{"id":600,"date":"2015-08-04T19:17:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T23:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=600"},"modified":"2015-08-04T19:17:43","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T23:17:43","slug":"music-unwound-the-neh-and-the-music-education-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2015\/08\/music-unwound-the-neh-and-the-music-education-crisis.html","title":{"rendered":"“Music Unwound” — The NEH and the Music Education Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NEH<\/a><\/p>\n

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Processing a terrific performance of Sir Edward Elgar\u2019s Piano Quintet at this summer\u2019s Brevard Music Festival, I found myself pondering both musical and extra-musical paths of engagement.<\/p>\n

Elgar, born in 1857, became Britain\u2019s most famous concert composer, an iconic embodiment of the fin-de-siecle Edwardian moment. From its retrospective relationship to Imperial England, his music derives its singular affect of majesty intermingled with anguished nostalgia. Added to that, the Great War shrouds the Quintet with a poetic veil of mourning. (Elgar\u2019s much performed Cello Concerto, also completed in 1919, is even more elegiacally veiled.)<\/p>\n

The audience at Brevard \u2013 one of the nation\u2019s leading summer training-camps for pre-professional classical musicians, in the foothills of North Carolina \u2013 mainly comprised young adults new to this piece, probably even to this composer. They were ardently attentive, effusively appreciative. I asked myself how many of them knew\u00a0 \u201cEdwardian England\u201d \u2013 or the Great War, or Queen Victoria. What cultural content, outside music, could they bring to a first hearing of Elgar\u2019s quintet? I would venture to guess: little or none.<\/p>\n

There are many manifestations of the current crisis in music education. Some derive from accelerated cultural change, which makes canonized symphonies, plays, novels, and paintings ever more remote. In classical music, the crisis is acute because the canon is closed — the mainstream repertoire for orchestras and opera companies ends\u00a0 well over half a century ago with Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Britten.<\/p>\n

Among America\u2019s music schools and festivals, Brevard is unusual for crafting a targeted response. With the support of the National Endowment of the Humanities, next summer\u2019s festival will incorporate a cross-disciplinary festival-within-a-festival: \u201cDvorak and America.\u201d All the collegiate musicians performing Dvorak\u2019s \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony will read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s The Song of Hiawatha<\/em> \u2013 which happens to be a pertinent point of reference for this most popular symphony ever composed on American soil. Even conductors who assay \u201cFrom the New World\u201d do not realize that \u2013 as Dvorak testified \u2013 the middle movements are inspired by episodes from Longfellow\u2019s once-famous narrative poem \u2013 that the Scherzo sets \u201cHiawatha\u2019s Wedding Feast,\u201d and the Largo re-experiences Minnehaha\u2019s death in shivering winter.<\/p>\n

At Brevard\u2019s performance of the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony next July, these movements will be accompanied by a \u201cvisual presentation<\/a>\u201d incorporating excerpts from Longfellow\u2019s poem (a core specimen of the American experience) and paintings by nineteenth century Americans, including the important \u201cIndianists\u201d George Catlin and Karl Bodmer. And a \u201cHiawatha Melodrama<\/a>\u201d combining verses by Longfellow with music by Dvorak will be performed in tandem with the symphony.<\/p>\n

The purpose of this exercise is to launch an inquiry into the question: \u201cWhat does music mean?\u201d It is the same question I asked myself about Elgar\u2019s quintet. It has no correct answer. But the question is invaluable, I believe, if fledgling classical musicians, reconnecting with masterworks of centuries past, are to maintain a living relationship with the legacy they inherit.<\/p>\n

When \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d was initiated in 2010 with a $300,000 NEH grant, it was a consortium of professional orchestras — the Pacific Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, and the Buffalo Philharmonic — committed to undertaking thematic festivals on two topics: \u201cDvorak and America\u201d and \u201cCopland and Mexico.\u201d A secondary component was institutional collaboration: the four recipients\u00a0 were challenged to link with high schools, museums, and \u2013 especially \u2013 colleges and universities. As director of \u201cMusic Unwound,\u201d I frankly imagined that these relationships would at best materialize slowly and fitfully. I did not foresee that the project would rapidly evolve to target students.<\/p>\n

In addition to five professional orchestras, the current \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d participants include the Brevard Festival, Chapman University, and the University of Texas in El Paso. It has unexpectedly become an experiment in infusing Humanities instruction.<\/p>\n

At Chapman \u2013 a small liberal arts college in Orange County, California \u2013 \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d is driven by a visionary chancellor — Daniele Struppa — who believes that allying with a major professional orchestra is a necessary strategy for introducing undergraduates to symphonic music. When next February the Pacific Symphony produces a \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d celebration of Charles Ives, Chapman students will be invited to explore what Ives and Mark Twain have in common. The premise of his exercise will be that what Huckleberry<\/em> Finn<\/em> is to the American novel, Ives Symphony No. 2 (1909) is to the American symphony: a landmark achievement in transforming a hallowed Old World genre through recourse to New World vernacular speech and song.<\/p>\n

At the University of Texas, \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d is driven by a visionary Mexican-American music historian — Frank Candelaria — to whom collaboration with the El Paso Symphony seems a necessary opportunity to introduce high school and college students to the Mexican Revolution and its formidable composers and painters.<\/p>\n

If \u201cMusic Unwound\u201d is renewed for a third funding cycle, the consortium will expand to include the DePauw University School of Music, where a visionary dean — Mark McCoy — is attempting to re-invent conservatory education. One part of this new template is a new\u00a0 way of teaching Music History \u2013 not as a sequence of Great Composers, but as a Sociology of Music privileging institutional history and cultural circumstance.<\/p>\n

Dvorak would open a window on Longfellow and Catlin. Ives would connect to Mark Twain, to Emerson and Thoreau. Elgar would register the passing of Empire and the trauma of unprecedented \u201cworld war.\u201d These topics need one another. Their binding synergies can no longer be assumed.<\/p>\n

(For more on “Music Unwound,” see my postings of March 31, 2011; Feb. 23, March 20, May 20, and June, 11, 2012; and May 1, 2015.)<\/p>\n

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        Processing a terrific performance of Sir Edward Elgar\u2019s Piano Quintet at this summer\u2019s Brevard Music Festival, I found myself pondering both musical and extra-musical paths of engagement. Elgar, born in 1857, became Britain\u2019s most famous concert composer, an iconic embodiment of the fin-de-siecle Edwardian moment. From its retrospective relationship to Imperial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-9G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":604,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions\/604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}