By Blake Wilson
It was just announced on National Public Radio that a Williams College professor obtained exclusive rights to an extensive set of videos shot in pre-Taliban Afghanistan. These will be digitized and made available not only to scholars of Afghan culture but ultimately to the Afghans themselves as audio and visual reminders of the decimated village cultures they will be trying to rebuild. Some things, however, will be irretrievable through the videos, such as the ancient artifacts once housed in Kabul's museums, now reduced to rubble, and how many songs have been forgotten by a generation that was not allowed to sing? It's an appalling prospect, really, for what's at stake is the very identity of a people, something the now-lost works of art and artifacts in the Kabul museum embodied with much greater power and immediacy than any video could capture.
Americans in the 21st century face no such cultural-identity crises, of course ... or do we? For those of us who teach and practice in the arts, it's difficult to be optimistic about the future as we watch the marketplace exercise ever-greater influence upon the substance of our disciplines and attitudes of our students and as arts instruction in American secondary-school education is devalued or eliminated.
In December, my wife, Lynn Helding, and I dutifully attended the annual holiday concert at our son's local elementary school. The music teacher kneeled on the floor in front of the children, miming the piece to a taped accompaniment emanating from a small boombox, while 50 first-graders stumbled over banal lyrics and searched in vain for the pitches of shapeless pop melodies that now seem to constitute public holiday music. This was the fruit of a semester-long preparation at a school that actually still has art and music teachers. My wife (a professional singer and Dickinson professor) turned to me and said, "comic books! ... this is like a semester of a literature curriculum devoted to the reading of comic books!," which, of course, would not be tolerated in an English course.
Despite the many studies that have shown how formative arts-related learning can be to early childhood development, a double standard clearly is at work here, and not just at my son's school. Increasing numbers of freshmen arrive on college campuses with an attitude already shaped by the examples of media and school, and my colleagues and I hear it all the time: "I'm just doing choir/music lessons/dance/theatre/studio art for fun/relaxation/diversion."
Sometimes this can be the right attitude, since these venues really do offer powerful alternative-learning environments on campus. Thanks, often to the particular strength of a high school, home, or summer arts experience, many of these students adapt quickly to the high standards of the Dickinson arts programs.
Then there are the students who persist in the arts-for-fun mode, expecting A's for attendance in their private lessons, resistant to having their creative work evaluated, or missing lessons and ensemble rehearsals when the pressure of their "real" academic classes mounts. Some of them got their start in the comic-book choirs of their elementary schools, and for them, arts programs remain, at best, casual and recreational activities in the pursuit of which rigor and discipline seem completely out of place.
Both kinds of students can be found all across American college campuses, and as the future arts audiences, patrons and consumers of our culture their potential influence is immense. Their paths and influence, however, will diverge in fundamental ways. One is likely, for example, to help sustain the great symphony orchestras of this country, while the other may contribute to their current decline. One may enable these orchestras to continue with innovative programming of old and new masters, while the other, at best, will feed the diversion of these orchestras' resources into increasingly desperate "outreach" programs whose "pops" and crossover programs are aimed at the margins of culture rather than posterity.
In the latter scenario, which is well under way, the mainstream programming tends to shrink to a core of overplayed warhorses, while the outreach programming veers towards arrangements of Beatles' songs and medleys of themes from movie soundtracks like Star Wars. Now, I like the Beatles (though I prefer them straight up), and I even enjoy the Star Wars score (even if it does derive from the "Mars" movement of Gustav Holst's The Planets), but this music isn't destined for immortality as concert repertoire (is Star Wars even programmed anymore?), and it doesn't deserve to displace serious concert music by composers who have few venues for their music other than the concert hall.
How sharply these two potential groups can diverge is exemplified by the fate of Gregorian chant in our own time. This vast and ancient body of religious song was in continuous use throughout Western Europe for 1.5 millennia, until it was jettisoned from the Catholic liturgy during the early 1960s by the second Vatican Council. By the mid-'90s it was back, but not in the church. A sampler of chant sung by Spanish Benedictine monks (ingeniously titled Chant) soared to the top of the Billboard charts and became a double-platinum seller. The author of the program notes, David Foil, claimed that "all of us can now share the amazing grace" of this timeless singing.
Responding from the vanishing perspective of one who had lived this Latin liturgy, a former monk, Tony Hendra, wrote a searing review of the disc and the cynical marketing strategy behind it: "Actually, Dave, we can't. Grace--the narrowly defined stuff of Catholic theology, as opposed to the amazing kind found in Protestant hymns--isn't something you earn by donning headphones. ... Chant isn't Muzak for the elevators of Melrose Place or feel-good earmush for Zen Rollerbladers ... It's prayer, Dave--the yearning of the immortal soul made manifest."
In this case the repertory, oddly enough, has not been displaced but completely misunderstood by millions of people to whom it was marketed as "earmush" for those New Agers who like their spirituality lite. I admit to being divided on this one; after all, at least lots of people are hearing this music more or less in its original form, but I also can't help thinking that when packaged this way it comes at a price, the same price we pay when we repeatedly hear Beethoven used to sell trucks and Vivaldi to hawk diamonds--these are the incremental steps by which history and culture are devalued and forgotten. The gulf between these two worlds of chant listeners could hardly be greater, but it is essentially the same one that separates our two kinds of students and that a liberal arts education strives to bridge. On one side is passive, aimless consumerism, and on the other, the real fruits of education--a lifelong habit of inquiry, engagement and learning in the active pursuit of truth and beauty. The one can erode, the other build, a civilized society.
Despite all forces to the contrary, American artists of real stature will continue to emerge and do what they have always done--create works that write large and lastingly for us what it means to be what we most deeply are. The greatest challenge facing 21st-century American culture will be the creation of a citizenry capable of being engaged by what the artists are making and doing. That is a job for education, and if that fails let's hope the video cameras are rolling.