Saving your eyes for the music? Listen to this post instead:
Part Three: “An Authentic Response“
[heads up: I’m about to be somewhat unfair to Bernstein and artistic planning committees]
Often, in the wake of horrific events, this tired Bernstein quote gets plastered onto concert programs and proliferates across social media: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
I first encountered these words during my undergraduate days when we had to give a concert shortly after some horrible national tragedy, probably a school shooting, although, horrifically, there’s been too many for me to remember which one. But I do remember thinking, when I saw that quote, something along the lines of, Really? That’s the best we can do? …Or are these superficially inspiring words a convenient justification for going ahead with a concert at a moment when music seems completely useless and inside we’re all wondering why we pursued art instead of becoming lawyers or journalists or policy makers—i.e. the people who do something?
I must not have been the only one with thoughts along these lines. After the 2016 election, I watched many of my peers undergo vocational crises and, my utmost respect to them for living in line with their convictions, actually switch career paths.
Indeed, music can’t truly act in the world. I’m not sure what concrete result artistic planning committees accomplished through their unsustained boycott of Russian composers in 2022; however, one thing that did not result was Putin exclaiming, “Oh shit! The West canceled Tchaikovsky! I’m sorry, boys, but it looks like we gotta call off the invasion.”
“Wow, Amy,” you’re saying now. “You really don’t understand the value of symbolic solidarity.”
Touché.
….And yet, somewhere deep in my gut, deeper than my cynicism, I believe in the necessity of responding to the heaviness of the world with vulnerability and authenticity… and, yes, with creativity, too.
I never found a sufficient articulation for this conviction until I encountered a passage by Patricia Hampl elucidating the value of “lyric perception” in this world of ours where everything hangs under the threat of nuclear annihilation, the “persistent threat of extinction.”
“No amount of lyric description can love the ‘beautiful,’ the ‘untouched’ landscape back from the bomb,” she writes. “…Yet I’m stuck with faith. … the faith that this helpless thing, lyric perception, is an authentic response to the world’s impossible contradictions which seem to resolve themselves, finally, as beauty. In fact, I believe that lyricism represents a form of courage, for it is the only response as thoroughly vulnerable as the jeopardized world itself is.”
Maybe you’re not satisfied with this. “Why exactly,” you may reasonably ask, “is responding to our world in this way—with vulnerability, authenticity, and creativity—valuable?”
Firstly, I believe there is immediate value for the spiritual health of the one who is doing the responding. My spirit feels nourished when I respond in an authentic/vulnerable/creative manner in any situation—and especially in a situation wherein I’m confronted by something distressing. Responding dishonestly, with guardedness and pretension, with an inclination towards destruction instead of creativity, multiplies my distress in the long run.
“Ok, sure,” you interrupt. “But you can respond to the world authentically and productively in many other ways other than through music—other ways that actually do things and enact change.”
Well, wait a minute. I wasn’t done yet.
Secondly, I think that when we respond to the heaviness of the world with vulnerability, authenticity, and creativity, there is indeed value created for the world itself. Or perhaps I should say, there is indeed value created for the other inhabitants of the world.
I mean, you’re right. Music isn’t as vital to the basic function of society as many other things (accessible clean water, a functional justice system, etc.). But I also hold that there’s a real sense in which fundamental needs are much less worth taking care of if we don’t have a world, enriched by creative expressions of our shared humanity, that’s worth living in, that’s worth surviving another day for.
. . .
-> continue to Part 4: Creating Rich Cultural Spaces in Which to Share Perspectives and Think