The death of the San Diego Opera has got me thinking. I'd like take the opportunity to enter a constructive conversation about wider problems than one particular locale losing one particular institution. The conception that this is a loss of culture itself is faulty, while the real loss of work (not aspirations for work, but real work) is actual and important. I'm not going to deal with the latter, because less employment is irrevocably negative for any system at any level. The former, however, is an ideological problem stemming from faulty philosophy, class warfare, and the fetishization of culture.
Losing just another "cultural institution," in my view, is working toward a greater goal of destroying museums. For those who haven't spent much time contemplating our musical institutions, the idea here is that there's a group of people (a board of executives) who know what "great art" is, and they will preserve it for and/or bring it to the public; this is despite and in spite of the poor public who just eat up all of those bits of art that are not great, mostly because they don't know how great this thing is that the institutions have. The people who support the institution's perpetuation seem as though they are culturally important, and bring an otherwise unattainable experience to those in the public who are able to buy a ticket.
It's times like these that I remember why I keep Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow at the top of the book pile on my desk at all times. The story here is the same story as every publicly performing ensemble in America; they have artistic authority and do not need relevance in any larger way, they need only relevance to their shareholders and backers. In no way does their "perfect art" regard human connection: knowing, care, or other positive relationships. Selection is under the guise of the mystification of "perfect art," not even a direct contradiction, but a contradiction wrapped in a mystification. It is the authority of culture, of knowing what is best for us, that is portrayed in all cultural institutions, governmental institutions, religions, etc. We must, of course, submit to this authority, because really, how else will we be able to individually grapple with such a mystical force as music or expression or life or freedom?
The death of another institution delights me for the reason that it will gradually increase the ability for musicians to be in the larger world, instead of in a concert hall apart from it. The authoritative musical experience is usually equated with having something to come to, partake in, and be a part of. These terms, however, are a great illusion of experience. They reflect little about who we really are, they depict situations that we are no longer in and values we no longer share, works we no longer have attachment to unless we build that attachment through the authority.
None of this is to say that an opera-goer's experiences are invalid or falsified, but the motivations behind the experience's creation are themselves tenuous. The work of institutions of all types are indifferent to their onlookers: self-perpetuation of the institution is the reason for constructing a performance. The only reason that the experience has been constructed, which may have been life-changing, meaningful, and ecstatic to the individual patron, is for the institution to do its work of keeping itself. You were a bystander. While the motivations for bringing art to the public could be less cynical in practice than I've described, either way, the institution does what it does for itself and allows you to watch. It is not there for you.
The problem is structural, not financial, not moralistic. The world as we know it, is organized by individuals and superstructures into blind competition, and it cares not for the winners and losers of the competitions that are set up. This puts individuals and institutions into a battle with the world to survive, and while they compete, they largely reproduce, building the same system in new forms, instead of producing with freedom and ethic. Life for a large institution (musical, political, social, or otherwise) is to do what it does perpetually, in hopes that the world recognizes its work.
Institutions are virtually unable to practice real freedom, that is, to paraphrase political theorist Hanna Arendt, the right to make a decision and see its consequences through. Following an institutional charter, reproducing the culture of the institution, or perpetually fitting itself into reality (that is, conforming to the real and social world) are all activities that undermine freedom itself. Setting up codes or standards for what an institution's purpose is, its specialization, makes it impossible to contradict itself and develop values; while planning every bit of how to work in the world, an institution makes itself unable to heed its own possible directions, and instead, locks it into mere conformance with the world around it, working for its own right to continue to enter into competition with the rest of the world. Founding values, themselves, can seal a structure into a place of failure by creating its own contradiction between those values and the necessity for competition with the rest of the world.
Content and intent of the work does matter, but only in the way that the competition does; if the individuals around the institution do not value the content, they will likely not support the institution, even if they support the values behind the content. Opera companies and symphony orchestras, have, in America, always transcended competition in the marketplace for competition in cultural authority. The system of handouts for cultural authority seems to be drying up, and this site of competition will start lobbing off the losers, those who can no longer convince the elites that cultural authority is worth the money it takes to produce the work of the institution. This applies to cultural institutions, as well as universities, religions, political structures, etc. Without knowing it, the cultural institutions have bought into a meta-narrative that places them in the perpetual role of irrelevancy, and they support the decline of their own perpetuation because of an inability to define the real terms of the larger competition.
In this country, the valuation of work skews largely toward the patently and singularly competitive. This includes a strong favoring of the "hard sciences," because they supposedly create technology that allows those who are most competitive, the already oligarchic and duopolistic, to increase their efficiency, and thus, create wealth by undervaluing productivity itself. This effects the humanities at large, because the hard sciences (I use the term sarcastically because of articles like this one) also tends to promote a view that they are the only tangible and useful thing in the world. Most humanitarians even agree strongly with them that they are far more important than the arts; it has commonly been the tactic of "objective" fields to make sure the public knows that music and art are continually being told that they are subjective, unimportant, and fleeting. Even when the humanities surpasses science at its own aims, it cannot recognize such gains: a "science of consciousness" does not even remotely exist, partly because the hard sciences will not recognize that it already does, and is known as the humanities. However, the competition between the sciences and the humanities has long resumed, with domination of the "objective" over the "subjective," turning them from what was originally an equal pursuit of knowledge about the world into frames for validity and usefulness. The myth that music is subjective, itself, has arisen from competition in the realm of ideas, and has continued to erode the faculties of both the individual and society in matters of valuation. In a world where music has been sold as an abstraction alone, without its attached meaning or value, it will continue to depreciate.
But what, if institutions and meta-narratives themselves are the problem, are we supposed to do? What is the antidote to the world's preference for competition of ideas, which spites the development of ideas? There are two suggestions that I can think of, both of which are highly idealistic. The first has to do with validating musical work at large as a worthy pursuit, an understanding of the truths of the previous paragraph. The second is about self-criticism in music, materially and emotionally supporting others who do good musical work, and skewing reality toward ideals by having a wider solidarity within our discipline through re-initiating an equitable aesthetic discourse.
A fundamental problem exists in how the world views our work as musicians: expressive, mystical, arbitrary, abstract, useless, unrealistic, etc. Hence, we are given little to nothing for our years of hard work, experience that is infused into every instance of our work. This is so rampant a view that in our everyday lives "musician" and "unsuccessful" have become tautological in our everyday speech; I heard this rationale on a nationally syndicated radio show just this morning, in a barely lighthearted way. The language surrounding our very mode of production have become quaint fallacies, ones that we reinforce by allowing people to talk about musical work as "entirely subjective," "mystical," and "unscientific." While this would be a hard enough problem if only the rest of the world thought this, but a great deal of musicians do as well, and don't protest in the least when their work is framed this way.
Starting with musicians, then, we need to progress in our thinking about what we produce (something that some of our sub-disciplines have already excelled at). It is not enough to simply allow predominating ideology dictate to us that we are unsuccessful, and this begins with understanding that this is a problem. We need to refocus our discipline in terms of what our work's relationship with the world is. We should be seen as the leading critics of a broken world, putting good experiences into the world for the purpose of sharing with others, developing the individual musician, and bringing the astonishingly developed sphere of musical work to its rightful place in the world. This begins with pedagogy, and it ends in action, action that shows the world how valuable the knowledge contained and illuminated by musical thought is.
Valuation of our own work, as musicians, is the key to unlocking the possibility of bringing the world to our art, and having a place in reality for the performance of it. The loss of aesthetic discourse has occurred over the past century, and is due to the last viable aesthetic discourses that were possible. The end of the German romantic/expressionist aesthetic, and the shambles in which is was left by Arnold Schoenberg, exposed the fallacies and contradictions in the valuations of music for the century before it: great men make great art, and that art is so great that one can simply intuit its greatness. It was an era of the unqualified judgement of greatness; the work of musicians in this tradition were tasked with reproduction, e.g. "Beethoven was a great composer, now let me prove how," either by playing his works or reproducing his style in their own compositions. While musical development did not cease in composition, they were not criticisms of Beethoven, but developments and amplifications of individual features to support the overall myth. The loss of discourse came from the challenges regarding who the rightful heir to the tradition was, and the accompanying move toward objectively proving who it was (as in Schoenberg's textual discourse with Heinrich Schenker, and Schoenberg's musical discourse with Stravinsky). Already, objectivity began to arise as the currency through which music could be legitimized, because it, for some reason, had already lost its legitimacy. It has clearly not been reclaimed through the twentieth century.
Since then, it has been widely adopted that valuation is itself an elitist's domain, and this is somewhat true, but works in both directions. Undeserving elitists do make arbitrary valuations to justify their already ill-gotten capital. In the same way, as long as valuation is only associated with an ex post facto justification of how this mysterious symbolic capital is meaningful, we can no longer form aesthetic claims without appearing to be vying for that symbolic capital. This attitude moves toward the ultimate relativism, an underdeveloped intellect and ethic, and those who espouse it attempt to keep themselves free of the judgement of those who would unmask them as charlatans.
Aesthetics, however, matter in the real world, and often have social implications tied to them. The lack of an aesthetic discourse amounts to Jacques Derrida's conception of hauntology, and the absence of aesthetic discourse in the modern world should point to the necessity for the discourse of aesthetics. Without an aesthetic discourse, music is trapped in the relativistic stage of the psychologist William G. Perry's stages of intellectual and ethical development; with no authority, all work must be equally valued, and hence, there is no "bad art." With this as one of the predominating conceptions of musicians, there is no wonder how good music has such a hard time coming into existence: it is inconceivable that such a thing even is possible in a relativistic world. A further development of the collective psychology of musicians is a necessity in bringing aesthetic value back to the discussion. This would be done by further individualizing the process of music making to allow it to commingle with individual freedoms, and providing the tools to reach the end of relativism: commitment. Commitment, Perry's final stage of development, is the recognition of the relativist world as many options for engaging with a single construct, while being ethically attached to good work and bringing it into the real and social world, by exercising the real freedom of doing something to change the social world for the better, and seeing it through for better or worse. Grouping people together into self-perpetuating institutions and allowing the institution to dictate the work of the individuals (while stifling their ability to critically engage with their own work) will consistently create an ivory tower in which work does not need to do good in the world.
The necessity for self-judgement in the praxis of musical work is necessary in transitioning to widespread commitment. For instance, the social good that is often done by musico-cultural institutions is to inspire people to become musicians in the first place. But, in reality, it does little more than inspire people to want to participate in the perpetuation of the institution itself. Rarely does this experience seem to amount to wanting to improve the situation of the institution, its standing in the world, or to translate that work into something that would be more actively able to change the social situations surrounding it. Institutions inspire individuals to conform to them, not to transcend them; in the same way, the world of competition inspires people to successfully compete, not to eradicate the system of competition. Commitment, on the other hand, tends to make inspiration into an ethic that spreads inspiration without locking the aims of the next generation into what their inspiration should mean exactly.
Were individuals to understand these mechanisms better, it would be a step toward enacting individual musical development as part of a necessity for a better (at least, less broken) world. Teaching musicians how to value, and how to devalue, needs to be at the forefront of the legitimization of musical work, as it would advance their ability to correct inequitable and unjust conditions by their particular good works (even simply making music); teaching non-musicians how to value and devalue would help correct the same situations by supporting good work for the sake of good work, and admonishing bad work.
Secretly, as far as "trained" musicians are concerned, this less-broken world already exists in musical subcultures who are based on individualistic freedoms and social performance of those freedoms. Musicians are in clubs and basements everywhere, making music that is important to them because of their knowledge and attachment to socio-musical constructs (like genres and scenes). Their commitment is to freedom in musical construction and development in itself, not the sameness and reproduction of an institution's abstract relationships. They are making music to share an experience with people, not to fulfill an end toward perpetuation of an institution. They experience risk on a personal basis, not as a collective risk that can end with "dignity and grace" as Ian Campbell said of his operatic institution.
The first step to be taken by musicians everywhere is to stop supporting the museums of music for the sake of doing so. They are not the site of music in the real world, they are apart from it, sheltered by the language of cultural authority instead of the action of musical development, both technical and social. Further, supporting artists who can be valued for their personal investment and personal development of style and musical function must become the norm, instead of suffering through worn out, abstract musical tropes; as a friend of my recently said to me "if I payed twenty dollars for a ticket and met the twenty dollar drink minimum, don't play a ballad that I could hear a better recording of on the freeway on the way to work." Our valuation of musical work as it exists in the real and social world needs refinement as a whole, and a reconsideration of the value particular music in particular settings needs to transpire. This will only happen at the individual level resulting in a wider change; we cannot expect the world to change tomorrow, especially not if we continually look toward the models of the past to save us.
Save for these changes, there's nothing stopping anyone from replacing the institutions as they duly fail, except, seemingly, recognition of the truth in the criticisms that the world levels at such institutions by not supporting them. It should be a sign that people need to change, that we need to individually and collectively make better decisions about how to organize our world and show support and value. Better yet, it should show that individuals who have the initiative to bring good work to the world should be more comfortable with letting reality have its bias against them, and do good work as an affront to our broken systems, not an appeasement to it. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from starting small collectives and co-ops of people who want to do good work without relenting to the world of competition and being bestowed its greatest prizes: mindless self-perpetuation, conformity, and developmental stasis.
