Saving your eyes for the music? Listen to this post instead:
Part Four: Creating Rich Cultural Spaces in Which to Share Perspectives and Think
Here’s another passage that’s stuck with me, this one by Olga Tokarczuk:
CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, PICK UP YOUR PENS!
Jasmine, the nice Muslim woman I’d spent the whole evening talking to, was telling me about her project: she wanted to encourage everyone in her country to write books. She had noticed that you don’t need very much in order to write a book—a bit of free time after work, not even a computer. Any such intrepid person might end up writing a bestseller—then their efforts would be rewarded by social advancement. It’s the best way of getting out of poverty, she said. If only we all read each other’s books, she sighed. She’d founded a forum on the internet. Apparently it already had several hundred members.
I love the idea of reading books as a brotherly, sisterly moral obligation to one’s people.
I do too. And we can replace “reading books” with “listening to one another’s music.”
This passage explains well the reason why I’ve come to care about building my solo concert programs around the voices of underrepresented composers in addition to those from the traditional canon. I, personally, do not program this way in an attempt to correct historical wrongs (that, for me, has only ameliorative value). I choose to program in this way because I want to use concerts as a space to curate a rich dialog of perspectives. I want to use my small platform to share unique viewpoints, identities, minds, essences—not just the greatest hits of the common practice period, much as I really do love them.1
Another way to say this is that anthropological interest motivates my work as a performer (and, to a degree, as a composer—for similar reasons, I’m interested in contributing my voice to these spaces as well). Also something more than anthropological interest: cosmological interest, in the sense that Karl Popper defines “cosmology”: “the problem of understanding the world—including ourselves, and our knowledge, as part of the world.”
This same anthropological/cosmological motivation is, incidentally, the same motivation underlying why I like reading books that I don’t necessarily “like”—I’m not interested in finding things I “like”; I’m interested in understanding as much as I can about the world and how minds and consciousness and perception work and how ideas evolve and influence each other and how humanity’s self understanding has developed across time and culture and what our relationship to the rest of the universe is and—
Anyway. The point is, I can’t do this if I only look only in one direction (i.e. the canonical mainstream).
“Alright,” you say. “I understand your intention. But what does contributing to and curating such spaces of diverse perspectives actually accomplish? We’re talking about music here, after all.”
I could answer that in many ways (including by calling into question, once again, your assumption that everything must be aimed towards “accomplishing” something else), but for now, I’ll offer this:
Art in general and live concert events in particular provide a rare space to step back and think, an invitation to temporarily disengage from the chaotic, endless stream of notifications and distractions in which we ordinarily immerse our consciousness. Thích Nhất Hạnh, who by most any measure did more stuff for the betterment of our world than most people who have ever lived, writes:
Often we tell ourselves, “Don’t just sit there, do something!” But when we practice awareness, we discover something unusual. We discover that the opposite may be more helpful. “Don’t just do something, sit there!”
It seems to me that concerts, especially intimate concert environments, have the potential to be spaces where we can not just do something, but sit there. And then, when we combine such an environment with a curated program of diverse musical perspectives towards which we direct our collective awareness, we have the opportunity to become a little bit more aware of the world, a little bit more aware of each other.
And when our awareness changes, when we bring our perception more in line with reality, then, when we resume acting in the world, we will do so with greater care and thoughtfulness.
It’s true that even the largest live concerts have only a small reach, relatively speaking. That’s ok with me. My work doesn’t have to influence everyone in the world, or some critical number, for me to feel that it’s “worth it.” Even just a few people entrusting me with their full attention for an hour is a precious gift.
I take my responsibility seriously.
. . .
<- back to Part 3: An Authentic Response
- Some may raise the question of how much of their “essence” a composer can truly imbue into their work. Does music by women and nonbinary composers sound qualitatively different than music by man composers? And if not, then why would it be important to program music by women and nonbinary composers other than to correct historical wrongs (which I’ve already stated is not my personal motivation)? This is an interesting question worth untangling. For now, I will only suggest that no one would credibly raise this question if we were talking about literature or even pop music instead of classical concert music. In those areas it’s quite clear that the kinds of narratives that underrepresented voices are interested in telling indeed differ qualitatively than the kinds of narratives “overrepresented” voices have been telling. My perspective is that the same is more or less true for classical concert music, but that the distinction is just harder to perceive because of the greater degree of abstraction entailed in this medium. ↩︎