Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
I was very moved by Henry Wyatt's cri du coeur over disappointing press support for, and audience attendance at, the North Jersey Bach Festival 2005. But bad news about classical music surprises me less and less, I am sorry to say, or about any other serious art, besides, as we roll onward in the 21st century.
Dr. Wyatt excoriates the press as well as music educators at the college and pre-college levels for dereliction of duty, or some such crime against music. Therefore the audience was small.
That's nonsense. The audience was small because the audience is small - by which I mean the audience for serious music, as serious music, is decreasing exponentially. But give 'em Tchaikovsky and picnics and fireworks, and they will still come. No disrespect to Tchaikovsky, picnics or fireworks.
Dr. Wyatt somehow fails to grasp that the serious tradition of Western art had spent all of its interest circa 1960, give or take, and has been spending down its capital ever since. The triumph of mass media across the board of public consciousness in the 1950s, in Europe as well as the United States, altered the grounds of cultural understanding irremediably.
One may join Dr. Wyatt in using the word "vulgarian," but this word has no real meaning in confronting the problems of culture today. It provides no answer, no remedy, for the appalling decline of cultural standards in the United States and in Western civilization < itself a term that gets foggier as time goes on.
In any case, given the facts on the ground, it's useless and counterproductive to attack such endangered upholders of the Western cultural tradition as classical music writers and classical music educators for the faint sound of their trumpets. They're doing the best that they can, so far as I can see, in a cultural environment increasingly either apathetic or downright hostile.
So what is to be done? Well, if you really believe that the music of J.S. Bach is essential to the survival of the human spirit as we've known it, then the time is long overdue for a declaration of war. Gosh, such rhetorical excess: this guy must be nuts. Otherwise, in American terms, it means that we put our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor behind Bach and everything that Bach represents. We put politesse behind and we get busy. And we go far beyond letters to the editor. We start finding ways to fight back. Mr. Redmond uses a more colorful phrase we decline to print - Ed.]
Michael Redmond
North Plainfield, NJMichael Redmond was the principal classical music critic of the Star-Ledger from 1974 to 1996. He was the first journalist to receive the New Jersey State Council on the Arts' Distinguished Service Award as well as many other honors.
Michael Redmond is a distinguished critic whom I have read over the years with much pleasure, "whose heart," to quote the late Mr. Lincoln, "I have always supposed to be right."
As to my failure "to grasp that the serious tradition of Western art had spent all of its interest circa 1960," etc., it is hardly evident that my grasp is less than firm because I have not decried the parlous state of high culture in this piece. Some of my readers will recall that, back in 2002, I wrote about "a fundamental problem: the disappearance of high culture from most of American society, aided and abetted by greedy free-market forces that regard all genres of music as commodities; by academics whose anti-elitist posturings include "cultural studies," "world music", and other forms of dumbing-down, in the service of an imagined agenda of social justice, all packaged in post-modernist jargon; by composers who, like Milton Babbitt famously declaring "Who cares if you listen?" write music no one can understand, save their colleagues on graduate theory and composition faculties; by audiences who won't listen to anything but comfort food of familiar chestnuts; by public schools that drop music and art when money becomes tight; by conservative politicians who fight culture wars but sabotage public funding for the arts; and by an intellectually and culturally slack public that gorges itself on cultural junk food.
Mr. Redmond says that "it's useless and counterproductive to attack such endangered upholders of the Western cultural tradition as classical music writers and classical music educators for the faint sound of their trumpets. They're doing the best that they can, so far as I can see, in a cultural environment increasingly either apathetic or downright hostile."
Are they doing the best they can? Try convincing a university music department that a year's survey of music history, taught out of a standard textbook, by an instructor from the instrumental faculty - not a music historian or theorist - is not sufficient. Try enlightening a department chair that courses on Beethoven, on opera, on Baroque music, on Ellington, on gender and sexuality issues in art music, are not frivolities but necessary for a university-level department; and that it is not enough that their music education graduates may know how to teach even though they don't know what to teach.
My university isn't unique; I hear the same from colleagues at other schools. Go on-line and access the course offerings for almost any college or university you like, especially our public institutions. Note the plentitude of courses on pop music, and the meagerness of courses on classical music - your tax dollars at work. Rutgers is the happy exception: when a Beethoven course was offered to all undergraduates a few years ago, it was oversubscribed; prospective students had to be turned away. Whenever I play for my students (almost none of whom are music majors) a Prokofiev piano sonata or a Machaut motet their eyes widen and glow in wonder at the musical beauty they have heretofore never experienced.
Pardon me, gentle reader, if I consider these items prima-facie evidence that a desire for serious culture exists amongst young people and can be cultivated with a little effort and vision by those whose profession it is to educate and cultivate. Is it thus too much to ask music teachers to inform their pupils of classical music performance in their area? Or to take them to concerts? When I taught horn privately, I did these simple things. Perhaps I was too ambitious, too overreaching in conceiving my purpose as going beyond the teaching of mere technical competence on an instrument, but I believed in educating the whole musician. I can only hope that some teachers are similarly overreaching.
Does the word "vulgarian" have no meaning in confronting our present cultural decay, as Mr. Redmond avers? In a scathing comment on commercial broadcasting a few years ago Bill Moyers wrote that "We are assaulted by sentimentality that works up emotional responses, unwarranted by and in excess of the occasion. We are assaulted by pornography that focuses on one powerful drive at the expense of the total personality." The truth of this becomes indubitable after watching MTV for a half-hour, or by scanning the FM dial.
Am I too harsh on the newspapers? Might there be some possible correlation, some delicate gossamer of causality, that connects such factors as the decline of music audiences, the shrinking readership of Mr. Redmond's old paper, and the far lesser amount of music and other cultural journalism found in its pages, compared to that golden era when Mort Pye was its principled editor and Mr. Redmond's excellent writing was one of that paper's jewels?
Henry Wyatt's piece in the vol. 5 no. 19 issue of CNJSJ was right on. I have "written" this article in my mind at least 100 times. I would be happy to sit down and discuss with you what can be done, if you would like.
My cynical formula for getting one student to a concert is this: 1 hour to reach a music teacher at a school to schedule a string workshop.
1 hour for the workshop.
1 hour scanning photo of young violinist with our master teacher and sending it to various local papers.
1 hour calling and collecting published photos and writing a personal letter to parents of said child, stressing the importance of bringing him to concerts, in particular, our Mountain Lakes chamber music concerts free to students.
1 performance the child and his father attend, never again to be seen.
No wonder I get weary!
Sincerely,
Mariel Bossert
Mariel Bossert is the director of Lyrica Chamber Music in Chatham.
Mr. Redmond suggest that it is time to "fight back" in defense of classical music. What does this mean to you? How does one take off the gloves and (to mix sports metaphors) really step up to the plate? This seems to suggest a degree of in-your-face aggressiveness. If so, how and to whom should it be directed? If it is time to populate the barricades (making yet another wild metaphor switch), what do we ask those folks to do when they have arrived with their great enthusiasm? In short, how do we become an offensive rather than a defensive force?
We solicit your answers.