Why does classical music matter? As the Seattle Opera announces the appointment of the Israeli conductor Asher Fisch to its newly created Principal Guest Conductor position, readers of this paper will no doubt reopen the Wagner conversations, as they did when he conducted Lohengren at McCaw Hall in 2004. His bio — a sabra, a Shoah survivor’s son, an internationally acclaimed Wagner conductor who broke with his native country’s longstanding taboo — grabs attention like a supermarket tabloid tale.
But beneath this steamy family quarrel lurks a quieter outrage, one with a longer reach and ultimately much larger implications. For who cares what conductor makes which music if most people don’t pay attention to the music in the first place? Leave aside, for the moment, the Wagner questions, and consider the condition of what passes for “classic” in America today. Classic rock. Classic cars. Classic clothes. The word denotes a thing that was stylish when it first came into being, and which holds its value over time: a “classic” is something worth returning to again and again.
Native speakers of Spanish often say “classic music” where native English speakers would say “classical.” Beyond the simple grammar, there’s truth in that clipped adjective. The music composed for concert performance over the past 400 years or so is still alive because, like Shakespeare’s plays or Rembrandt’s paintings, musical classics open the human imagination.
Western civilization’s classic musical portals to the imagination — concert performances of symphonies, chamber music, solo recitals, and operas — have, in two generations, begun to shrivel, and in some cases close entirely, as financial support for public school music education in this country has waned. Speaking to a group of music critics at a recent workshop sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Henry Fogel, President and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, described the gradual quieting of the once-pervasive presence of musical classics in America: two or more generations have now grown up without elementary school orchestras, but accompanied by TV as an integral part of childhood. Television and its heirs traffic in a kind of visual stimulation never before known to humans, but the average orchestral concert looks pretty much like a concert Brahms might have attended in the 1880s.
At the same music critics’ gathering, Los Angeles Opera music director James Conlon, an American-born artist fresh from years of acclaimed performances in Europe, described the results of this educational absence as a dangerous egotism: Americans “are the worst” when it comes to being able to “get out of our time and place,” he said.
Instead of expanding our abilities to communicate linguistically and artistically, “we sat on our laurels” in our years of wealth and power, and have placed our shared humanity at risk as a result.
Conlon’s artistic perspective includes a secondary mission that will resonate especially with JTNews readers. He has created a new L.A. Opera series called “Recovered Voices,” dedicated to the performance of music by composers whose works were lost because of the Shoah. Here in Seattle, such a series has been going on for a decade. The unique chamber music project called Music of Remembrance entered its 10th season this month. Since 1998, artistic director Mina Miller’s MOR has been marketing its concerts not just to Jewish audiences attuned to its programs of composers suppressed by the Shoah, but to general audiences, in the spirit of witness and recovery.
Conlon created “Recovered Voices” as a result of one of those experiences NPR likes to call “driveway moments”: while listening to the radio as he drove home from a rehearsal, Conlon, the mid-career music professional, heard a piece of music he did not know. He fell in love with the piece, waited in the driveway to find out what it was, and followed its story all the way into a whole new landscape of the human condition.
It was a landscape which, alas, is not new to many of us. Conlon had discovered a great piece of music by Alexander Zemlinsky, and along with it the world of composers — like Zemlinsky, his students, and his contemporaries — whose careers were cut off in Europe because Hitler’s machinery decimated them. Some made it to America — including Zemlinsky, drastically weakened in spirit and influence by the time he got here — and Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg, to name a few. Many others never made it out of the concentration camps, but managed to get their music out to survive them. With his new position in Los Angeles, Conlon brings a new level of awareness of these composers. What difference will that make?
“When we do not know something, in this profession [music], we assume it’s not worth knowing,” he said. “This is a very dangerous assumption.”
So the still-not-famous names from the Holocaust era in Europe slowly begin to recover their reputations and establish their worth. And so it is with the wider musical world that surrounded those names, and used to surround us in the United States as part of our common sonic language: the world from Bach to Mozart, Haydn to Beethoven, Schubert to Bernstein.
While the Seattle public schools have recently made a gesture in the direction of increasing arts education (see Dana Thompson’s report in the October issue of Seattle’s Child), lifelong immersion in traditional — “classic” — music has faded, for the most part, into occasional public outreach programs, or, for more privileged children, private education and/or the occasional concert.
The music once considered essential to a basic American education, as essential as Shakespeare, science and baseball, has taken a seat at the back of the bus, segregated into submission by the power elites of digital reproduction. Where will Conlon’s, or Miller’s, or Asher Fisch’s audiences come from when the current generation of “on-demand” self-programmers replaces the generation that buys concert tickets now? Will they miss out on discovering entire imaginative worlds because they only tuned in to what they wanted to “demand”?
Without imagination, we are bereft of our humanness. Our daily work remains that of mere survival, rather than of connecting with the universal and timeless something that, whether in religious or in secular terms, we acknowledge as the eternal. Something beyond survival — our awareness of our lives and deaths, and our desire to make them meaningful — differentiates humans from other beings, and musical classics are one of the portals into that something.
Like other such portals, from Torah study to textile art, mixed media to meditation, the best of them challenge us and energize us, and the loss of them diminishes our ability to imagine the repair of the world.
Gigi Yellen Kohn is a longtime JTNews writer on music and arts and hosts a weeknight music radio show on Classical KING-FM. This piece was written as part of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship: 2007 Institute in Classical Music and Opera at Columbia University School of Journalism.