Ed,
I am a private entrepreneur who must examine
everything in order to survive, however you could
help on this if when you say:
> Hi Ray,
>
> I won't comment on Marx or Keynes except to say that your library book has
> wronged them both.
1. you explained what you meant about the economists(Marx and Keynes) since you
are one. I realize how arrogant it is of me to do this but please accept a
civilian's questions. What form of massive government spending is sustainable
over a number of years at great cost to the average citizen and yet remains
popular? A defensive war perhaps?
Keynes = government spending and where does the government spend more? in a war
that
demands life and death loyalty or prison? Not many would be as blatant or
passionate in their questions as we civilians, but perhaps there is a bit of
peasant good sense at work here. yes?
2. on the other hand, I want to share a story I was taught in college. My music
history
course in college taught us that all music began in monody (single melody)
evolved through
a parallel melody called parallel organum and became counterpoint and then
melody and harmony. It began with church chants and ended with symphony
orchestras moving out of
tonality and into the brave new world of complicated atonality. It makes
perfect sense if the
world is only Western and began to sing 1500 years ago.
Out of one million years of human music and expression, no body questioned that
this history made ancient music out of music that was less than one thousand
years old. But then the world got smaller and all of those communist
universities began to explore the lead of Bela Bartok who became an expert in
Hungarian "folk" music and wrote his own modern music around aesthetic ideas
found in the folk music. These same ideas were atonal and polytonal and
thoroughly up to date but they were truly ancient. The communist universities
went out into the back country and listened to peasant women singing and
improvising atonal music while they cut the hay in the fields. They played
games that were as sophisticated as the most sophisticated modern music and
they had been doing it for God only knows how long.
But the point here is that although the official story made sense in the
limited context of Europe and the church, it was inaccurate. They didn't even
acknowledge the gift from the Gypsies with music that traveled with the Jews
and blossomed into some of the 19th centuries most interesting and complicated
scores. No, instead you got the simplistic jargon that ultimately made both
Jews and Gypsies simpletons and parasites on the "true" aryan musical tree.
But that wasn't true either. In fact they found those original church chants
being sung in Yemen by Jews that had been separated from the rest of the world
since before 2,000 years ago. So the chants were Jewish! After WW II the
Jews became the excepted international group in the West while the Gypsies were
outcasts. (They had to register with the police in New Jersey simply to travel
and their banks were constantly raided and robbed by the police in the U.S., see
the "Romany against the city of Spokane" over this and other issues of
prejudice)
Even though the Gypsies lost 75% of their population in Dachau, there is only
one Gypsy representative to the Holocaust museum in Washington and they had to
fight for that. On the other hand, although many of the original Communists
were Jewish in Russia, the Russians embraced the Gypsies and made outcasts of
the Jews. Gypsies had their theaters and were found in all of the performing
arts organizations. They also were able to travel freely from one country to
another while the Jews were actually prisoners in their own homes if they
wanted to leave the country.
My point to this story is that it was based upon models in the minds of people
in the East and West and very little of it is based upon historical fact.
Wish, but not fact.
Now let us take your economic story. I can give you a lot of facts on this
because I found that my research didn't match the official stories and so I had
to dig. Both Lawrence W. Levine and Richard Crawford have written studies on
much of this and I would recommend them for their erudition into the social
contract that has created the current mess.
I don't
have time to fill it out and they have done it better than I anyway. Levine's
Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard are called "Highbrow/Lowbrow, The Emergence of
Cultural Hierarchy In America" Harvard pub. and Crawford's work is described
in the latest issue of the NEH Humanities magazine. He is editor for the NEH
for the forty volume series of Music in America and is just finishing an
earthshaking new American musical history textbook for University use. It will
churn the butter. What I, of course like, is that he has documented the same
discoveries that I have also made, but not from the place of the performer but
of the scholar.
You continued: (snip)
> However, I can't seem to above two sentences out of my
> mind. They capture or suggest something essential, but I'm not sure of what
> it is. I keep thinking of Stalin's Stakanovites (sp?), workers who were
> totally
> committed to production, risking everything so that they could exceed quotas
> which the state had set for them. They were glorified, made the subjects of
> speeches and songs and given medals. In retrospect, we see this as a
> cynical and false glory, but at the time and place, ever so many miners and
> factory workers believed that building socialism was the right thing to do,
> so glorifying the pace-setters does not seem so strange.
I too believe it was inadequate but you are not explaining why it was wrong and
what the cold war had to do with their squandering of resources.
If King George had had the access to North America in the 18th and 19th
centuries don't you think the Americans would have been forced into the same
kind of hokey patriotism that
drove Stalin's minions. In fact how about:
"Plowing the land on the great plains will make it rain, for the greater glory
of
the common man and Democracy." The Stalag had nothing on the Army Posts
and the "white man's" lies in North America.
> I think too of the generations of people who did work long hours, indeed
> lifetimes, in mines and factories simply because they had to. There was no
> other way of making a living. Many of these people died accidentally or of
> occupational diseases, leaving wives and children to fend as best they could
> in a system without much social support. I agree that there was no glory in
> it, but there was something very much tougher -- an acceptance and gritty
> perseverance, and a recognition that there was no other way.
What they got was the continuance of their genes and no more. Other than that
they were forced into insignificance. Some but not a lot of the offsprings
pulled themselves out of that hell and accomplished something but without the
garden that they inherited in the way of
plentiful resources, I am not convinced that they would have been any more
productive than the camel drivers in the desert are. Certainly the women of
the pioneers with their terrible life without contraception and the unsanitary
log houses that they were forced to live in were very heroic simply by surviving
but the men often killed the people who the women traded with, just out of macho
ignorance.
> Eventually,
> this grittiness and toughness led to the formation of powerful unions, an
> improvement in working conditions, and the passage of widely beneficial
> social legislation.
yes, but it wasn't all that simple. It was and still is a very bumpy ride.
1,700
socialist unionists were deprived of their property and in many cases murdered
by the Klan in the early part of the 20th century. They also robbed and
murdered
the Osage (the richest ethnic group in the world) and still refuse to pay the
owed
annuities on the oil leases.
> As well, with the passage of time, older technologies
> were replaced by newer and more efficient ones. Both because of unions and
> the achievement of higher levels of productivity, incomes rose and ordinary
> people could afford to go see movies and plays.
Except There were 1,300 opera houses in Iowa in the late 19th century, there is
now 1 and 1/2. There are not as many performing arts companies and spaces in
the U.S. and Canada today as there were in the American West at the height of
the "Indian Wars." The same is true of all of the other cities including New
York.
Your history is inaccurate both in the history of the theaters of Europe where
the
seats now reserved for the wealthy were the original provence of the peasants.
You don't think the history of tearing up seats or throwing tomatoes at the
stage was from the Aristocracy do you? The peasants took their art seriously
and still do in Europe today. They sat in the Orchestra under the
dripping candle chandeliers with their lunch, which they threw when the
performance
wasn't up to standard. When they came to America they were well aware of the
great cultural riches of their homes and brought that awareness with them. Even
the Chinese
brought their opera with them. All of those gold mining towns in Colorado have
very beautiful small opera houses. I've even sung in them. The Osage
Indians had the most beautiful one in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
You would
think that the myth of the Hunter/Gatherer Savage would have been
dispelled by the fact that the first five Prima Ballerinas from America were
Indians. Osage, Cherokee, Miami/Peori and Choctaw. They had been
performing complicated dances from their nations, from the moment that
they began walking. The European dances were not so tough.
My
Cherokee grandmother had an invitation to attend Juilliard when she was
young because of her prowess on the piano. My father played the violin,
guitar, piano and sculpted as well as having a Ed.D in psychometrics.
He went to school all of his life because being Indian meant "never giving up
learning" for a job. He had two Masters Degrees and received his Doctorate
when he was 55. All of his seven siblings got their degrees as well.
Because he loved dissertation studies he then wrote
two more for other candidates who agreed to do studies that he couldn't
get the money to do himself. They then became a banker and a school
administrator. He walked away with the knowledge. You can get a lot
done if you are willing NOT to take the credit. (old Cherokee proverb)
Plainly the Hollywood history that the economists and some developmental
anthropologists write about has more to do with teaching economic theory than it
does with actual history. My father's first Masters was in History with Edward
Everett Dale at the Univ. of Oklahoma where Dale was an authority on Cherokee
History and the parallels with the treatment of the Kulaks by Stalin. My father
taught me about the 11 million buried by Stalin long before Reagan or the
Republicans "discovered" them. He also taught me about "Sand Creek."
As I said Oklahoma had 17,000 socialists who were eliminated by the Ku Klux Klan
about the same time. And they also destroyed the most prosperous black
community in the nation in North Tulsa, also about the same time. History is
complicated and interesting Ed.
I
> Entertainment became
> popularized. It was no longer the preserve of the rich.
It is true that Opera moved out of science and the old circuit wagons
and on to the stages of Florence when the stolen gold from Peru,
Silver from Potosi in Bolivia and the Gold from Mexico flooded
Europe through the Spanish. I might say that Opera was built on
the bones of my relatives and that by all rights I own the patent
paid for by the blood of my relatives whose wealth flooded second
rate empires and peoples and caused them to crawl out of their
caves for a while. But that would be as rhetorical as the economists
and anthropologists are with their beloved Hunter/Gatherer theories.
I even run into that junk in my own people these days who have gone
to college and learned it from their professors. The world is so much
more interesting and complex than that. Why make it so psychologically
and spiritually unimaginative and poverty stricken?
The thought occurs to me that Keynes may have advocated government spending to
fund
his wife and his theater. We don't hear much about that but you never know the
true
motivation for things. Life has been stranger. But back to reality.
The problem is that until recently the history of American musical performance
has been
about Europe and not America. It has also been slanted to sell capitalism and
economic expansionism.
"Exploit and pollute" because there is a lot of it, including cultivated little
Italian tailors digging for gold in the Glory Hole Mine in Central City. You
would never say that the reason the Italian tailors and carpenters love opera is
because they of the money to go, or would you? I could recommend a couple of
tailors that you might discuss that with.
The reason that the economists, anthropologists, psychologists and other
"ists" have had such an easy time with their myths is because the few
histories of American Music (even the Britannica four volume American
Music series) has been basically about how America has little musical
composition in the literary model of Europe.
Discussions on the history
of Art's Economics are as recent as William Baumol (1965 I think) and the
performance company histories themselves have been over individualistic
(in the hyper mode) and unfocused, at best, as a linear evolution of musical
tradition.
In short there is no decent history of the Arts in America either
economically or as performance. The Cultural Hierarchy that Levine mentions
considers only the musical composer as worthy of a history and we have not had
many to mention since we haven't payed them for their work in over a hundred
years.
Russia is today following that example in who they are not paying as well.
Perhaps
we should just say that Capitalism steals Intellectual capital with impunity.
but back to the music.
The biased Musical Histories
that Crawford alludes to in the Humanities magazine article were the same
that I studied as an undergraduate and it was only in graduate school that I
broke free with a couple of big papers that opened my eyes.
So
1. don't assume that the little guy is artistically dependent upon the
big guy's money. I made that point when I spoke of practicing when we
didn't have money to eat.
Also
2. the greatest musicians in Western history have not been wealthy and the works
that the West venerates today by Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Schumann,
Strauss etc. have all been more in spite of the taste of the wealthy than
because of it.
There is a big difference between commodities and art. Art is usually bad if
it comes from the taste of the local wealthy patron. That is why Beethoven
thought that Napoleon
was a great leader until he declared himself one of those wealthy patrons.
Beethoven wouldn't even step off the road to let the wealthy man's coach have
the right of way. He certainly didn't shape his music to please them.
They on the other hand, did have the good sense to realize that his greatness
could
either make them history's fool or a member of the erudite elite. So they
put up with a lot of guff from him as well as Wagner, Schumann, Wolf etc.
It was only Mendelssohn who came from the wealthy class and he wrote
lots of duets to be sung by the commodity traders. That was good but
basically second rate. Most considered him to be a great failure for one
so talented. (forgive this rather glib over simplification, but time is short
and the
point is correct.)
> Perhaps, if one views it this way, there was some glory in it. We are the
> descendants and beneficiaries of the people who spent their lives sweating
> in the mines and factories. Yet not many of us would even give this a
> passing thought. We are much too busy zipping around in our minivans,
> chattering on our cell phones or playing with whatever other gadget fate
> seems to have thrust into our hands. Where all of this came from is not
> something we are very much bothered about.
Obviously I disagree. Not much has come from those mines and factories as far
as the art
is concerned. Rock and Roll are successful and popular because they are cheap
to run and can be endlessly reproduced. Symphony orchestras and Opera companies
are not productive in that sense. Recording and movies have replaced live
performance only because the cheap is seductive and not because they are a good
substitute for the real thing. But the problem is not all with the audiences
here. The Artists still click their heels and solute that elitist "value is
wealth" cultural heierarchy even today. It is so bad that I rarely go to
outside
concerts these days. They are too expensive and filled with heavy profundity
but not much togetherness or sense of form.
In the realm of metaphor these commodities you admire in your story (movies and
recordings) remind me of the government surplus goods ( also called
commodities) that are sent to Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the poorest places
in all of North America.
It placates but neither develops or nurtures. I recently heard my daughter
allude to Star Wars as being more important than knowing and learning from our
94 year old Cherokee elder who is ailing. That is Pine Ridge in New York
City. You can teach anyone that dung is
food if you have enough will and resources. (Modern Cherokee proverb)
I don't mean to complain or flame you Ed, but these stories are
stereotypes and myths that have been used to put a group of
people, who I don't feel deserve what they have, above all others.
You just have the unfortunate task of writing some of those things
down. I do appreciate your courage and willingness to dialogue.
I consider you a man of both honor and dignity and I do not mean
to treat you otherwise.
But this is my business that I have been working both in Academics
and in the private sector for forty years. I have taught amateur choirs
in churches and synagogues and developed opera companies, from
people literally off the street, to sing at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall
and even the great Opera Houses.
There is plenty of talent and material for great art in America but
these "mental models" that are propagated by groups that have not
done their homework adequately (but have the power to make people
listen because of Nobel prizes and other awards given for small
limited areas) are a pain in the butt.
Their actions steal food, clothing and
shelter as well as serious venues from the highly trained artists of
America. I will not be quiet about that nor should I. We would have
no future in most of the models that I have seen thus far on this
list and I find that uncultured to say the least and probably fits the
definition of barbaric.
Ray Evans Harrell
