Stitching up the wound

11/29/2016

Recently, on createquity.com, Ian David Moss wrote the following:

The 2016 election laid bare not only a seething undercurrent of bigotry and xenophobia in our midst, but also just how politically and culturally segregated America has become. Are the arts part of the solution? Have they been part of the problem? We ought to find out.

Yes, let's please find out. I've been thinking about this idea of cultural segregation in recent weeks. Consider my home state of Massachusetts. The 2016 election results map below tells essentially the same tale as a map of the entire nation: there is a broad band of red made up of towns in the middle of the state that I can't name and have never visited. The closest I ever get to them is when I'm whizzing by on the Mass Pike on the way to Amherst or the Berkshires. I've never met anyone from North Brookfield.

Remember the rural residencies for chamber music ensembles funded by the National Endowment for the Arts? In 1992, the Ying Quartet was a poster child for this initiative, graduating from the Eastman School of Music and getting their professional career started in Jesup, Iowa. (Interestingly, Jesup is located right on the border of Buchanan and Black Hawk counties. Earlier this month, Buchanan voted for Trump while Black Hawk was one of only several counties in the entire state that went Clinton's way.)

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, as we begin to learn about how divided our country has become, I wish for a way for our nation's open wound to be stitched up. Could the careful sewing of exposed flesh be accomplished with help from musicians? After all, while attempts at conversation are full of stubborn subconscious meaning-making, isn't music considered to be a universal language, transcending cultural barriers through wordless communication?

Attention funders: I'm advocating for cultural diplomacy right here in Massachusetts. A granting program that encourages cultural exchanges, led by artists (with support from trained facilitators), between the state's urban and rural communities. Let's look to the arts to help us sew up the tear in our cultural fabric. Given an appropriate frame, a visceral experience with live music may be able to create the empathic space for the deep stories of our neighbors to safely emerge and be shared.

Of course, when deep stories are brought to the surface, we have to be ready to respond with empathy and understanding. I believe that music may be an effective vehicle to help us get below the surface-level discourse, but who is going to help us with the challenge of continuing the conversation once it has begun? Personally, I would place my trust in the Interaction Institute for Social Change.

Another challenge: a cultural exchange is a two-way street. Are we ready to be receptive to what may be shared with us? Just as receptive as we wish others to be when we share our culture with them?

Our challenge awaits. How will artists contribute to affirming a shared belief in connection and inclusivity? In the words of New York Times columnist David Brooks:

"The job for the rest of us is to rebind the fabric of society, community by community, and to construct a political movement for the post-Trump era."

3 Comments

Heath Marlow

11/30/2016 11:13:53 am

Response from Bob Labaree, NEC faculty:

Speaking as an ethnomusicologist, I’m always a little wary of “music is the universal language” talk because it romanticizes music’s emotional power while acting as if social and cultural differences don't matter. (Your essay says they do matter, but play anyway.) Musical language is astonishingly local in the specific cultural meanings we read from it. It gets easier to call it universal the more we are able to disregard the music’s emotive details. (Ignorance of those details helps.)

BTW, an article I wrote pubished in the CMS journal in 2013 is all about the problems we confront with audiences and young musicians when it comes to hearing music’s meaning. It comes out of my teaching of freshmen, which is why I sent it to CMS. I collaborated with them in the summer Intercultural Institute for a couple of years more than a decade ago. http://symposium.music.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=9577:the-global-dj-project-and-the-blank-canvas-world-music-memory-and-meaning&Itemid=146

You describe a necessary act for musicians: get out of the class-burdened temples of art and go play in the churches and towns. This is a message to our students about the social potency of taking what they do outside their comfort zones. The message's value is not seriously diluted by any quibbles we may have with it. But I’m also wary of "healing the wounds" talk. The wound is social, not musical. The class and race divisions are only healable through economic and social action. Buchanan and Back Hawk counties did not vote one way or the other because of the Ying residency. The impact of the quartet on that vote is imponderable. But the mysterious glue which the quartet can provide is profound.

It also works long-term and deep, even invisibly deep. Over 600 years Muslims, Jews and Christians lived rather separate but unequal lives under Ottoman rule. Separate neighborhoods, markets, schools and centers of worship. But they were all protected. If any group felt they could do violence to another group, the government cracked down in the name of social harmony. (Social disharmony was bad for business.) The result was, over time, a tolerant environment, within which music was widely shared, musicians collaborated in extraordinary ways, Muslims visited the Armenian market on Thursdays because they had the best flowers, minorities rose to many positions of power, and yes, people even intermarried. Compare that with the steadily growing identity politics initiated by nationalism in the 19th century.

The moral: we have to think in the long run. Stable, reasonably equitable social relations supported by government and economics provides the platform of musical and other cultural interaction. That was a theocracy, this is not. The "go into the world and play music for the people" is a solid program of investment in social cohesion, even though its direct impact on the whole social fabric is difficult to track.

11/30/2016 11:29:14 am

Response from Rachel Panitch, Thread Ensemble:

"Are we ready to be receptive to what may be shared with us?" is the question that I found myself talking about in my group [at the Boston creatives' post-election conversation] the other night. If we are truly asking people to be open to the stories we have to share, then how are we remaining open, and are we OK with what we might end up Listening to and Engaging with and even Amplifying? Especially with improvised music from a group like Thread Ensemble that aims to reflect back the stories we hear from our audience? The answer is Yes, but it's something I'll depend on fellow creatives to talk with about, and help me figure out the best ways to go about it.

Ashleigh Gordon link

12/1/2016 07:08:42 am

One question that came up at a recent post-election conversation with over 100 Boston creatives was if we as artists did enough during this election (and certainly prior to the election) to have helped interfere. While we won't ever know, we can certainly look back in hindsight and realize the lost opportunities. More importantly, moving forward, this election has certainly revived artists' understanding the great power we hold in impacting social/political change (and also the huge responsibility we have to do so well). We are questioning the role of the artist and thinking, plotting, brainstorming, acting, creating in more socially-conscious ways as a result.

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