Re: Will Russia make it?

[Ray Evans Harrell]

Harry Pollard said: (snip) I understand how you want the government to make things easier for artists, but I fear that may mean wonderful artistry may be lost  because it didn't reach out to people everywhere, but was restricted to a relatively closed community. But, you really have to start with that farm boy in Minnesota. Harry     You know I like you Harry and I suspect you are good at drawing the kids out in those classes as well as representing your guru before many audiences.    However you presume too much.   If I am not mistaken you are the one from England via Canada and now in "Sunshine valley."         Let me assure you that Minnesota with the outstanding Tyrone Guthrie Theater, the Minnesota Opera founded by one of my teachers Wesley Balk and who has done cutting edge work developing new American works and in the training of American Operatic Actors and has one of the best schools for it in the country, and the Minneapolis Symphony and the St. Paul Chamber Symphony plus PBS and the fine Ojibwa writers and painters all with the help of public funds and support of the farmers, urban folks, Indians and Lake Wobegon inhabitants. (Kidding)    Minnesota folks have a tendency to come out into the world, realize that even with mosquito season, they have a good deal and so they return home just as Wesley Balk and Garrison Kieller did.     It's about culture and just as they know how to finish Wild Rice while the free market ruins it, they also know the meaning of the word culture since they have preserved theirs.   As for the farm boy.    I know a lot about farmers and the ones in my family were always wonderful musicians.    My cousin is currently developing opera programs for the Japanese Royal government in Tokyo after doing the same for the San Francisco Opera and Juilliard here in NYCity while another cousin is a premier guitar and jazz teacher for the Berklee School of Music in Boston.   Our old farm family has a large number of professional musicians, administrators, conductors and singers in it.   So the problem is that most of these people find more work in religious music (and can do the same thing without the money hassle) in every style from Renaissance to Pop.   Many have orchestras and large choirs and groups of every age to do their work with from small auditoriums to football stadiums.     I would also mention that many of the great American singers in NYCity are from the farms of Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Indiana.     They have been developed, not through secular culture but through the religious one of their particular community.    So why not, like GW Bush's religious charity initiative, let the churches and synagogues handle the music and art?     Because they are narrow in the application and purpose of what they do.   When the great Artists came out of the churches in Europe it was the beginning of that great flowering that represents the most profound gifts of Europe to their futures and to the world.   The Genie left the church and cannot be put back, in Europe anyway nor would they want it so.   In my family, I'm the secular one (in spite of the fact that I'm a Cherokee Priest).   I'm the one who is concerned about the secular humanist tradition of music and art that gave America so much of her identity in the past and that has been sacrificed on the altar of the marketplace and small government from the Civil War to the present except for a short time during and after WW II.    It took a while to die.  There were still 1,300 opera houses in Iowa in 1900 but America is now and has been since the Wall Street 1929 crash a secular cultural desert with banal, clich� formula music substituting for any real thought.     If we didn't have immigrants (like the ex-Soviets today) to constantly feed our creativity, we would have nothing.   It is no accident that America's finest opera conductor James Levine at the Metropolitan has been replaced with a Russian with fewer "problems."    But isn't it embarrassing for the third largest society in the world to have so few truly creative secular Artists and Thinkers?       On the other hand churches and synagogues are where the real musical thought is these days and has been during all of the market love affair.   That is why the Baptist and Methodist Churches have given us so many Presidents lately on both sides of the political spectrum.    Truman, Carter, Clinton, Gore, GW Bush, Gingrich even Ken Starr comes from the religious tradition of great singing and constant rhetorical examination so popular with these groups.    As for the Synagogues, they have the best paying jobs for the largest numbers of fine singers in America.    Synagogues are also often the best repository of European secular music in such towns as Tulsa, Oklahoma and even Chicago, Illinois.    We forget that America is huge both in size and population and the closeness that our media makes us feel does not mean that we are a small country.    The few fine to superior institutions and individuals that we have when compared to other populations is poor indeed.    Especially in the secular.   Your story is too simple and my point is that in the secular in this society, the only "rational" values are what it pays for.    As Brad points out, the secular has been captured by the culture of economics where profit is the only proof of utility and that is why they don't value their own secular identity, whether Artistic or Intellectual, very much at all.    On the other hand, in the Baptist Church, if you don't give it away then you are ungrateful to God and the greatest value is what you give of your physical self.   The reverse of the economic culture.   Although they do pay their professional leaders to develop their gifts.      I have, and will always, advocate for Art for the people and out of the hands of the Elite.   The only way that can happen is if it is paid for by the culture itself.   We are a divided culture religiously.    I don't believe that we can afford to be one secularly and to sing with one voice is a good start especially if the singer is a wonderful one.   That is why the Army doesn't make the foolish mistake of the economic culture.   In the sixties they gave over a million dollars to fund the U.S. Army Band and Chorus in Washington for the morale of the soldiers.   Today they still fund the same size and diverse unit.   Nothing like that male bonding.    Regards,   Ray Evans Harrell   Cheers,   Ray