Last Friday I spoke to the annual conference of Chamber Music America, a wonderful organization that binds together chamber music organizations across the country and suggests how they can function in a seemingly indifferent culture. The conference was titled "Found In The Shuffle: Authenticity in Today’s Musical Market." The organizers had read my essay "Listen To This," from last year, and were interested in hearing more along the same lines. What I said seemed to strike a chord, and I was very moved by the response. Below are the first few paragraphs of the speech. I’ll add the rest once Chamber Music America has the chance to put it on their website.
I’m going to begin by quoting from Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Before I do, I want to reassure you about my use of the word "collapse."
This is not going to be one of those death-of-classical-music
lamentations, a woe-betide-us, the-end-is-nigh, the-sky-is
falling-this-year-too kind of affair. I am going to strike a pretty
optimistic note today. I tend to usually, because it’s simply more fun
to be an optimist than a pessimist. Optimists are never pleasantly
surprised, they say. Well, pessimists are never pleasant. In any case,
while I do think that the future of classical music, so called, is, if
not exactly bright, then something other than bleak, I do admit that
the possibility of failure, of an eventual and complete end to
everything we hold dear, is perfectly real. And, as Diamond’s book
suggests, in reference to societies and civilizations that have bit the
dust of history, we will fail, in essence, if we choose to fail, if we
want to fail. There are literally hundreds of passages in this book
that have an eerie relevance to the situation in which we find
ourselves. For example: “It is painfully difficult to decide whether to
abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming
incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer
to die than to compromise and live?”
Diamond gives the example of the Norse settlers who died out on the shores of Greenland. They refused to adapt to the way of living of the
Inuit people, who had figured out the only way to survive in the
Greenland climate. “In trying to carry on as Christian farmers, the
Greenland Norse in effect were deciding that they were prepared to die
as Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit.” He goes on: “Perhaps a
crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to
hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when
times change.” Among the most damaging of those values, Diamond finds,
are religious ones, such as those espoused by the Norse in Greenland,
which prevented them from adapting to their new climate. And there are
secular equivalents of religious values, quasi-religious notions that
we cling to even after the conditions that created them no longer
exist. These are values dictated by “wooden-headedness, persistence in
error, mental standstill or stagnation,” to quote from another book on
a similar subject, Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. These
self-destructively high-minded values are often rooted in a deep fear
of what the world might be like without the accustomed way of doing
things — a fear of losing one’s identity. It can also come from pure,
simple, close-minded pride, from a contempt for the unfamiliar and the
other and the unknown.
Now, who
chooses to fail, who wants to fail? No one consciously does, I suppose,
but there is an attitude which amounts to the same thing, and it can be
detected in some corners of the classical world. It’s the attitude of,
well, things seem to be going down hill, so the best thing to do is to
hold on to one’s dignity. Kind of like Mr. and Mrs. Astor on the Titanic,
or Victor Garber in that movie, holding his head high as the water laps
about his feet, his chest, his chin. After all, there can be a kind of
excitement, even a strange elation, in bearing witness to the demise of
an art, in being the last man standing. I detect an eagerness to see
the end, an appetite for destruction, to take a phrase from Axl Rose.
But the music refuses to die according to the schedules that doomsayers
have devised for it. And, in any case, the death of a great institution
or of a genre or of a style is not the same thing as the death of an
art. It can feel like death, but it is only change and evolution. The Titanic
was one ship that sank: human transportation went on. Consider another
apocalyptic metaphor, the extinction of the dinosaurs. The death of one
set of species was not the end of life on earth. It cleared room for a
new host of species. When the age of the dinosaurs came to an end, the
age of the mammals began.
Perhaps I don’t need to spell out for you
where exactly this metaphor might be heading, and why I feel rather
more comfortable using it in front of a gathering of chamber musicians,
instead of, say, a gathering of symphony orchestra musicians or
administrators. But I’ll go ahead and spell it out anyway. All the
major symphony orchestras in America could collapse tomorrow, and life
would go on, musical life would go on. The symphony orchestra in its
modern form has existed for about a century and a half. We had hundreds
of years of musical history before that, an endless catalogue of
masterpieces and legendary musicians. We functioned without the
orchestra then, and we’d be able to function without it in the future.
I’m not in any way wishing for the collapse of the orchestra. I’d be
deeply disheartened by such a turn of events. It might mean among other
things that I’d be out of a job, as would many music critics around the
country. But I’d be very interested to see what happened next. The
point is, I wish that for every story in the media about troubled
orchestras there was a matching story about a new composer-led
ensemble, a new chamber series, a new program of professional musicians
working in schools, and so on. There are more professional musicians
than ever before. More people are going to live concerts of classical
music than ever before. There are far more composers writing music
—ten, maybe twenty times as many as a hundred years ago. But musical
life lacks a center. It exists off the radar screen of the major media.
It’s actually kind of exciting when you think about it. If I were in
the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I’d
make a virtue of this. Classical music is the new underground.