“But get me a musician.” And then, while the musician was playing, the power of the Lord came upon him (2 Kings 3:15).
This verse from the Old Testament describes how the prophet Elisha called on God to perform a miracle. There was a desperate need to fill a dry ravine with water. Music became the instrument of rescue, and the musician the giver of a new lease on life. The idea that music was in some measure a privileged means of communication, a bridge between the human and the divine, and thereby crucial to alleviating human distress through its capacity to bring forth the power of God, has never entirely vanished from our collective consciousness, despite the increased dominance of the secular over the sacred in Western history since the late eighteenth century.
A case in point from the far more recent past can be found in H. G. Adler’s magisterial and exhaustive 1955 study, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community. Adler, himself a survivor but not a musician, understood that performing music and listening to music in the camp by the incarcerated inmates, which had once “fulfilled a real need,” had become a “curse” when music making ceased to be voluntary and became subject to the sadistic whim and orders of the SS. But for a long stretch of time, concerts by inmates—Adler cites performances of music by Beethoven and Brahms by fellow prisoners—were “triumphs of pure morality over the adversity of an almost unbearable present.” Not because it was a means to an end (e.g., water), but music alone elicited the capacity for hope and goodness—theologically speaking, gifts of the divine located in the biblical account of creation. They were brought forth by the playing and hearing of music.
A renewal of faith in this theological image and in the justification of music as indispensable to life and therefore hope and survival in dark and difficult times would be welcome as each of us struggles with isolation, fear, and danger during the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This editorial is being written in July 2020, some five months into the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world beginning in the winter. Of all the places hit hard by the coronavirus, the United States has seen the highest number of cases and deaths, disproportionately among the poor and the non-white population, and has exhibited startling incompetence and confusion, led by an ill-prepared, mendacious, and irresponsible Federal Government. The United States has been hampered by its inadequate and discriminatory healthcare system, the evisceration of long-established resources in scientific and medical expertise, and a public health system dominated by private enterprise. To make matters worse, the pandemic occurred while the nation and its public institutions were paralyzed by a polarized political and cultural environment, in which fragmented extremist fantasies and conspiracy theories that undermine science have flourished within the population, pitting citizens against one another and depressing any shared sense of a common cause.
Public life and therefore public culture were abruptly shut down in America, as they were all over the world. The response in the United States, however, was not uniform, thereby prolonging the agony. Music making along with all manner of public events and rituals were casualties. I remember vividly canceling, on March 12, 2020, after the dress rehearsal on the day of the concert, an all-Duke Ellington program at Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Marcus Roberts and his ensemble. Every musician on stage realized that something unprecedented in their lives was happening. We understood, as all venues closed and the rest of the 2020 season in New York was canceled, that it was, at best, uncertain not only when the normalcy to which we had been accustomed would return, but also whether something akin to the past would ever resume. And if it would not, what would the future hold.
Outside of the United States, for the public sphere that includes sports, religious observance, recreation, and the amateur and professional world of theater, dance, and music, one can reasonably expect that the interruption, no matter how long, will be temporary. The pandemic may leave few long-term residues and scars with respect to the performing arts in Europe and Asia. The governments on the European continent, and in Asia as well, seem prepared to restore institutional subsidies, sustain the livelihoods of artists, and resume programs of education in the performing arts, particularly in the concert, opera, and chamber music tradition of music. In these cultures, the shared acoustic experience in real time and space, for the listener, the performer, and the composer, is highly prized and deemed indispensable. The concert halls and orchestras of Europe and Asia are springing back to life, and gradually, over time, and with a sense of security that the danger has passed, with or without a vaccine, the public will return and feel comfortable sitting closer than six feet from one another in a full house. Choral singing, in places of worship and in concert, will ultimately resume.
But that optimistic prediction cannot extend to post-pandemic America. There is no meaningful government support for the arts. With the exception of the mid-1930s, there is no significant tradition of such public sector support. And there is little if any political appetite or prospect for such support. The political mood, so different from the one that supported the New Deal after the Great Depression, shows no inclination to give the arts and artists priority. In the field of concert music and opera, the American scene has been dependent on private philanthropy. This trend was visible already in the late 1950s, when economists (notably W. G. Bowen and W. J. Baumol) predicted that earned income, particularly ticket income, would be a declining factor in meeting future costs, no matter how large the halls might be. There was no way that ticket prices could meet the costs of an inflexible need for personnel and there were no avenues for economic efficiency.
The arts, luckily, were then still minor but visible factors in the Cold War, a fact that gave rise to a fleeting flirtation with some brief increase in private and public interest in music and dance. In his 1959 trip to the United States, Nikita Khrushchev expressed his confidence in Communism as superior to capitalism, in part referring to the arts. He noted with evident sarcasm that in the United States, “your theaters subsist solely on the handouts of wealthy people,” whereas under Soviet Communism, high art and culture were supported by the state in order that the great traditions of the performing arts—ballet, opera, and concert music—might become accessible, much like the treasures in an art museum, to every citizen.
Even though ticket prices have risen steadily, the economic condition of orchestras and opera companies has worsened during the past sixty years. As has been noted in these pages in past issues, the generation of wealthy American patrons committed to the civic importance of concerts, orchestras, and opera companies is dying out. The attention of the exceptionally wealthy is now focused on other worthy causes, from social justice to the environment, and in the arts, to contemporary visual art and genres within popular commercial culture. The predecessors of today’s popular arts once lacked the sufficient intellectual and social prestige to attract the investment of the superrich; their descendants do not.
Therefore, the pandemic of 2020 hit when the traditions of musical culture of concert and operatic life in the United States have already been weakened by the erosion of philanthropy and the sustained absence of support from public funds. But that reveals only one aspect of the predicament. Since 2000, adult attendance at concerts and opera performances in the United States has steadily declined. And the audience that has continued to attend is getting older and dying out. The fact that the age cohort most at risk in the 2020 pandemic represents the core audience for classical music is a perverse form of poetic justice. Skeptical readers should take a look at a YouTube video of a recital at New York’s Alice Tully Hall by David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter from 1970. Shots of the audience reveal not much gray hair. It is astonishing how young the audience was, by comparison to today.
Likewise, when the late Beverly Sills finally made her debut in 1975 at the Metropolitan Opera, in Rossini’s Siege of Corinth, all tickets were sold within hours, almost a year before the event. Yet lines of eager fans gathered early in the day of the first performance in the remote hope of getting in. No doubt the fact that Sills was a hometown favorite, and a star not only on the stage but on radio and television, helped. But no classical artist or opera singer now attracts this kind of public attention, devotion, and enthusiasm. Selling out Carnegie Hall or Geffen Hall in New York, even at the last moment, has become a rare event. The half-life of superstardom in classical music gets shorter and shorter.
What dwindling audience existed before the pandemic will come back, if at all, only hesitantly. Not only will many still suffer from fear of getting ill with an infectious disease, but some will have gotten used to the ease and comfort of enjoying music using the most modern technology. A forerunner of this dynamic—a romance with a novel technological surrogate to attending a live event—occurred with the development and distribution of the long-playing record and expensive high-fidelity equipment in the 1950s and 1960s. Before the 33 1/3 vinyl disk, the fragile 78’ record had become a popular item. But it functioned as an adjunct to concert life, a supplement to listening to live performances, either in person or on the radio. Recording supported the culture of concert attendance.
By the mid-1960s, however, the balance shifted. More money was to be made by artists through recording than live performance. Recordings became more important. And one could readily imagine staying home, in a “surround-sound” context, with or without headphones, and listening to one’s favorite multi-phonic studio recording rather than going out and sitting, uncomfortably, in a concert hall. And the recording had the advantage of being error free, and possibly even “definitive” (that absurd but briefly alluring idea), making attending a live performance if not inferior then redundant, as a venerable colleague, a distinguished scientist, once confessed to me in the context of arguing that the career of a performing musician had been rendered obsolete.
Today’s technological substitutes are the finely produced opera high-definition videos and the endless supply of Internet sites from which one can download and stream music. The pandemic has deepened the attachment to video and audio access to music at home. High-fidelity seems less important. We have learned how to take advantage of the ease of computer-based technology, and we can even make listening more personal, tailored to our tastes, and interactive.
Consequently, musicians need, for the post-pandemic world, to emulate the way television drew (or stole) from radio. Radio survived, and perhaps concert life will too. Technology might very well play a distinct positive role in renewing the visual experience of live performance and the enjoyment of acoustic sound, and therefore the concert experience. At the same time, however, streaming live events and accessing recordings may become the rule for many music lovers. After the pandemic has passed, why not be content to watch performances at home, much like a soccer match or basketball game. In the world of sports, going out to the arena has been largely the province of healthy, energetic young people under thirty. They readily fill a stadium with tens of thousands of fanatical fans. There is no comparable young ambulatory audience in the United States for classical music or opera. So perhaps in post-pandemic circumstances, an opera will be performed on the Met stage, with the singers facing an empty, 3,800-seat hall, while the performance is watched by a global audience comfortably settled in the privacy of their homes. In that case, one needs only one or two performances, from which an HD video can be made. Individual viewers, most likely, eventually will be able to program their own visual angles so that they see what they wish. This will lessen the incentive to attend a live event.
The prospect of further reduced public interest in music in post-pandemic America will, among other things, doom whatever remote prospect for public subsidy for concerts and opera may exist. And although there is a long and honorable tradition of Black American composers and performers, and a significant history of collaboration between jazz and classical music in the United States, most concert organizations, performers, opera companies, and symphony orchestras, prior to 2020, have ignored both and done pitifully little to draw in the non-white population of the nation to the concert and operatic traditions. Now that the country, spurred by the outrage at the killing of George Floyd and faced with a resilient and widespread Black Lives Matter movement, is possibly poised to confront, finally and concretely, centuries of oppression and racism against people of color, perhaps our musical institutions will rise to the challenge. But it might be too little and too late. The neglect of Black America within the world of classical music since the 1960s will haunt efforts to revive and sustain the magical world of symphonic, choral, and chamber music and opera in America.
Is there any reason for optimism? One positive answer lies in the fact that although the traditions of music derived from the sacred and secular practice of music in the West may not ever achieve broad popularity and participation in the United States, and therefore merit significant public tax levy support, the survival and health of these traditions remain vital to politics and the formation of personal identity, and to the ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity, to borrow the French formulation. One of the mysteries behind the place of music in theological constructs of the relationship between the human and the divine is music’s power to give voice to each individual, and music’s circumventing of ordinary criteria of clarity, correspondence, and comprehensibility.
Music’s meaning and allure seem shrouded, hidden from the eye, and impenetrable by speech. Yet music is felt, in a non-uniform way, by each person and becomes essential to one’s sense of personal dignity and freedom. This is in part because music is defined by and possessed of form. Therefore, music may be more susceptible to perfection and “pure morality,” as Adler put it, than most things humans do, including writing and making images. Music, in its finest incarnations, whether in a popular song with mass appeal or in an arcane work of instrumental music cherished by a few, may have qualities hidden from others, but essential to oneself. Even if music is created, preserved, and performed by a small band of professionals, its impact echoes beyond the measures of audience share and entertainment profitability. Like sacred texts, music operates on more than one level and is a sacred possession of personhood.
In a democracy, especially one marked by highly efficient and intrusive technologies of communication and surveillance controlled by monopolies, dissent, freedom, and resistance are desperately needed. Conformism and standardization above all require countermeasures. Being a professional musician may be the province of a minority with special gifts, but the reach of the musician occurs in various configurations. It is quite resistant to control and manipulation, and is peculiarly egalitarian. The making of music, particularly its performance in public, has repeatedly played redeeming roles (admittedly alongside ones of collaboration) in times of tyranny and oppression. The role of music as a means of hope and solidarity in slavery and oppression is not a romantic myth. And for a comparable experience to flourish in contemporary life, we need an aesthetic dimension in our public culture in the United States that is not standard, reductive, or uniform in character, or defined and financed by the marketplace, by mass consumption, and by criteria of profitable commerce.
In short, the inherited musical practices and traditions, many developed in Western Europe, cannot be merely dismissed as elitist, exclusionary, and the products of political oppression, imperialism, and colonialism and therefore without value or purpose accessible to individuals all over the world. Playing and hearing music made in real time and space, in public, challenges by its very ambiguity borders between people and circumvents the uniformity of influence of history, language, and culture and the attendant identities these factors inspire. Music, in a manner analogous to the practice of science and mathematics, arenas equally resistant to popular understanding, has cross-cultural value and purpose as a common ground, although music’s indispensability is far more obscure.
Given this nearly religious faith in the need for and importance of our inherited traditions of music, what is to be done to prevent the 2020 pandemic from devastating, for future generations, the practice and place of music in American life? The following, in no particular order of priority, are ideas to be explored and tested. Many points are obvious but bear repeating. Performers, scholars, and composers must seize this historic moment and see it as an opportunity, and not merely as a daunting and overwhelming circumstance. Clearly, the link between this facile exhortation and formulating a plan of useful action is more easily alluded to than forged. Fear and nostalgia are two eminently understandable responses to what we face, but they need to be resisted.
Music must become intensely local. We should not return to the international concert circuit, with its relentless imitation of the patterns of Hollywood and the film industry—or, for that matter, the popular music world. We don’t need or require mesmerizing global stars, who travel, repeat recitals, step into standard opera roles, play over-exposed concertos in our hometowns with a few rehearsals or come to guest conduct, staying for a week. All such international concertizing does is flatten out the interpretive range. It disadvantages the courage and prospects for the finest musicians in any given locale. Since most of the worldwide concert scene is dominated by repertoire with extensive histories of interpretation, novelty is rare, and performances nearly meaningless and redundant. It was not always so. When virtuosi first toured before 1848 and then, in the later nineteenth century, orchestras traveled, particularly after Hans von Bülow’s Meiningen Orchestra visited European capitals in the 1880s, the impact was salutary. Touring raised standards and broadened horizons. That is not needed anymore. Recording, Internet access, and streaming give anyone in the world a sense of what is going on out there and what the reigning technical standards are. What is needed instead is nurturing excellence and a specific sense of meaning locally. This requires forging a dynamic community between listeners and music making by those from within the same environment. Creating meaning in performance is far more likely when there is a connection between the performer and the audience. Furthermore, the level of talent in today’s conservatories is remarkable. There is an extensive distribution of first-class musicians all over the country. Local orchestras can become first rate. Music directors should live in the communities of their orchestras and be present, even when guests conduct (who should also be drawn from within the community). Ensembles should feature local soloists, chamber groups, and young unknown soloists. Opera companies need to be more numerous and smaller as flexible standing ensembles, devoted not only to fully staged productions but other means of extending the reach of the operatic repertoire, in innovative productions, with piano accompaniment, in unusual venues, using amplification and simplification, experimentation, and improvization. Let the Vienna Philharmonic remain in Vienna. Last but not least, we should augment participation, encouraging the combination of professional and amateur performance, particularly in choral music in the communities we choose to live in.
Expand the repertory and curate all concerts, so that music for listeners is more deeply connected to the conduct of life. The possibilities here are boundless, as art museums have long realized. We must stop playing the same music from the past. The links to literature, religion, philosophy, politics, psychology, science, history, and art in the history of music are extensive. Let us break out of the auto-poetic image of music as emergent from a discrete autonomous historical logic. This needs to be done seriously and not as some marketing gimmick, as many major orchestras have tried to do. Every concert hall and opera house is located in some reasonable proximity to a university, a library, and a museum. There is no reason not to recruit allies from these institutions to help with the task of repertoire expansion, curating, and contextualizing. And contemporary music needs to have a constant and continuous presence, including second and third performances, not merely premieres.
Musical performance needs to become untethered from the concert hall and opera stage. Faced with the Internet and streaming, let us give up an exclusive allegiance to acoustic purity. We need to perform in public spaces, from churches to schools, to commercial and industrial sites, in museums and hospitals, prisons and on train platforms, and in the streets. Amplification and videography should be freely employed. Musicians ought to travel in their communities to places they have never been and to neighborhoods from which few are inclined to venture to attend our home bases, whose facilities more often than not date from well before this century, and are therefore technologically inflexible if not obsolete.
Widen the range and reach of music education. Deepen music’s ties to our public schools. At the same time musicians need to work more closely with higher education. Above all, musicians and scholars should expand the range of available adult education. In all this we must lessen the emphasis on spectatorship. We should encourage people of all ages, at all levels, to take part in making music, from playing to composing, improvizing, and writing about music.
The concert format must be altered and varied. We should stop playing concerts primarily in the evening, and mostly without any active, direct interaction between performer, composer, and the audience, before, between, and after performances. Concerts might focus on one work, and then repeat it, after engaging the audience. Scholars should be brought in to help break the barrier between stage and audience. To do that, they must develop the capacity to speak well in public and without recourse to jargon. Intensive concert experiences and concerts to which children are welcome (without the program needing to be designed for them) should be features of the concert calendar. Online pre- and post-concert events will be more in demand after the pandemic. The concert experience should be cumulative for individuals in a community so that music might shed a unique light on their sense of history and contemporary life.
Scholars need to reinvent themselves as ambassadors and teachers who use language to encourage the love of music in the communities in which they reside. For example, no house of worship that wishes to have music should be without it, and the scholarly community needs to help non-music institutions invite music in, set the repertory, provide the commentary, and help deepen and differentiate listening without talking down to the lay community.
Bridges must be built to other genres and uses of music, without condescension, well beyond lame crossover concerts or the performing of movie scores with their films. New music of all types needs to be featured in this task. Music must interact with video and film, with dance companies, and musicians should share their stages with jazz musicians and local bands.
Not all of this will work. But musicians and musical institutions in each city and region working together on a coherent plan to create a vibrant musical culture for all residents, using local talent, establishing local traditions, year-round, with consistency and discipline, can spark enthusiasm and support for music and help cross divides in our social fabric that we rarely cross. The definition and scope of professions in music will change, and so too the substance and pattern of training. The allure of standardization and imitation inspired by global consumerism, snobbery, and misplaced fealty to some transnational world of music making must be fought.
Now that we can all tune in, remotely, to any and all manner and types of music and performances from all over the world, let us concentrate on our separate publics, utilizing the public space and social realm of where we live. By working to elevate the local in musical life we may encounter the chance to emulate the prophet Elisha, and call for a musician to inspire a miracle comparable to the bringing of water (the obvious metaphor for life) to the dry ravine which we now inhibit. If we succeed, the musician who plays and brings us the power of the divine will be, as it should be, our neighbor.