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Picking up now from one detail in my last post, about some Atlanta Symphony realities…
When people say the Symphony is the soul of Atlanta, what do they mean?
They can’t be saying that any large part of the town dances to the Symphony’s beat. Or that entire neighborhoods define themselves by what the Symphony plays. Or that whenever there’s a performance, thousands of people — tens of thousands! — ask themselves if tonight they ought to go. Because those things clearly aren’t happening.
But the Symphony’s supporters, I might guess, don’t mean anything like that. They’re speaking metaphysically, though maybe without knowing it, and of course with great sincerity. In their minds might be a lovely dream, in which the arts speak for the city, and the Symphony sits at the head of the arts. Whether that’s really true, or what anyone else in Atlanta might think about it, hardly matters, since we’re speaking of ideals, not of reality (though some of us might half convince ourselves that our ideals are real).
Many souls
So what is the soul of a city? It can be many things, depending on which part of a community you want to talk about. In Washington DC, where I live, someone (perhaps a bit old-fashioned) might locate our soul in the elegant home of some legendary hostess, to whose parties come ambassadors and senators. Then we’d be saying that DC’s political culture is what matters most to us.
If instead we chose Ben’s Chili Bowl, a lively place to eat on U Street, we’d be tipping our hat to our African-Americans, 57% of the city (and once much more). And if we raved about the restaurants along 14th Street, which weren’t there five years ago, we’d be voting for our young creative class, whose members been flocking to DC in the last few years.
So the souls of cities — real ones, that truly are alive — might not speak for everyone. And yet they live.
A gritty soul
For an example, read a piece in the New York Times that appeared on November 21, by Jon Pareles, the paper’s pop music critic. It’s about Berlin, where people say a club scene, gritty, and built around techno music, is fused into the city’s DNA. This scene has been there since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one proof that it’s real, and not just someone’s nice idea, is the number of Times stories written about it over many years (which you can find if you search the paper for “Berlin techno”).
Here are some quotes from the piece. I think that from them — and even more from the entire piece — rises a soul that you can almost taste. One I’m sure not all Berlin would share (not everyone ever went to those clubs, after all), but which is alive enough both for natives and for visitors that it’s been talked about for 25 years.
One aspect of reunification that no one would have predicted — the emergence of techno and a tenacious, do-it-yourself club scene — has turned out to be not a passing night-life fad, but a cornerstone of the city’s identity.…
The music, abstract and mournfully propulsive, just sounded right in the semi-ruined spaces of the transformed city…
“Gorbachev is guilty for techno,” said Dimitri Hegemann, who started the pioneering club Tresor and later a recording company of the same name. “Because he opened the wall, he finally gave the green light. There was optimism, euphoria. Everything was creative, everything was possible, we could do what we wanted to do. All these kids from East and West went to Berlin to see what’s going on…
The spaces were crucial. Where the wall had carved a perimeter for its infamous death strip, and then where East German businesses began closing down, there were abandoned buildings awaiting both squatters and party-givers.
“When I was living in the squats, I learned the most important things for my artistic life,” Ms. Allien said. “To feel free and not to be afraid, even if I can’t buy bread tomorrow — not to be afraid of anything, just do it for passion.”
Another major factor shaped Berlin club culture: no more curfews. The music never has to stop. That helped create the city’s late-night-and-into-the-next-day habits, disrupting circadian rhythms for a disorienting good time. Clubs typically open their doors at midnight, and few partygoers bother to show up before 1 a.m.; they’re probably taking preparatory naps. I tried a few clubs around midnight and found only handfuls of people in conversation at the bars and nearly empty dance floors.
The city differs from other hubs known for their night life in another significant way: Berlin still favors music over bling. Its clubs…have famously arbitrary doormen. I heard stories of women being turned away from a club because they were wearing high-heels and clearly not planning to dance much, and of someone barred after flaunting his affluence with a platinum credit card (clubs are generally cash-only).
Posing is not encouraged; many clubs make visitors check portable cameras at the door.
And then Pareles adds:
The clubs mentioned here are the ones that were most memorable; through history and happenstance, they could only be in Berlin.
So now back to classical music. I hope someday our lonely art can penetrate this deeply. Then we can talk about an orchestra that truly feeds its city’s soul.