The decapitated tradition

While recently looking for inspiration while drafting a cover letter I came across an essay I wrote about three years ago for an unsuccessful grad school application.  Though perhaps a tad overwrought, I think it articulates the core idea of The Loose Filter Project - using new concert music to help establish a broader cultural context for all concert music.  In practice this means playing more new music and altering the concert experience (perhaps Stuart can comment on how all the concert-going experience itself - venue, atmosphere, etc. -  affects how we perceive music).

I was having a discussion a few of days ago with my good friend and grad school roommate Scott Harrison on his Facebook page  (you'll have to scroll down a ways) that centered around Pops concerts and the role they play for orchestras.  My point was that because the Pops experience is so different from the regular concert experience that few people, if any, will be convinced to try out the later even if they enjoyed the former.  Scott suggested that perhaps large orchestral institutions aren't the best place to implement such a broad recontextualzation.

I think that Stuart and I have accepted the position of this essay a given for years now, but I think it is still worth publishing.  As far as addressing the main problem  - "societal relevance lost" - playing more new music is only part of the equation.  We still have to "reattach" new music to the great concert music tradition, and we have to continually rethink the concert experience.  We have to tinker and experiment in order to find out what works and what doesn't, and we have to be able to fail.  Given that, perhaps Scott is right - big orchestras aren't the right venues for experimentation and innovation.  Perhaps they're too big to fail.

Several years ago I was conducting my undergraduate wind ensemble in a movement from Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy.  As I indicated the crescendo at the end of the first phrase there was a miraculous change.  For the duration of that crescendo, just a few short seconds, there ceased to be a band, a conductor, or even a rehearsal hall.  All that existed was that harmonically pungent crescendo.  As I stood in the hall afterward, shaking and light-headed, I knew I had found my purpose.  But I wonder now, what exactly is the conductor’s purpose, and the purpose of the artist in general, in society?

Bill Moyers: Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today?  Who are our shamans?  Who interprets unseen things for us?

Joseph Campbell: It is the function of the artist to do this.  The artist is the one who communicates myth for today.

If I were a composer, the above dialogue would be directly applicable, but as a conductor I must approach this interpretation of unseen things in a more roundabout way, as a recreator. As musicians, we breathe life into great artworks, animating their unseen things so that our audience can experience them for themselves, because music is not merely the printed score, but a personal, internal experience that can have profound effects. 

Meaningful internal experiences are all to rare today, the results of which are painfully evident, as people take cues from everywhere and everyone but themselves for what to think, feel, and believe.  We have lost that ability to look within, and one of the symptoms of which is concert music’s loss of relevance.  The great musical works are to many like great novels written in a strange and incomprehensible language. As a musician, it is my function to help the listener experience these great works in our cannon, both new and old, and act as a translator of sorts.

Now, the orchestral community has recognized this problem, i.e. societal relevance lost, but only a few orchestras have grasped its cause and acted accordingly.  As is clear, we cannot simply browbeat our audience with the “What we do is important, therefore you must like it” approach (this is especially true in fundraising), even if you have a trendy cocktail hour before hand.  We must approach our audience on their own terms and demonstrate to them the important role music can play in their lives.

Exacerbating classical music’s marginalization in society-at-large is the fact that the majority of our orchestras severely under-represent the current manifestations of our art, i.e. don’t play enough new music.  The music of our time, our culture, is the continuation of a centuries-old tradition, and to neglect it is to decapitate that tradition.  As an example, ask yourself this.  How many non-musician 25-30 year-olds do you know who have a cultural context for Beethoven outside of A Clockwork Orange, or some other pop culture reference?  The importance of living composers is that they provide a context for concert music in all of our lives, because their music comes from our shared culture and has resonance as such.  This assertion is clearly supported by the success of Salonen in Los Angeles, Tilson Thomas in San Francisco, and groups such as Alarm Will Sound in New York, and the London Sinfonietta. 

I am by no means saying that we abandon Beethoven, far from it!   The prospect of performing Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms, et. al., is why I conduct.  What we should do is work back to these great composers and thereby provide a context for them by programming old and new side-by-side, without apology or qualification.  We simply cannot ghettoize living composers with the occasional short ride.  Instead, we should rightly place them in the repertoire and let our audience know that we do indeed practice a living art.  

The decapitated tradition by Dustin Soiseth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.loosefilter.com.
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