Finding Common Ground in Symphonic Music
Our half-acre garden (including orchard and volunteer blackberries and raspberries), is sufficient for me, husband Dan and neighbors Sharron and Don, with enough left over to share some with children who no longer live with us but visit and enjoy the fruits of our efforts. Gnarly Apple Farm, our tiny piece of paradise, has been providing us with a smattering of sustenance for seven years. Alliteration aside, “sustenance” is mostly limited to growing ingredients for Food Made With Tomatoes — salsa, marinara, sun-dried, roasted, ketchup, and did I say salsa? Also, peppers, onions, garlic, tomatillos, ground cherries, and yes, tomatoes. About 50 plants worth.
Then, down on the hierarchy of those crops that must be planted are root vegetables, beans and peas, cabbage and eggplant, and the usual assortment of squash that lately have been ending up down the maw of marauding squash bugs. And, potatoes.
Let me diverge here a bit and introduce the brains behind this operation: Sharron. Our gardening relationship started when we first moved here and got acquainted. Sharron grew up on a farm in Ohio and knows the ways of the Family Garden like I know the Circle of Fifths (And, dear reader, in case you were wondering when the music connection was going to be introduced, that wasn’t it. Keep reading). I had planted vegetable gardens in the past, with limited success, so I was very interested in learning, and Sharron is as close as you can come to a horticulturalist without having a degree.
We divided our roles quickly. I am the brawn, Sharron the brains. At first she did all the planning, mapping and ordering seeds. She also knows when to fertilize, when to weed and water and has a spidey-sense about when things are about to go south. I get my digging orders from her regularly, delivered gently but with unmistakable authority and together we weed, fertilize, squish bugs, tend our garden.
Nowhere is her instinct more sharp than when it comes to tomatoes. She starts the seedlings, nurtures them from late February until planting time, transplanting fifty little plants into successively larger pots while gently misting them with organic mite deterrent and carefully watering from below so the tiny fragile stems don’t rot.
Planting is complicated, almost as much so as starting seedlings. Planting a tomato plant requires the right depth, the right ratio of compost to dirt, the right organic fertilizer, and the right mulch, Toothpicks are necessary at the base of the stem to keep the plant from being girded by slugs, and slug bait is sprinkled everywhere so the little buggers will eat those (and die). Watering has to be on the dirt itself, not touching the plant, and then correctly scheduled.
But this article isn’t about tomatoes. It’s about potatoes.
Sharron hates potatoes. She doesn’t hate to eat them, but she won’t have anything to do with planting them. The first year I wanted to plant potatoes she wouldn’t let me. I begged the second year and she grudgingly perused her favorite seed catalogs until she found some special organic blight resistant seed potatoes which she ordered (I paid for them), gave to me when they arrived in the mail, and they were my responsibility thereafter with the dictum: “Plant these anywhere but nowhere near the tomatoes.”
Potatoes, compared to tomatoes, are very easy; just about my level (tomatoes are above my pay grade). You work your ground into a raised row, then dig a trench to grade. Dig a hole three or four inches in the bottom of the trench (i.e., below grade), dip the seed potato into gardening sulfur (I learned the hard way to wear a respirator), and plop it into the hole, eyes up. Cover with a nice mixture of compost, dirt and fertilizer. Pat it down, water, and wait for the plant to appear; then mulch on successive weeks until the trench is overfilled to equal its depth. Keep watering and wait for the plants to flower, then die, then dig up your potatoes. Aside from spraying and squishing all the beetles (and their progeny), and the usual amount of grunt work it’s E-Z-P-Z.
So why does Sharron have such antipathy towards potatoes? The common word here is: blight. Tomatoes and potatoes are both members of the same genus of nightshade and therefore prone to the same diseases. And once blight hits, it is very difficult to stop its progression which can be very rapid.
So on this early August morning, when I walked out to the garden at 9:00 a.m., Sharron had already been out there for over an hour. That’s long enough for anyone to get into a pretty good stew, so when I walked up to her, she eyed me from beneath her ball cap and said in as gruff a voice as I ever heard from her, “You have to dig up those potatoes today. Right now. They’re blighted.” I allowed as how I realized that the plants had died back, but that I couldn’t tell if they were blighted or not. I made the point that the beetles had been very bad this year and I hadn’t been fully successful in eradicating them. That wasn’t near good enough. “I don’t know what they’re dying from, but you’ve got to get them out.”
I said I recognized the problem and would get right on it and turned to get the wheelbarrow, turned back and asked if we could use the mulch for weed suppression in the squash bed. “You put that mulch as far away as possible from this garden,” she said, “maybe under the apple tree over there,” she stretched her arm way out to point to the tree that grows on the far side of our parking lot, perhaps 500 feet from the garden.
I went to work. With my husband’s help, we ferried the mulch out to wa-a-ay over yonder. Sharron was mollified and instantly back to her warm self. She went home, her equanimity restored and Dan went back in the house to lugubriate on his trombone. I was alone to discover what surprises I could find in the dirt.
Digging potatoes is the reverse of planting, but it’s a dirty, sweaty job in August. You scoop up the mulch into the wheelbarrow, and it’s multiple loads because there are about three layers of mulch that have built up over the season. Then open the trench around the sides away from the plant so you don’t break what you can’t see — tender new potatoes. Push the dirt back away from the planted part of the row, letting it run through your fingers to catch the little bitty spuds that are great in roasted root veggies. Put the potatoes in a bucket (later, you spread the potatoes out in the sun to “cure,” never washing them until just before you cook them). I worked this way down the entire row of Yukon Gold potatoes, then started on the Norland Reds.
Part way down the Norland row, I started to notice that I was encountering an awful lot of rocks. Mostly under a pound, but I began to find a couple 2 to 5 pounders. These were well impacted in the soil and took some widgie-ing with the trowel to remove. Boy, I thought, these guys must’ve been floating up for awhile. One thing you learn when you garden is that the earth is very fluid. Rocks float in that “fluid” dirt and will work to the surface. That idea of fluidity of solid matter is fascinating to me, because it feels like such a mystery. Since I’m an artist, not a scientist, I am more comfortable making philosophical connections in physical matters.
As I worked down the row, unearthing potatoes and putting them in the bucket, pushing the dirt backwards out of the way as I worked to the bottom of the trench, I hit a hard stop. The granddaddy of all floating rocks was right at grade below my trowel. This guy is at least a cubic foot and weighing (my close guesstimate given the effort it took to roll it out) at least 30 pounds. I worked at it for 20 minutes, sweating and grunting, pushing my sturdy trowel down along the edge of the rock and levering it up. It was too heavy to lift, but I rolled it up and out on the pile of potato-free dirt, then moved on down the row, marveling.
That sucker had floated up at least six inches in seven years! We had never encountered it until this year, but there it was.
Change is inexorable. Planets move, rocks float, people change despite themselves, and societies alter their course, and culture takes on new traditions and new meanings.
In a fluid culture such as ours, the arts are the bedrock (there it is, the connection you’ve been waiting for!). In fact music is like glue — I see it in my church work all the time. Pastors come and go, but the choir is still singing. I don’t think anyone would dispute that America is undergoing a cultural sea change nowadays, but our basic values are still there, solid as rock. Music reflects culture and when a culture starts to slumber in a state of peaceable contradiction, music will often subversively float up from our collective id, usually infecting the young first. And then all of a sudden a new direction begins. But the music is still the glue that sticks us together.
Think of popular music since the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. The classics are still so pervasive that even youngsters born 50 years after know the basics of Aerosmith, the Beatles, Michael Jackson and so on. But classical music? That rock has not risen for decades. I think of Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring and what a tremendous effect that had on the American listener in 1913. The original social impact of The Rite of Spring is long past, but at the time it was the harbinger and reflection of tremendous tension in Europe that would soon explode and keep exploding for decades.
Can you think of symphonic piece that honestly reflects the tensions in this country from 1930 to 1970? … C’mon, I want to hear your ideas. No, sorry, not Rhapsody in Blue. The only thing that comes close is West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein — reflecting the rise of youth culture, racial and class tensions. And there are some Broadway shows that did a good job of expressing social concerns, almost entirely from a white male point of view at least until the last 15 years or so. And Star Wars, as great a piece as it is, is 2 parts artistic gravitas and 8 parts self-referential pop culture. Maybe at best it expresses that contradictory slumbering I mentioned before, which is really about racial and class issues. So, dear readers, it‘s pretty much all pop culture that has reflected who we are with all our uniquely American joys and troubles.
In my mind, there is nothing wrong with popular culture being the lamplight of a nation’s soul. It just makes me a little sad that the position once held by so-called “high culture” has been toppled. Symphonic music is just so beautiful and stirring in ways that pop culture isn’t. Not better, just different.
Most of us know the symphony orchestra has taken a lot of hits in recent years. Audiences that attend symphony concerts have fallen to about 12% to 15% of the population; the reasons for this are complicated but here’s David Bruce’s excellent analysis about the relevance of modern music. And this short article that outlines a few of the emotional triggers that drive people away. And another article that boils it down to dollars and cents and the art vs. commercial aspect of sustainability.
I can show you just as many articles about orchestras that are developing plans to create relevant programming that attracts new audiences while still maintaining a healthy bottom line. But none of these really gets down to the crux of why we haven’t developed a uniquely American voice in the high art of the symphony orchestra — why our rock hasn’t risen.
I think I may have an idea about why this is the case.
My inspiration for this blog really came about while “grounded” — and digging potatoes is about as grounded as it gets. Think about it — we present symphonic music as something elevated, elite, reaching higher artistic levels — climbing up Mt. Parnassus if you will. And “elite,” in the minds of many is “better.” This attitude is deeply entrenched: there is high brow music and low brow music, and n’er the twain shall meet. I learned that when I was shorter than knee-high.
Why do we make such a big deal about going to the symphony?
Here’s my challenge: who do we think we are, pretending to be so hoity-toity? We’re all immigrants, and we came here to make a living, to raise families, to be part of something greater than the sum of our parts. I’m talking to you, cultural elites who think Beethoven walks on water. And, I’m talking to you, the backbone of workers who think the cultural elites are snowflake libtards or whatever the insult du jour is. Both you groups are the same: you’re polarized in your particular camps and and not seeing what is there in front of you.
Music is supposed to be neutral territory. Sure, there are dedicated applications of different styles of music — you don’t usually to go the opera to hear Muzak. “Neutral territory” is much the same as “common ground.” The common ground of music shares a message about values, feelings, concerns, joys, prayers that we relate to as a community of Americans — all Americans. And yet, here we are firmly entrenched in the habit of importing an approach to music from Europe and elevating it as the moral anodyne to our indigenous music, implying somehow that it’s depraved or even sinful. When we go to the symphony, we’re by default hearing programming based on the projection of another’s set of values, along with confirmation bias and wishful thinking that goes like this: if it was written by a dead white European man, it’s good, and only then. I’m not going to dance around this — it’s all about race and class but we’ll get into that nitty gritty another day.
Suffice it to say that the double standard of one kind of music being good and another being bad has become so dogmatic that no one seems to notice anymore. I can ask any group of third graders, “Which is better music, Beethoven or Taylor Swift?” The waggish boys will yell “Taylor Swift” before giving me a serious answer, and then they’ll all pick it up from the context of what they heard at home, or the zeitgeist, even from my body language (forgive me, it’s ingrained since before birth). Beethoven. Those symphonies are still the best music around in terms of artistic quality. They might prefer to listen to Ms. Swift, but those kids still know the difference. After all, they hear everything on commercials, right? And believe me, third graders are smart.
Is “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” better than “Pavane for a Dead Princess?” If you talk to a diehard follower of classical music, there is no question that Ravel’s little masterpiece hits some depths of emotionalism that most pop tunes don’t, “Tell Laura I Love Her” notwithstanding. If you talk to a Don McLean fan, the anthem to the end of an era of music is something they really relate to on a deep emotional level. But is one better than the other?
Is a potato better than a tomato?
Sure, if you’ve studied your music history, you know there are prescriptive rules around quality and excellence, and those differ between one performance practice and another. But having been around long enough to see how music, dance, and visual arts have changed over the last 9 decades, the rules are clearly in flux and have been for awhile. Who knows how long Don McLean’s anthem will stick around? Or the Beatles, or Michael Jackson or Aretha Franklin. Or Frank Zappa, John Williams or Philip Glass. (My money is on Frank.) So, I’m going to issue a manifesto by which I live: it’s not up to me. Time will tell and we won’t know until after we’re gone. As a conductor, I can only choose what I like and what I think the audience will relate to.
As a conductor, my job is to make sure the music gets heard.
My final comment on cultural trench warfare as it relates to the symphony orchestra. There is a concept imported by those dead white European guys that we should definitely unpack and adopt: use what’s already there to make something new. Just because a piece of music came from the flat top guitar belonging to Blind Lemon Jefferson doesn’t make it untouchable for any reason. In fact, the DNA in any piece of music that emanates from the salt of our earth would be considered fair game by Dvorak, Bartok, Grieg, Khachaturian, Soler and hundreds of other European composers of the previous century. In fact, if any one of them had been living here (ok, Dvorak did live here, hence the New World Symphony), they would have been in hog heaven with all the amazing source music available at the fingertips of any accomplished, skillful composer that writes ethically and with respect to the source.
It’s up to us to learn to embrace and love the gifts that have risen and sprung to the surface and continue to flow from our common ground. Then be willing to allow that DNA to recombine and grow and reflect and represent and change with us. That is what the arts are for, paving the way for change. Then that rock will rise.
I leave you with a great example: William Grant Still, Afro American Symphony
Commonwealth Orchestra Outreach Project 