I was recently involved in creating and presenting an ambitious multimedia performance in San Diego, a composition titled “KNOWING / NOT KNOWING.” Its subject is how knowledge arises in our and other societies. That may sound formidable but the formative ideas were not offered in dry, lecture-like fashion. Technological resources included massive digital screens, video projection, sound spatialization and computer-controlled lighting. I took pains to ensure the text was eloquent and understandable, that the combination of live performers and previously videotaped ones was engaging (even to neighborhood children who were seen in the audience during the 90-minute show). Part of the evening was devoted to what those who lived near the downtown venue were thinking about their own lives. They contributed epigrammatic thoughts about their circumstances and dreams, and their eloquence and depth was impressive.
The production cost a lot and required substantial subsidies in addition to ticket sales. Fortunately, it had gained the attention of UC San Diego’s chancellor, Pradeep Kohsla, and he stepped up generously. The university’s efforts to show the talents and products of its faculty and students at an imaginative new facility called Park & Market provides fare otherwise unavailable to that community. Certainly there was no likelihood that the city’s very well-endowed symphony orchestra would consider for a moment involving itself in such an endeavor. It has demonstrated, over the years, an intransigent belief that San Diego audiences will respond only to the most undemanding and familiar repertoires.
This performance was a notable success. However, it can be perplexing now to find ways of addressing a contemporary audience about the more current and deeper issues we face in our increasingly fragmented and freighted lives. Assembling the means to create novel and appealing content with the assistance of newly available technologies—only distantly imaginable a few decades ago—is similarly troublesome.
I once gave a lecture called “Living in a Bridge.” Its theme was that there had been periods of relative tranquility in music history and ones during which things were less well-ordered. The former were called “common practice” periods. They were marked by a shared familiarity on the part of composers, performers and audiences about, in a general way, “what to expect” when experiencing music. This understanding was a matter of experience over time rather than explicit instruction.
The satisfaction and denial or delay of such gratification are the primary vehicles of musical meaning. The principles, ideals, rules in play create a conventionality that allows both less demanding and more intricate musical experiences. I posited that we were no longer in a circumstance in which it could be expected that, from a disruptive variety of behaviors, there would come a coalescence around a new set of recognized normatives.
We naturally think of a bridge as spanning the gap between two more solid and reliable circumstances. A bridge is a connective construct. My point was that we were certainly in a bridge-like state of transition but that I did not think our bridge would return us to stable ground any time in the foreseeable future.
Today, this apprehensive outlook has been realized in ways and to a degree I could not then have imagined. Not only have the Covid plague and economic conditions diminished the social dimension of attendance at artistic productions, but the current administration’s arbitrary wrecking ball is further decimating the presence and, more important, availability of rewarding intellectual and artistic experience. Even the funding necessary for libraries and their associated services has been tragically attacked.
In our culture and that of most previous times and places, the performing arts have involved three components: an individual or recognized group that “presented,” an especially suitable place in which the presentation would occur, and an audience of people who gathered in that place to experience the performance. It has always been the case that these three elements shared the same locale. That is no longer true.
“Presenters” can be anywhere, and they don’t even need to be human. Their work can be disseminated in a vastly enlarged number of real and metaphoric spaces. A teenager can experience a technological wonder such as the film “Avatar” on the tiny screen of a cell phone or a huge, wrap-around, high-definition projection screen with hundreds of others. And you, as an individual, can and do experience the delivery of a film or streamed performance by, say, the Mark Morris Dance Company on an iPad while lying comfortably in bed. Alone.
This devolution of dimensional access to the performing arts coming on top of their leading institutions’ timidity has helped undermine a social pillar of cultural life in these no longer united states.
Compounding the situation are a plethora of ways in which any “leisure time” one might happen upon can be spent now. In Beethoven’s Vienna, issues of transportation, social class, paucity of individual income as well as absence of mass media meant that going to a concert was one of the few available ways to spend an evening out. It was a period of transition from the nobility’s conditioned support, with music heard in its relatively modest chambers, to the enormous concert halls built around the turn of the 18th century in London, Berlin and Paris.
Now, thousands of subscribers took the role of providing financial support. Those concerts for “a public” were not the solemn occasions we might today associate with that word, where audience members sit quietly, apparently listening and responding only with applause when convention dictates. They were highly variegated occasions on which the movements of a symphony would be separated by an opera aria, an organ improvisation or some other distant genre of music in order to keep the freely chatting and munching members of the audience sufficiently amused to purchase subscriptions.
So imagine now how the management of, say, the New York Philharmonic, or its counterparts in Chicago, Los Angeles or Seattle, are to cover the roughly $170,000 per-year salaries of its resident musicians, construction or rental of inviting concert halls, planning and advertising of a diverse and attractive program with (very) high-priced music directors and soloists as well as guest conductors from all over the world? Would such institutions be likely to make adventuresome choices? Certainly not.
They and other performing institutions such as opera and dance companies are decidedly risk-averse now. Even more than previously. Don’t challenge, rather comfort. Anyone can easily understand that. It’s a matter of survival now, more than any of us could have previously imagined.
Roger Reynolds is a Pulitzer-prize winning composer (“Whispers Out of Time,” 1989) and author of five books; in the late 1960s, he helped establish UC San Diego’s Music Department. Over the course of his career, he received Fulbright, Guggenheim, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Awards as well as a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Revelle Medal from UC San Diego (2016). In 1998, the Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work, and he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023. Roger’s ICWA fellowship (1966-1971) was based in Japan.
 |
|