Discovering Our Musical Mythology
It’s an exuberant time at Eastman. The consecration of the house right across from Kilbourn Hall, the new “Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre”, in concerts with the Eastman Philharmonia and the Rochester Philharmonic; and Meliora, the annual festival celebrating all alumni of the University of Rochester, all commemorate and advance our rich, dynamic presence.
This is also a time to reflect seriously on the purpose of what we do. The economic events of the last year have impacted all of us. These changes haven’t been just financial, of course. Institutional hierarchies and structures and their priorities—all are changing. Be it business, communications, religion, education, or the arts, if there is one thing we can be certain of, it is that many, if not most, of our assumptions have shifted dramatically.
And this leads to an important intersection of what we do—music—and the drama of larger world events. It is at this intersection that our greatest opportunities exist, and therefore give us reason to believe that there is no greater season for the arts.
In Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, the central character, Charlie Citrine, ruminates about an observation heard from time to time, when Americans compare themselves culturally to many of their peers, when they’re trying to figure out their messes and predicaments, trying to figure out who we are as a culture, and sometimes feeling that we’re not measuring up. Charlie says (were he speaking in the present tense), “Maybe America doesn’t need art and inner miracles. It has so many outer ones.”
The outer miracles seem to get the attention. But I predict the inner miracles will intensify by virtue of our finding our unique voice in time, the time in which we live. Maybe one reason is that adversity teaches some of our best lessons, forcing us to reflect on our values. This brings us to a couple of key themes: finding our cause, and finding our myth.
I read an article recently on Gustavo Dudamel, one of the rising stars of the orchestra conducting profession. Dudamel is the 28-year-old sensation who stormed the world stage of YouTube with a youth orchestra from Venezuela, whose performance of Bernstein’s “Dance at the Gym” from West Side Story brought the world’s house down. This particular orchestra was and is the poster child for the El Sistema project, an initiative that, since its inception in the mid-1970s, has transformed some 400,000 of Venezuela’s poorest youth into musicians.
This article on Dudamel was in a recent issue of Vogue. Vogue is a heavy magazine, bulky enough to send you over the aircraft baggage limit at the airport. As an aside—maybe this is a “guy” thing—it’s a chore, a real chore, to wade through 586 pages of fashion and perfume ads, occasionally taken off-task because you’ve just got to try one of those scratch-and-sniff tear outs for perfumes like D&G, or Very Hollywood Michael Kors; or to study these rail-thin models who always look like they’re deeply miffed at somebody, so sullen, sultry, and dark-tempered, dressed in tight earth-tone suits walking bicycles through what looks like Sherwood Forest or standing atop a bar clothed like a jaguar with a hat that looks like a peacock that just got an Afro.
My favorite ad was for Hermés. The model’s sitting stop a dog sled, drawn by a team of huffing and puffing Alaskan Malamutes or Siberian Huskies, somewhere up in the Arctic, I suppose; bright, clear blue sky, and no doubt very, very cold. And in one of those insane paradoxes that only fashion photographers can get away with, around the model’s shoulder is looped a several thousand-dollar, cherry-colored alligator bag—Item #1 on that provisions list for your upcoming Arctic expedition. But it was the written line in the ad, stuck right there in the freezing blue horizon, that got me, something that would not play in Rochester, New York: “Winter … at last!”
This being a fashion magazine, Maestro Dudamel was himself shown in some fashionable formal duds. I checked out his suspenders (silk-satin, from Dion Collections, as if I’d know what that is), and studded cuff links that did not exactly shout that ad slogan, “Some things in life are priceless.” (By the way, I’ve always been somewhat mystified as to why you’d have a fashion designer mess with the tuxedo. A penguin is a penguin is a penguin.)
After I’d barreled through all this fashion overload and enjoyed the artifice, I set to reading the stuff on Dudamel. Classical music always seems to be looking for a savior, but Dudamel’s star power aside, he does sing a few themes that have got us thinking.
About, for example, his incredibly diverse programming. One upcoming LA Phil concert will feature a combination of Verdi, Mozart, and Frank Zappa. Dudamel’s also imagining a festival that will musically unify the Americas, plural. But what Dudamel says about his programming and his future work with the LA Phil, is crucial: “We want to give a message that we can take out the borders.” He goes on to say, “Music is a social project.” For some, that latter statement might seem like superficial philosophizing. For me, this is where one of music’s great rejuvenating opportunities exists.
Deborah Borda, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, displayed more than just opportunistic savvy when she and outgoing music director Esa-Pekka Salonen determined that an LA-Dudamel match was made in heaven: supremely gifted Latino conductor; Latino city; and, in spite of its pestilential fires, floods, earthquakes and occasional riots, America’s new cultural melting pot. Even more powerfully at this particular time, Los Angeles is at the intersection of Central and South America, the United States, Canada, and the immensely influential Pacific Rim. But [going] deeper, Dudamel’s trying to find LA’s voice. And in order to do it, he’s digging through its mythology, what Julia Cameron calls “finding water.”
This is where our individual musical mythologies enter the discussion. The individual musical voice, discovered, then worked and shaped. What is it? In literature it’s the unique musical voice you hear in William Faulkner, or in the sensory roughness of Ernest Hemingway. It’s in the way Harold Pinter deploys those interminable pauses in his plays, as if to force us to feel the sharp edges of his terribly messed-up characters. It’s the voice you hear in Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, the isolated musical sense you get of Norwegian loneliness, the things people have done to one another, and how these lonely folks out in the woods deal so starkly with their indiscretions. Or in the fluid monologues of Robert Hass, the feeling you get that he’s stopped you to address the issue of a rock, or a pelican, or the feeling he gets after reading Goethe.
In music, we are struck when we hear authentic, genuine phrases, in a world where so many of the phrases we hear don’t seem to be genuine or authentic. Correct, perhaps, but sometimes you get the feeling that the performer isn’t speaking what he or she is truly thinking or feeling, but what maybe he or she thinks you or me, or somebody else, wants he or she, to think or feel.
One of my favorite poets is Seamus Heaney, one of a long line of great Irish poets. In Heaney—an eminently musical poet, by the way—there’s no fraudulent relationship between the writer and his subject matter, nor between him and his reader. In an essay he originally wrote as a lecture to the London Royal Society of Literature, in 1974, he squarely hit upon the point of one’s artistic work bearing one’s original voice. In so doing he dug deeper, because certainly for young musicians and perhaps a lot of old ones, we’re constantly asking, “OK, but how do you find that voice?”
And this is the key point I wish to make today, tethered a bit to El Sistema, but frankly much simpler and more obvious. Seamus Heaney would say that beyond craft, beyond practiced, disciplined accomplishment, it is your relationship to the world that is the key. And before that, how necessary it is for you to lunge into world-experience, not just academic experience, for this is what will give your unique voice resonance, enthusiasm, and authenticity.
One of Heaney’s first poems was called “Digging.” He says of this poem, “This was the first place where I felt I had done more than make an arrangement of words: I felt that I had let down a shaft into my real life. The facts and surfaces of the thing were true, but more important, the excitement that came from naming them gave me … a kind of confidence. I didn’t care who thought what about it: somehow, it had surprised me by coming out with a stance and an idea that I would stand over.” He goes on to say that in his upbringing, the purpose of a literary education was to “turn the student’s ear into a poetic bugging device, so that a piece of verse … could be identified by its diction, tropes and cadences.”
This is somewhat similar to the excellent education in music that a place like Eastman will give you. Your teachers, be it in theory, performance, composition, or music education, will ask you to become a musical bugging device, to discover the individual imprint of different musical styles. And also, by the way, to feel these styles.
Poets like to use music as an inspiring metaphor. Heaney finishes his passage talking about that authentic voice inherent in each of us: “This is the absolute register to which your proper music has to be tuned.” Years later, Heaney had another epiphany of the “real world” sort. He became aware that much of Ireland’s preserved cultural artifacts originated in the bogs, where things (and people) were buried and in some cases remarkably preserved. He began to conceive a kind of poetry that was “lying beneath the floor of memory.” More blatantly, the buried Irish past, linked to Irish myth and somehow, in the poet’s mind and work, melded into the present history and condition of Ireland.
And so now comes your opportunity, our opportunity: discovering our musical mythology. But even more importantly, the mythology of our roots. As Americans, we tend to take ourselves to task because our past, relatively short, seems somehow vacant of outer miracles: significant, culture-bending events. Yet if one were to read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, and read of what our forebears went through, about the immense human toil buried in soils not far from here, about the unique role that people who lived in Rochester played in that enormous drama, about the role that upstate New York played in that pivotal moment in history, that’s just one piece of the history. “To define and interpret the present by bringing it into significant relationship with the past,” as Heaney says, is a form of searching for our musical mythology.
So I close, as we dive into the new academic year, not with an argument for another El Sistema. I think it would be great to hand every man, woman, and child a clarinet or bassoon or trombone, and have them play in an organized ensemble, in order to save classical music. But genuine, authentic music is more than that. For our students, the experiences availed to you at the Eastman School of Music will be as important as those gleaned from your families, your peers, your teachers, and yes, people out there who do not speak or play your language. But most of all, you and your unique history, which presents a spectacularly rich digging ground.
That’s what we mean here at Eastman when we say that we’re making music matter. In finding our musical voice we discover our ancestral musical undercurrent. But we must also, to become authentic, mesh with the diverse human elements that enrich our collective voice. Somewhere in there, we’ll be able to say we discovered our own musical mythology.