the spiritual richness that music provides.” When asked if his music program was a vehicle for social change, he replied, “Without a doubt that is what is happening in Venezuela.” The kids who might otherwise feel that their options in life are extremely limited are passionate about the program. “From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he is no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress, heading for a professional level, who’ll later become a citizen.”28
Much of the music the kids learn in El Sistema is classical, so I have to temper my bias toward pop music here, as the program has achieved its
goals many times over. In the smaller villages they might play guitars, drums, and a marimba, so it’s not all classics, but it’s the classical repertoire, the youth orchestras, that are the main focus of El Sistema.
Abreu is now retired, but he guided the system through ten administrations—right and left wing—in Venezuela. I’d venture that this non-partisanship is essential to the survival of these programs, as well as the fact that El Sistema falls under the Ministry of Family, Health and Sports, not the cultural or educational departments. This designation might have helped make the program immune to the arts biases that crop up here and everywhere—I know I have some. Hugo Chávez has increased the funding for this program, and naturally he would like to take some credit for its success, but it started long before he was on the scene. But it was smart of him to invest in the future of his country, rather than cutting it off at the knees as like No Child Left Behind program did to the arts in US schools. As a result of No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on test scores, US schools gutted their arts programs by more than half in most states. If Venezuela can find the means to fund music programs, why can’t we?
A similar program in the UK is called Youth Music, but the kids learn pop, jazz and rap—not just the classics. In one depressed district, Morecambe, where there had been territorial gang conflict for years, it was suggested that the kids use rap to express their frustrations and to talk about their situation. A local bricklayer named Jack says, “When I was sixteen, [I wrote] my own songs about my attitude and gun and knife crime, and how to stop it.” The neighborhoods eventually declared a kind of truce, though tensions remain— but it’s a start.
In Liverpool, Youth Music is associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and has been adopted by a school called St. Mart of the Angels. Peter Garden, the director of the project, said, “The percentage of children who improved their reading by at least two levels in 2008–9 was 36 percent. For 2009–10, it was 84 percent. The figure for mathematics increased from 35 percent to 75 percent.” In Northern Ireland, kids have turned away from joining loyalist or paramilitary groups to play music—the effects of these programs go way beyond music and even beyond improving overall academic achievement.29