Re: [Futurework] Kill Culture and Community and you have nothing

[Ray Evans Harrell]

I like Bernard Holland.   Over the years when he has reviewed me he has done it well.   When he has criticized I have usually agreed with him.   When he has complimented I have not always agreed but was grateful.   For that reason I hate to state that he was so completely wrong headed in this article.   To find the fault in the people who are carrying the stones when the problem is with the architect is not a cool thing to do if you are being paid to be a judge.   To judge the intent of the architect as being solely economic is a common mistake but avoids the substance of greatness.     Orchestras used to be self-sufficient but they did not play the kind of music that the elite wanted and demanded as a secular form of religion.   So the elite bought them out and the artists sold out to a fragmented repertory.    Music, like language, has its complex forms, its vulgar and its ordinary.   A person needs every kind to nourish the centers that are located physically in the body.   Otherwise the body rots from within and so does the mind.   Music exercises all of those centers and today we find that it even keeps dementia away if we use it wisely and physically as we grow older.       Orchestras are necessary for some of the greatest complex works that we have in the West.   To remove them to the few and wealthy in live performance is to create a dumb citizenry.    Everyone needs it all.    Holland makes a good point about the tendency to ruin great works by doing them too much but that again is an _expression_ of the problem and not the problem itself.   The problem is simple.   Too little money even if every seat is sold in the house.   The salaries are low for experts who must train for many years and compete vigorously for the jobs only to make $35,000 a year.      A lawyer and a doctor shouldn't coast once they have done their study but they do to our loss.   When a performing artist coasts he is booed and gone immediately.   But even if you aren't booed and even loved you can still be "out of luck" and work.     So the New York Chamber Symphony that just died, ran a $25,000 per concert deficet while playing to sold out houses.   William Baumol calls it the "Baumol Disease" because he has written so much about it.   In the literature it is called "productivity lag" and is the plight of every orchestra and opera company in a capitalist system.   It is a result of the capitalist concept of value which is tied solely to monetary profit.   That makes some very important thing that are "public goods" impossible to produce because you can't make money doing them.   That is the flaw that I have continually spoken about and will continue to speak of.  No amount of good administration will eleminate it.  The same is true of theoretical physics.   But physics is easier to understand.  That logic is linear.   Today we have the science to think differently about music but we still avoid it.    Why?         REH     ----- Original Message ----- From: Karen Watters Cole To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2003 6:56 PM Subject: [Futurework] Kill Culture and Community and you have nothing I suspect cousin Ray has been busy drafting a letter in response to this from today�s NYT.   How to Kill Orchestras @ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/arts/television/29HOLL.html?8hpib I also have this in word doc but it is 53KB and won�t clear the FW filter.  Please contact me if you want a word version.   This is not just about orchestras or the arts.  It�s about loss of culture and a confusion of priorities.     What the author didn�t address was the loss of arts education that has precipitated the audience loss and narrowed available donors.  Even if the philanthropic wealthy were still the primary source of revenue, rather than corporation sponsorships now so prevalent, you have to have a new audience being turned on to listen, enjoy and contribute by patronage and ticket sales.     It has been a generation now since the funding wars began on the NEA, by ideological conservatives who objected to �good money after bad�.  I just wish they had thought about the long term consequences of taking the arts out of the public schools.  We might recover from funding issues by themselves but if children growing up don�t know great art from pop culture, how are you supposed to recover from that?    How foolish, and unnecessarily tragic, especially now when pop culture and cookie-cutter development is taking a toll on what people see when they take a hard look around cultural and social America.  Look at how popular unreality is: those survivor shows incorrectly labeled reality TV, set in exotic locales with preposterous premises, and then all the recreated docudramas of contemporary people living like their ancestors did.  It�s no wonder, too, that many, many towns are turning to �heritage tourism�, such as the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial hopes to do for many out West, when the family-supporting jobs have left town and every town is beginning to look like the last.  Or review the sales for renovation retailers, old homes.  Ever notice how many people go to the re-enactment fairs?  No wonder Harry Potter rules, all the adults have lost their sense of creativity and imagination.  Or too many of us.   So it should not come as a surprise that people are looking inward, asking painful questions, and talking about more than the loss we experienced after 9/11.  People are intrigued by the return to local living economies and taking a family vacation to visit the past, when they see just an endless parade of sameness coming at them from corporate mergers and big box retail, where they are told that the great American republic is dependent on how much consumers spend, not on ideas, or creativity, or innovation or sheer gumption to carve out a new country, a new life.  What about that loss of individuality?    While I hope we can practice a humane globalism, because global trade and the exchange of ideas and minds will not disappear, nor should they, it seems imbalanced and willfully blind to ignore the slow suicide we are committing economically and culturally.     We are making great strides in science and technology, and its diabolical byproduct, the military industrial technology complex; however, it certainly seems that the days of American greatness have peaked and passed in dynamic economic growth and cultural creativity and/or great political innovation.  We are, sadly, already in a state of decline and not listening to the voices in the wilderness warning us.     -  KWC