{"id":996,"date":"2018-04-04T13:06:52","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T17:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=996"},"modified":"2018-04-04T13:06:52","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T17:06:52","slug":"can-orchestras-be-re-invented","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/04\/can-orchestras-be-re-invented.html","title":{"rendered":"Can Orchestras Be Re-Invented?"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Skinner, in his article in the current Humanities<\/em> Magazine about the NEH-funded Music Unwound<\/a> consortium that I direct, describes Delta David Gier, the exemplary music director of the South Dakota Symphony<\/a>, addressing a room of university students and faculty:<\/p>\n

\u201cHe starts by asking everyone to reimagine an orchestra as a humanities institution \u2013 one that brings together symphonic music and the immersive intellectual context you get from a museum. That, he says, is what is going on here, in this room, and tomorrow on stage in the program called \u2018Music Unwound: Aaron Copland and Mexico.\u2019\u201c<\/p>\n

Later in the piece — \u201cCan Orchestras Be Reinvented as Humanities Institutions? Joseph Horowitz is Asking\u201d<\/a> \u2013 Skinner writes of me:<\/p>\n

\u201cHorowitz complains a lot, and one of his bigger, more enveloping criticisms is what brings him to the humanities. \u2018Orchestras are not interested in their own history,\u2019 he says. \u2018They are not curators of the past.\u2019 This is the moment when Horowitz is most likely to smile his brokenhearted, I-can\u2019t-help-it, I-have-to-tell-the-truth smile. As smiles go it is remarkably sad.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheater companies, he points out, have dramaturges. Museums are staffed by scholars. But orchestras, despite their reverence for great music of the past, don\u2019t even care about their own backstories, says Horowitz.\u201d<\/p>\n

I also read in Skinner\u2019s piece that in front of a room of people I bring \u201ca very different energy\u201d than others might, \u201changdog, brainy, and a little hard to predict.\u201d In fact, he thinks \u201cHorowitz should make a one-man show of his thoughts on classical music and life. He\u2019s an inspired monologist \u2013 or, as he puts it, \u2018I have a big mouth\u2019 \u2013 and it would be very interesting and not a little bit shocking to have him airing his many opinions in a stand-up format.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any takers?<\/p>\n

Related news: I went to the Metroplitan Museum of Art the other day to see \u201cThomas\u2019 Cole\u2019s Journey: Atlantic Crossings,\u201d which is up January 30 to May 13. Cole was the teacher of the most prominent, most influential American painter ca. 1860: Frederic Church. You can\u2019t talk about Gilded Age America without referencing Church \u2013 but it\u2019s done all the time. The same is true of The Song of<\/em> Hiawatha<\/em> and Dvorak\u2019s New World<\/em> Symphony<\/a>: essential reference points for understanding how Americans viewed themselves before the turn of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

In a splendid video presentation that introduces the Met exhibit, Cole is called \u201ca torchbearer who created a defining aesthetic\u201d for the New World. Thanks to Cole and Church, landscape became the defining American genre for visual art.<\/p>\n

Including major works by Turner and Constable, the exhibit dramatizes how the European landscape masters that Cole revered inspired epic canvases of mountains and plains inhabited not by peasants and farmers, but — a transformational ingredient \u2013 by ceremonial Native Americans. This achievement, clinched by Church, parallels the achievements of Mark Twain and Charles Ives<\/a>, who likewise transformed hallowed Old World genres \u2013 the novel, the symphony — into something New.<\/p>\n

Created by Elizabeth Kornhauser, the museum\u2019s Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture,\u00a0 the exhibit links to nine Exhibition Tours, two concerts, and various other presentations \u2013 in addition to a major publication: Thomas Cole\u2019s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, <\/em>which \u201cbreaks new ground by presenting British-born American painter Thomas Cole as an international figure in direct dialogue with the major landscape painters of the age.\u201d<\/p>\n

Personally, I would never call Cole a \u201cgreat painter.\u201d (Church is another matter; and he\u2019s the painter who most evokes Dvorak\u2019s majestic, elegiac renderings of the American open space.) But he is a great and necessary figure in the history of American painting.<\/p>\n

Were an orchestra to do something similar, it might be a contextualized presentation of the symphonies of John Knowles Paine (1875, 1879) \u2013 crucial progenitors of the American-sounding Second and Third Symphonies of George Chadwick en route to Ives. Paine was the first American to compose superbly finished symphonies in the Germanic mold. I would not call him a \u201cgreat composer.\u201d But he is a great and necessary figure in the history of American classical music.<\/p>\n

American orchestras do not even know him. (An excellent recording<\/a> of Paine\u2019s Second may be heard on Naxos \u2013 with JoAnn Falletta and the Ulster Orchestra. Avoid the Mehta\/NY Phil recording.)<\/p>\n

David Skinner\u2019s article was originally published as \u201cRoots Music: Joseph Horowitz Looks to Reinvent Orchestras\u201d in the Spring 2018 issues of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Skinner, in his article in the current Humanities Magazine about the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium that I direct, describes Delta David Gier, the exemplary music director of the South Dakota Symphony, addressing a room of university students and faculty: \u201cHe starts by asking everyone to reimagine an orchestra as a humanities institution \u2013 one […]<\/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-996","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-g4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","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=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1001,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions\/1001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}