“The Alchemy of the Muse”

Inaugural Address, October 2007, Dean Douglas Lowry

Remarks prepared for the investiture of Douglas Lowry
as the sixth dean of the Eastman School of Music

Eastman Theatre
27 October 2007

I think it’s fair to say that Eastman’s vaunted legacy has carved a defining swath through musical culture since its founding. For these achievements, Eastman has been blessed with considerable national and international acknowledgement.

Yet if the dynamics of global connectivity have taught us anything, it is that institutions must be nimble and ultra-creative in order to evolve productively, constantly re-imagining their goals and aspirations by looking at themselves through eyes other than their own.

So before we talk about the remarkable opportunities for growth before us here at Eastman, I’d like to share a couple of simple personal thoughts about this mysterious thing we call music.

Truth told, we don’t really know what happens when streams of musical sounds move through time and space and hit the radar dishes of our psyches. It defies explanation because explanations are verbal, and music is a non-verbal art form. So our attempts to do so remain highly speculative. Philosophers have tried. For example, Suzanne Langer once described music as an emotive analogue to experiences inside us. Some have even argued for music as a separate form of “intelligence”.

Others call music an energy impulse that has the power to excite in different ways, depending on how we’re hard-wired. Music can excite bodily movement through space, as in dance. It can activate humming or singing, invoke emotional states, present us with intensely intriguing sonic puzzles, accompany spiritual or aesthetic experiences, or simply serve as an intriguing and relaxing backdrop to drinks or dinner.

Music’s source is, according to the Greeks, the muse. The muse was one of nine Greek goddesses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who presided over our arts.  (Notice that Zeus appointed goddesses, and not gods, to watch over us.) The word ‘muse’ can be a verb, as in, “to think or meditate in silence.” But ‘muse’ is also a noun, as in, “an inspiration that motivates a poet, artist, or thinker.” Listen to that: an inspiration that motivates a poet, artist, or thinker.

Now alchemy was “a form of medieval chemistry and speculative philosophy that attempted to discover an elixir of life and a method for transmuting base metals into gold.” But it also refers to “any seemingly magical process of transmuting ordinary materials into something of true merit.” A brilliant theatrical set designer I used to work with in Cincinnati, Paul Shortt, once said that he was really in the business of creating illusion through visual imagery. He went on to say that no matter what your art, you’re essentially doing the same thing, be you poet, painter, composer, or performer. Masks, illusions, alchemy, but deployed to tell some version of some truth, giving credence to Oscar Wilde’s statement, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” 

Hence, the alchemy of the muse.

At Eastman, our métier is the work of the creative imagination, be it the composer, performer, scholar or teacher. And as for the Eastman School, I believe fundamentally that the most powerful, provocative, inspirational, and motivating impulse in any organization or human being is the creative impulse. Correspondingly, the most effective organizations, be they educational or artistic or business; the most effective and compelling stage plays, musicals, films, pieces of music, novels, poems … are those where the creative impulse is flying high.

Which brings me to one of Eastman’s brightest accomplishments: its adventuresome spirit of entrepreneurship, its creativity. Through innovative programs like the Institute for Music Leadership, students are afforded opportunities to explore alternative means for advancing their music, to interact with major players in the field. But they also learn via metaphors from other art forms, like learning audition techniques from actors. This is another muse at work at Eastman: the muse of the musical entrepreneur.

Now we don’t define “entrepreneur” in the strictly “business” sense. Some in the arts are actually offended by use of this word “entrepreneur”. Though business is certainly woven in, we use the purest and broadest definition: “a person who organizes and manages an enterprise … with considerable initiative.”

If I look through the roster of prominent Eastman alums – Ron Carter, Renée Fleming, Dominick Argento, Chuck Mangione, Mitch Miller, to name a few – it all began with, to be sure, a significant gift of music. But what sets these artists apart is initiative. There’s something about these innovators, for they are people with initiative, a particularly restless, active, dissatisfied, intensely curious element that fuels their constant creativity.

And so, behavioral initiative is at the basis for our vision of what I call The Eastman Advantage.

Vision is, of course, moot without focus. Though we work in music, one of the most ambiguous of mediums, this does not mean we don’t have to focus as an institution. Frankly, this is no different for the musical poet, be it composer or performer. The poet W.H. Auden put this spin on it: “Great creative work is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” A great way to characterize the act of composing and making music, and of the tasks before us here at Eastman.

Focus is difficult, made even worse in this era of the intensely constant distraction. But focus is necessary. Igor Stravinsky, one of the music world’s most creative geniuses, wrote in his Poetics of Music, “The creator’s function is to sift the elements he receives, for human activity must impose limits upon itself.” He goes on, “My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself … my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action …”

Another way to say it might be, “An artist is most free when the limits are most severe.”

But vision doesn’t just require imagination and focus, it also requires urgency. And so I’m going to bring up a sensitive topic. I’ll kind of come in the back door on this one.

We are a goal-obsessed civilization, a mode that has accomplished some incredible things. Skyscrapers, advances in medicine, technology, space travel, the Eastman School of Music. But as the sages tell us, there’s a downside to every upside. The upside ‑ some say the necessity ‑ of living and breathing a goal-oriented philosophy, of accomplishment, is that it motivates. Goals frame the argument. They give us something to work for, allow us to prove our mettle, enable our dreams to emerge and become real. They help us focus, because goals help us quantify accomplishment. They allow us to visualize an end-game.

However, here’s the flip-side. Once a goal is accomplished, how do we behave? Have we prepared ourselves for the next step in our pursuit of even higher excellence? Have we taken notice of our competitors? Has the game changed? Moreover, is the way we do what we do sufficient to move us to the next level?

I guess here’s the rub, the opportunity challenge that presents itself as a gentle warning to every organization seeking to not only sustain elevation, but aspiring to fly even higher. I’ll paraphrase from the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s book: “What got you here … may not get you there.” For starters, we have to be wary of believing our own rhetoric. Secondly, I’ll suggest that our Eastman institutional behavior must now be adapted to a new, ever-more shifty marketplace. Yet I will also insist that it is Eastman’s responsibilityto create the market – that’s been our storied trademark – and to do this, we must not be averse to risk. Sometimes I sense that our risk aversion in academia is fortified by this habit of constantly conducting our work as if our peers are always standing at our shoulders. We are also driven by this mania for “benchmarking”, as if each action or non-action can’t be determined until we are sure that we know what our peer group is doing. 

The good thing is that Eastman has had a track record for some revolution in that regard. But we must not be so bound to the legacy that we become chained to it. We must be courageous enough to fail. Winston Churchill, whose epic successes and failures drew upon him with equal force, said, “Success is maintaining your enthusiasm between failures.”

Toward that end, I am committed to a number of objectives, not the least of which is broadening our input, and not just broadening input from the music world, but outside the music world as well. Because if we’re only listening to what the music world thinks is important, we run the risk of listening to nothing save that which agrees with our own prejudices.

Which brings me to two other vitally important topics: diversity and engagement, which are intertwined in my view. The latter first. Let me posit something: everything is theater, theater is everything, including music. Great characters in great plays, like great lines in great symphonies, must engage, and engage productively. Each character must tell their story in a way that is compelling and interesting, but also, the story has to mean something to the community, a rich and diverse community, not just “us”. I guess it’s what I’d call productive engagement, for this heightens urgency and excitement and also multiplies engagement. And it’s based on another quite simple precept: music is a communal art.

However, engagement in and of itself is pretty meaningless if it’s not part of a larger strategy aimed toward enriching our musical life with differing points of view, different aesthetics, different movements. So creating and managing strategic diversity is crucial. There’s a Talmudic statement inside whose capsule is an admonition, and it goes like this: “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” And for that, sometimes we pay a steep price.

As we move toward developing a compelling strategic vision, toward empowering the diversified Eastman Advantage, our strategic vision will be rooted firmly in the essential lifeblood of any great music school: its students and its faculty. Yet our vision will also be rooted in discussions about diversity that will not simply focus on ethnic diversity, but on aesthetic and intellectual diversity as well. We have, as I speak, an excellent diversity committee hard at work on these questions, and they will present to me a draft statement shortly not just on what Eastman’s position will be on diversity, but what we’re going to do about it.

Another stated goal of the Eastman Advantage: making music matter, initiatives that will delve into questions of music’s very relevance. We will discuss music’s vital role in the allied arts, and how this intertwining has only the most positive benefits for music’s future. Toward this end, we will host an international conference that will engage internationally prominent critics, creators, and scholars, not just in music, but in the visual arts, film, dance, and multi-media as well. And we will call this conference Music Out Of a Vacuum. Why a vacuum? Everyone is fond of saying that music is a universal language, but why is it that when serious discussions take place about the future of music, only the music professionals are involved? I would argue that music has evolved in a much larger stew pot than one of “just music”, in the same way that fiction, film, photography, poetry, dance, drama, you name it, have evolved. But I have to tell you that some of these other art forms have re-established their urgency and necessity in the culture because they invited others into the discussion, and in the process not only found enrichment, but inspiration. We should fear not the possibility of throwing ourselves into the general contradictions of what this might bring. We can’t fear that tumult. As the poet John Keats said, “There is nothing stable in the world; uproar is your only music.”

We will further develop a focused set of what will be called Eastman Collaboratives, building on some ground-breaking linkages. For example, already begun initiatives with the UR River Campus on something called “music and sound”; or a conference next summer with the Mannes Institute on rock and roll and jazz; or enhanced performance opportunities with River Campus students combined with Eastman students, not just to enrich music, but to enrich the community, our community.

Last but not least, we will strategically protect and enhance the Eastman legacy by building and re-vitalizing the infrastructure. We absolutely need to mine deep for resources for faculty and student support, and for facilities, using the remarkable acceleration of the Eastman Theatre Renovation and Enhancement Project as a platform for our broader advancement efforts.

We will strengthen the beacon of Eastman’s communications signal, re-vamping the website, energizing its content and engage-ability, innovating its media, figuring out ways to ensure that the story of Eastman’s great work is told far and wide. The CD we wish to record is our collective vision with a world-wide distribution deal. While this will require doing a better job at calling attention to our work, it also means we must develop strong personal stories that constantly dramatize the link between music and what is human. I hope we can keep in mind the words of Laura Riding, who said, “If what you write is true, it will not be true because of what you are as a writer, but because of what you are as a human being.”

In the end, no matter what our Eastman script, how lucidly and compellingly we write it, how nimbly we produce it, how well we mine the necessary fuels to generate sufficient long-term support to stoke its dreams, it will be about making music matter. And our envisioned dream must matter to more than just us, the audience of the professionals. We cannot behave as if music is an end in itself. As Henry Miller said, “Art is only a means to life … in becoming an end, it defeats itself.” To do that, we must also conduct our work amidst a compulsion to contribute. Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.”

Writ large on our façade, George Eastman’s muse looks over us: “For the enrichment of community life.” We are the alchemists who must convert music into something meaningful, something communal. I would argue that if we keep connected to the soul of civilization, the audience will take care of itself.

And to that full experience must we be truthful. As ephemeral as the dream may be, as realities curve the pattern, we must believe in it.

President Seligman, students, faculty, alums and friends, indeed, the entire Eastman family, thank you for sharing this moment.

I cannot tell you what an extraordinary honor it is for me to serve you as the sixth dean of the Eastman School of Music.

Thank you.