Editor's note: This blog entry by Bethany Way is the second in an occasional series of blog entries by New Audience Road Show participants. The New Audience Road Show is an arts-education program that immerses young arts-curious adults in what the Columbia arts scene has to offer. Participants meet with arts leaders behind the scenes to learn more about the inner workings of arts organizations and then attend local programs. -- Dan Cook

What is art? Columbia’s New Audience Road Show made its second stop at the Columbia Museum of Art and learned the answer to this question. Apparently, it depends on whom you ask and what they’re looking at when you ask them. 

Our first two visits gave us insight into how individual pieces, collections, and exhibits are acquired and displayed at the museum and opened our eyes to all that the museum has to offer Columbia’s residents. Roadies were given an early tour of the Ansel Adams and Vogel exhibits, and we really enjoyed an exclusive visit into the museum’s vault to view pieces of the permanent collection. Exhibitions rotate throughout the year, but the museum’s permanent collection is impressive, accessible, and not at all pretentious for those who don’t feel they are art-savvy. Not to make everyone even more jealous, but we also enjoyed food from the White Mule across the street. FYI, we heart your hummus and black bean dip!

The Road Show’s third and last visit was to attend the opening of the Ansel Adams Masterworks exhibition along with the Vogel exhibition. It’s mesmerizing how the simplicity of Adams’ photography captures everything magnificent that should be appreciated about people and nature. 

What do Roadies want to tell Columbia about your Museum of Art? If you’ve never visited and if you’re not a member, you’re missing one of the best deals Columbia has to offer for entertainment and culture. Memberships are affordable and pay for themselves after about 2-3 visits depending on your membership level. Besides, you can’t attend the fun exhibition opening parties without a membership. Your membership entitles you to free admission to over 70 other venues throughout the Southeastern United States.  If you are a young professional like us, check out joining the Contemporaries group when signing up for membership and get involved with promoting the museum with other young professionals. Still not sold? Sundays at the museum are free! No more excuses. Go and discover your answer to “What is art?”

Bethany Way
Columbia Road Show Roadie
 

Morihiko Nakahara constructed his Oktoberfest concert with the S.C. Philharmonic like a true scholar. Using Vienna as a template and Haydn and Mozart as the major players, he took his audience on a musical time-travelogue of the great Austrian metropolis as it existed in the late 1700s and early 1800s. There were other Viennese delights too, and a look backward at the turn of the century when all the lavish entertainment and music and dancing of the city’s high society began to disintegrate.

But rarely is the story behind great music as neat and orderly as it seems. Even Haydn’s especially neat and orderly “Surprise” Symphony, which ended the printed program, was actually not composed for Vienna. It was written for London, where Papa H had been lured to produce his last dozen symphonies. And the offer came from London none too soon, as his patron, Prince Nikolas Esterhazy, had just passed away and his orchestra disbanded.

But the music is Viennese through and through, including the second movement’s “surprise” chord that tradition says was meant to wake up a drowsy audience in the middle of an hours-long concert. Haydn, always the gentleman, denied it of course, but it remains one of the iconic sounds in all of symphonic music.

The other Haydn on the Philharmonic program was born and bred in Vienna, or at least down the road in Eisenstadt, and commissioned by the Empress Maria Theresa. The “Te Deum” is also fairly late Haydn, sort of a boisterous liturgical hymn of thanksgiving. Unlike his big oratorios, “The Creation” and “The Seasons,” this “Te Deum” has no solo voices.

Both of those oratorios were performed in Carnegie Hall that same week by John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestra Revolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir. Gardiner is the epitome of a scholar himself, a true pioneer of early and classical period music. In his review of “The Seasons” for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini notes that Gardiner also has “a wild side… Take the extended chorus in the Summer section, a scene of country folk and hunters. The brash music depicts blasts of hunting horns, shouting hunters, barking dogs, the thumping hooves and steaming breaths of galloping horses and the delirious hurrahs of onlookers when the exhausted deer falls.”

Apparently Haydn had a wild side, too. Tommasini goes on: “Haydn shows himself to be a proto-film composer. Take that, John Williams!” Tommasini summarizes: an “arresting performance of this astounding music,” but speculates that this oratorio perhaps “dabbles too much in literal-minded scene painting, with evocations of twittering birds, leaping fish and droning bagpipes,” whereas “The Creation” is a “searching, monumental piece” where “Haydn may have aimed higher.” Well, I’m all for searching and monumental, but I got nothing against Haydn’s wild side and delirious hurrahs.

The New Grove Dictionary points out how the late oratorios were an unexpected and brilliantly successful final phase of Haydn’s work. He heard Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” in London, and the Dictionary’s contributor says it provided the “strongest impulse for The Creation,” and agrees that, at least in my words, “Creation” is music for the heavens and “Seasons” is music for those of us not above celebrating the joys here on the good old earth. Haydn himself quipped that the country folk of “The Seasons” are scarcely the equivalent of the three archangels of “The Creation.”

Recent scholarship has revised the stereotypical picture of the old-fashioned, bewigged composer. That he was old-fashioned and proper doesn’t mean that creativity and diversity are lacking in his music. Indeed, some scholars refer to a “sturm and drang” period after he moved from Eisenstadt to Esterhaza (then near, now in, Hungary) in 1766. Here also, sacred music led the way, including the “Cecilia” Mass and the “Stabat Mater.” His symphonies of the time were dramatically called things like “La passione” and “Trauersinfonie,” and moved eons away from the older Baroque and the then trendy “galant” style.

In the first half of this concert, Morihiko chose music of Viennese composers Mozart and Salieri.  But again, the Mozart Bassoon Concerto was not written for Vienna, but for Salzburg, where the young Mozart eked out a living as a court musician. It’s probably not mature Mozart–but keep in mind that if there is such a thing as immature Mozart, it’s still wonderful. Here, the second movement begins with such a lovely set-up that you expect a soprano to pop out and sing a glorious aria; nor are you disappointed that it’s a bassoon that actually gives voice to it. The outer movements perfectly define that courtly and elegant “galant” style mentioned above. And say what you like about Salieri, anyone who numbered among his pupils Beethoven, Czerny, Hummel, Schubert, Liszt and Mozart’s younger son must have had quite an impact on the musical life of Vienna. But we have to admit that Salieri was Italian, though he moved to Vienna at a teenager.

Morihiko spoke with some seriousness to the audience about a seemingly musical trifle, “Perpetuum mobile” by Johann Strauss II and a 1981 rethink of that musical tidbit called “Charivari” by Heinz Karl Gruber. Leave aside the scientific work under way during the industrial revolution to discover a real perpetual motion machine, and focus on the high-flying and partying society life in the city that celebrated so much of that merriment with gay and danceable waltzes of the Strauss family and all the others. As the conductor hinted and the printed program stated, “The strains of Strauss’s music insulated the moneyed classes from the political and ethnic conflicts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century.” You could say that the “perpetual” partying that never stopped entertained the people from the grim militaristic realities being set in place throughout Europe. (For a uniquely American perspective of a similar blindness to change, look up Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”)

Gruber writes, “‘Charivari’… is based on the motif from Strauss’s “Perpetuum mobile” polka which I had previously borrowed… In a purely musical sense “Charivari” is an attempt to repay that debt. But… Strauss himself was already describing an endangered species… [H]is motif alarmingly calls to mind that official mask of Gemutlichkeit [cozy, cheerful, comfortable] behind which post-Hapsburg Austria has so often hidden its reactions to even the most drastic changes of fortune, and its complicity with some of them.”

The Maestro didn’t say all this, but it was in the program for everyone to read. Choosing his words wisely, he did, however, lay out the scenario of turn of the century Vienna that was about to implode, as related through Gruber’s musical metaphor. The orchestra played the two back-to-back. A Charivari (Shivaree in frontier America) recalls a raucous ceremony usually involving newly-weds, banging metal things loudly, wearing disguises and masks. In Gruber’s work, “Perpetuum mobile” starts out just fine, but degenerates into musical chaos, and we can imagine the disguises and masks gradually coming off as the partygoers’ eyes open to the militarism that had come to the ascendency while the people danced the nights away.

All right, it wasn’t that simple, but there’s a germ of truth there. Herr Gruber was a Viennese himself and had a lively taste for history and politics. Hence another of his works: “Frankenstein!! A pan-demonium for voice and orchestra.”

The composer himself says, “The title of the volume from which I took the poems of Frankenstein!! – Allerleirausch, neue schöne kinderreime (Noises, noises, all around – lovely new children’s rhymes) – promises something innocuous; but Artmann [the poet] himself has described the poems as being, among other things, ‘covert political statements’. Typically he refused to explain what he meant. But his reticence is eloquent: the monsters of political life have always tried to hide their true faces, and all too often succeed in doing so. One of the dubious figures in the pandemonium is the unfortunate scientist who makes so surprising an entry at mid-point. Frankenstein -- or whoever we choose to identify with that name -- is not the protagonist, but the figure behind the scenes whom we forget at our peril.”

How timely for us today: several monstrous names from the Beltway come to mind instantly. Sounds like a perfect choice for next Halloween, Maestro! As I said at the outset, great music is not always neatly and exactly what it seems. Even the concert itself: Was there a hidden agenda behind this program, a scheme to encourage us to look deeper into the music we enjoy, but also into our own collective and civic lives?

The “Surprise” Symphony followed Gruber. Was this Marihiko’s own scholarly metaphor for the surprise that destroyed Vienna and most of Western Europe at the apogee of all the high-flying society, and brought an end to that wonderful Gemutlichkeit? Did he mean it a cautionary tale that the notorious Wall Street high-flyers surprised us with last year? And the unannounced encore, Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” a complete surprise and unexpected overture at the end of the concert: Was that his own look backward? The end is just another beginning?

Is Marihiko going cerebral on us?

I had to miss the S.C. Philharmonic’s September concert due to a conflict with the Society for Music Teacher Education Symposium, at UNC Greensboro. SMTE is a fine nationwide organization of college teachers dedicated to helping their students become good music teachers.

The keynote address was offered by the dean of an excellent school of music at a prestigious mid-west university. He is a brilliant man with broad experience in music performance and education. The main thrust of his address explored the need to integrate music education programs into the broader musical and arts activities within the community. This, he argued, could open up new learning and performing experiences for both public school and university students. He encouraged music educators to collaborate with professionals and others outside our traditional sphere of work, including age groups other than those we usually serve.

This is a subject dear to our family’s heart. My wife’s USC String Project trains music education majors to become quality teachers by giving them supervised experience while undergraduates, working with some 300 Columbia area public school students four days a week.

In my day as conductor of Hampton Roads major youth orchestra, we played annual concerts in each of the three good concert halls in the area (now there are five good halls, by the way), including a side-by-side with the professional orchestra in major works like Holst’s The Planets often led by the Symphony’s assistant conductor. At the opera house concert, the company contributed singers and arias, and again the assistant opera conductor joined me on the podium. In an orchestra-wide competition, one student was chosen annually to play a solo with the professional symphony.

But probably the most impressive example of community-wide musical cooperation happened in Los Angeles just the other day. In the words of The New York Times’ Anthony Tomassini, here’s how it went:

“The conductor Gustavo Dudamel began his tenure as the 11th music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic not with a formal program at the orchestra’s home in Walt Disney Hall (that comes on Thursday) but with a free community concert on Saturday at the Hollywood Bowl. The program, titled “Bienvenido Gustavo!” concluded with Mr. Dudamel conducting the orchestra in a vibrant and probing performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with a roster of excellent vocal soloists and a chorus of 200, a rainbow coalition of choristers drawn from the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers, the Our Lady of Los Angeles Spanish Choir, the Philippine Chamber Singers and other local ensembles.

But there has never been a gala quite like this to celebrate the arrival of a conductor to a major American orchestra. For more than two hours before Mr. Dudamel appeared, there were performances that brought together renowned artists from pop, jazz, gospel and the blues with young area musicians. Andraé Crouch, the Grammy-wgospel singer and songwriter, performed with his New Christ Memorial Church Adult and Children’s Choir. The bass and trumpet player Flea — a founding member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and, like Mr. Dudamel, a musician devoted to musical education — performed songs with an ensemble of youngsters from the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, which he opened in 2001.

The Latin rock musician David Hidalgo, the blues great Taj Mahal and Alfredo Rodríguez, a young Cuban pianist, also took part. And the jazz giant Herbie Hancock played with an ensemble from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. When the actor Jack Black, introducing Mr. Hancock, paid tribute to Mr. Dudamel for galvanizing Los Angeles (“This dude’s on fire,” he said), the audience, which packed the 18,000-seat bowl, cheered and shouted, “Bienvenido Gustavo!”

That Mr. Dudamel, who made his American debut conducting the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, has already had an enormous impact on the cultural life of this city was clear when he made his first appearance of the night, conducting the YOLA Expo Center Youth Orchestra. YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles) is part of a two-year-old initiative by the Philharmonic to provide instruments and orchestra training to students, modeled on El Sistema, the vast music education system in Mr. Dudamel’s native Venezuela.

By the way, 18,000 people showed up. No doubt our keynote speaker would have been impressed. He is right, of course, about community-wide music making, and any Columbia music lover can probably think of examples of possible cooperation between our public school and college musicians and professionals. In fact, some are trying to accomplish this very thing now, probably with limited resources and time, and we could agree or disagree how well they are succeeding.

Also in his keynote, the dean characterized music education as one of those circular efforts, in which we basically keep doing what we do over and over, year after year, and usually with the same demography. Of course we consistently strive for better results -- and that was the purpose of the symposium -- but he pointed out that we typically fail to engage with other arts activities in the larger community.

He cited statistics on how many high school and college musicians continue to play, sing, or even go to concerts after graduation. The numbers are so depressing I won’t even divulge them, and I have personally lamented over this very issue for decades. If you love serious music passionately as a kid, what happens to douse that fire in the belly when you are an adult? And the dean mentioned other statistics citing steep declines in overall concert attendance in the last 20 years, even though about the same percentage of kids continue to participate in school music programs today. They just stop making and listening to live music when they graduate. The dean offered speculation from philosophers and other worthy thinkers that shed some light on these problems, but it seemed only to partially explain the situation.

If we’re looking for philosophical explanations, why not start at the beginning: What is an education for? The old argument in my college days pitted practical employment skills against traditional liberal arts education; the vocational school goal as opposed to the more general critical-thinking and problem-solving ideal. Matthew Arnold’s well-known argument for education in Culture and Anarchy was for a broad knowledge of culture and “the best that has been thought and said.”

What? You say nothing has changed? It’s the same old argument? I’m shocked! But let’s be honest: these days, for all practical purposes that argument really is over. The realities of the times and especially the cost of higher education have settled that old debate, turning many universities into costly occupational training centers. The average American university student today graduates with a debt of tens of thousands of dollars in borrowed money. I’ve seen average debt numbers between $17,000 and $40,000, and they can easily reach a quarter of a million dollars for a medical student. In any event, it’s a staggering eight ball to start your professional life behind. Yes, some government plans help lighten the burden for a few. And as income disparity continues to increase, there is a growing number who are fortunate to live under the golden parachutes of their high-wage-earner parents, and who will graduate from Harvard or Yale or Stanford with a golden parachute of their own. But for most, the cost of a college education grows more burdensome every year.

And while I’m digressing, let’s not overlook the fact that many industrialized nations send their qualified young people to college with no tuition at all. Twelve of the 37 countries in the European Union offer their citizens a university education with no tuition, including France, Denmark and Sweden. Most of the other E.U. countries open their universities with only a minimal tuition. Of course, higher taxes in Europe play a role in this situation, but as a nation, we have chosen not to invest in our most precious commodity, our young people, at least to the extent that many other democracies have. Again, we can argue the pros and cons, but for our students, the down-to-earth purpose of education is agonizingly clear: get a job ASAP, and begin paying off those loans.

Back to the speech again: None of this disproves the dean’s point, but it might explain why music teachers are so focused on doing what they do on the job and not growing alliances in the wider arts community. It’s not only in the interest of doing good work, but keeping that most essential job at all costs (with that equally essential healthcare insurance–but that’s another topic).

One more thing: While I’m not a fan of music/sports analogies, a cursory comparison between music education and sports education is useful. Don’t football players do the same thing over and over? Practice fundamentals and skills, diagram and rehearse the plays and then take them before an audience?  The long TD pass is as thrilling this week as it was last week even though it was essentially identical, and in fact the TV replays never cease to be fun. Of course there is always a winner and a loser, and we’ll cheer the home team just as we silently cheer a Beethoven symphony all the way to the final chord. Yet public school and university sports teachers have done an exceptionally good job integrating their programs and those of the sports pros in a way that music education has not. I’m talking media access.

How many college sports events are on TV? Thousands? How many college orchestras, bands and choruses -- equally as proficient in their fields -- are on TV? Zero? Has even one concert of USC’s superb Symphony Orchestra ever been aired on TV? ETV taped one jazz piece a few years ago but blatantly rolled the cameras out before the concert continued with a glorious performance of Beethoven’s Sixth. High school footballers can flip channels every weekend and visually connect to a potential university sports future in real time; high school marching band members get to see a university marching band for maybe two seconds on the tube as the camera fades into yet another beer commercial. Nationwide, no serious American music students get to see other live classical musicians in the easily accessible TV media.

No matter how excellent, college music (and all the arts) has been culled from the commercial and even public airwaves, while college sports and chatter flood them. All professional classical music is gone from commercial radio and TV with a couple of exceptions, and one of them, WQXR, just faded away into WNYC (QXR’s last hours of broadcast were grimly moving.). Public radio provides something, rather poor in my opinion except for Monday night’s SC orchestras, while Public TV has dried up serious music pretty much altogether in our market. Does our own university radio station broadcast any of our student’s performances?

Of course some parents take their kids to concerts, maybe even to the Met Opera at the movies, but that access pales when compared to media promotion of college sports. At my gym the other day, I even noted a high school football game, nationally on ESPN, I think.

Am I asking for less promotion and access to sports? Heck no. Keep ‘em coming. But the brutal truth is that, in order to offer more diverse musical learning opportunities, so the young could learn from the experienced, we could all do better; yet think what we could do if we had broadcast media access. If the dean is right, we have a difficult job ahead of us building pathways that connect public school, college and professional musicians, or at least allowing them to see and hear each other.

I’m not ready to give up, but you would think some network exec somewhere would be beating the bushes for sponsors of some broadcasts on the tube of at least some college-level arts. If not world-class college music, why not world-class college drama or dance? The quality of college arts organizations is the U.S. is superlative, and there would be a grateful audience, though admittedly not as large as for those high-revenue sports. Give sports teachers and coaches credit for a job well done. But those of us in music education have struck out, as the private and public media say to us, “Access denied.”

Isn’t there something in the FCC licensing process about “public” airways and serving the “public” interest? If arts education had any media access at all, the dean’s goal would at least have a fighting chance.