I’m happy to see a lot of concentrated discussion around London about issues I actually know something about. In the past week we saw Orchestra London successfully appeal for financial support from the city, and we heard news that Ribfest might be cooked. Now I know next to nothing in terms of background specifics about either of these cases, but this is a great opportunity to try applying general theories of social capital and the creative economy.
Paul Berton at the Free Press made the argument in favour of support (seconded by James Reaney), writing before the decision that “it should be an easy one for council”:
We already have in Orchestra London what many other mature communities are striving for. It is a key part of the Creative City. It nurtures and mentors a musical community here that is much richer for the orchestra and creates ripples and economic benefits that are impossible to calculate.
The orchestra plays a crucial role in our cultural mosaic, and without it, the musical scene, and our true potential as a cultural centre in Southwestern Ontario, will be threatened.
Yes to the opposition’s argument that it’s expensive to support the Orchestra, but I imagine it’s a lot cheaper and easier to keep an existing orchestra afloat than to build a new one from scratch later. I don’t buy into Tom Gosnell’s suggestion that another orchestra will simply replace the current one if it fails.
But on the side of the dissenters, Kevin Van Lierop made good points on Friday at From My Bottom Step:
Coun. David Winninger made the comment; “If we let this orchestra go, don’t let us ever call ourselves a creative city again.”[01], but is this really the case?
Yes the creative city and the creative class can be tied to the orchestra and other similar assets, but is that really what makes up the core of a creative city? I would argue no.
The creative city and more importantly the creative class find ways to make things work. Although financial support from municipal governments is certainly a key factor I do not believe for a minute that it should be considered to be the defining factor. The creative class have the mindset and the ability to be successful and to emerge at the top even in hard times, economic or otherwise…
Both Berton and Van Lierop are right – but each is only half right. Creativity functions when there are two sides to the equation. Each aspect of creativity exists for the sake of the other. Either argument recognizes only one side of it.
On one hand creativity needs openness, complexity, and ambiguity. Creativity means playfulness, experimentation, discovery, doing things when we don’t know the outcome. We’re not being very creative if we’re only buttressing old legacy institutions under the banner of The Creative City…
(Though it’s worth mentioning, to make sure we’re not talking about different things without realizing it, that “the creative class“ in the technical sense refers to a large cross-section of society that includes lawyers, physicians, and engineers — not just designers, playwrites, musicians, etc who are more creative in the above sense.)
On the other hand creativity needs concreteness, discipline, and focus. All of that creative chaos I advocated above doesn’t support itself. Creative freedom requires a fairly solid foundation, or a mature system to develop on. Artists have always been enabled by mentors, patrons, and communities. Creativity is organized around institutions and paradigms — even if only in a symbolic, conceptual, or emotional way.
Orchestras play an important role as socio- cultural- creative institutions. They’re symbols of a community’s stature, they’re flag poles to generate civic pride and cohesion, and they’re simply (though perhaps more importantly) a reason for people to congregate, interact, share experiences, and build relationships – especially for a certain class we might call “elite,” the creative class, or the educated class. There are arguments that orchestras and performing arts centres etc aren’t really elitist – I don’t like the term myself — but those arguments usually contradict the more primary argument that performing arts are essential for attracting executives and talented individuals, which is the mistake David Canton made here. (“Elite” doesn’t necessarily = rich. Think of how people who supported the wealthy John McCain decried Barack Obama, the more modestly compensated intellectual, as an ”elitist.”).
The mistake isn’t so much the contradiction itself, nor that it’s wrong to have “elitist” institutions to attract talent and investment, nor that it’s wrong to favour a specific class of people; the mistake is failing to address people’s problem with ”elitism,” failing to find out why people are so turned off by groups of people with more knowledge and social influence, as well as understand in concrete terms how something like an orchestra benefits society, and explain those benefits to everyone (starting with ourselves), and finally to create the institutions that will most effectively deliver those benefits.
In theory I should be the kind of person who supports Orchestra London. I do listen to classical music and I’m somewhat conversant about it. I was just looking at their upcoming concerts and saw a couple I was interested in. Berlioz is at the top of my list of composer I want to become more familiar with (thanks to reading Jacques Barzun, the historian I hold in the highest regard, who championed Berlioz and raised his profile) and it was good to see Symphonie Fantastique scheduled for the season finale. Above that, one of my favourite pieces of music (of any kind) will be performed here next month: the Elgar Cello Concerto. A younger generation that grew up hearing stuff like “My Heart Will Go On” (the Titanic song) and soaring rock ballads should find at least the first movement fairly accessible, it resonates in the same chambers of the soul where sorrow and hope combine – except, as a meditation on the Great War, Elgar’s piece goes even deeper and addresses wider social and intellectual concerns.
Since this essay is also meditates on the two-sided, complementary, harmonious nature of loss and growth, maybe this is an appropriate soundtrack:
Now here I am advocating classical music, embedding performance videos in my blog and encouraging people to listen, but I haven’t attended an Orchestra London concert since I was seven (give or take) and I have no real intention of seeing any concerts in the future – mainly because I have no money and don’t like going out much in general, and I hate sitting in an audience (I’ve never been to a JLC concert either, and I see maybe one movie in a theatre every two years), but part of the reason I don’t go to these concerts is shame in the face of “reverse pretentiousness.”
Reverse pretentiousness is the (predominantly) working class disdain for all cultural, aesthetic, or intellectual interests and aspirations — or anything requiring refined taste. Just as there is a perception that classical concert-goers look down their noses at the uninitiated masses, there’s a large crowd of people who look down their noses at people who eat arugula, know what the hell Alex Ross is talking about, attend art shows and plays, and don’t know who won the World Series or what league the London Knights play in. I know that this disdain is real because it exists in the social milieu in which I grew up and still live.
After writing the last paragraph I wondered if it might seem inconceivable that there are people in London who don’t know the Knights are in the OHL. By comparison, shouldn’t it be just as inconceivable that there are people in London who can’t name a single local artist, playwrite, novelist, or any Canadian composer?
I’m glad I stumbled into this comparison because I’ve been meaning to elaborate it for a few months now: Which is more worthwhile, sports or the arts?
Now I’m not anti-sports by any means. I watched a bit of football and basketball while writing this, and the first thing I do when turning on the TV is flip through the guide to see what games are on. Sports does a lot of good for society too. It encourages fitness; it teaches teamwork, concentration, sportsmanship, leadership, work ethic and discipline – not to mention competetiveness (albeit debatable, with mixed positives and negatives); and nobody could reasonably argue that sports aren’t economic engines and huge sources of social capital for communities.
Sports is a reason to get together, to interact and share experiences. It also gives us a common set of references with which to identify and cohere with our local and national communities. Think of school teams, think of the Olympics, think of loyalty, civic pride, participation, national spirit (again, some mixed positives and negatives there).
The arts are also a source of social capital, and are roughly comparable with sports in terms of the aforementioned benefits. What the arts give up in fitness is gained back in other kinds of competence and dexterity, what’s given up in teamwork is gained back in independence, and what’s given up in competitiveness is gained in creativeness. As with sports, all of these can have mixed positives and negatives, depending on circumstances. Just as the virtues of sports can turn into vices — like the willingness to cheat, or excess regard to rules and groupthink – virtues in the arts can degenerate into vices like dilettantism, self-absorption, and rebelliousness for its own sake.
But on top of all that, the arts have yet another virtue — or rather, a whole other dimension of virtue — that sports does not offer, and that is meaning.
What I mean when I say something has meaning is that it is a means to something beyond itself. That is, the arts produce concrete things that retain and even accumulate value over time, and we can use that as a platform or tool to do or build something else.
We can look at old paintings, read old books, and listen to old music, then learn from those things and use the knowledge and skills gained to make something ourselves (or with others). Whereas sports mostly just happen;we enjoy watching, we enjoy playing – and some people do manage to make a lot of profit by it, and a good deal of economic value is generated in the process – but ultimately that value will never crystallize into something that sustains itself over time. With sports, we have to keep playing or the value is lost. With arts, we can save the fruits of our labour for a rainy day, and use them to create something newer and better.
The arts help us understand and explain the world we live in. Consider my last post, a short commentary on a book I just read. The insights I gained from that helped me make a little more sense of life, it helped me write this, and as these intellectual investments accumulate over time, eventually I’m able to produce even greater value at even less cost (i.e. less time spent reading and studying).
Reading Shakespeare (or if you prefer, watching Seinfeld or The Simpsons) gives us references to think and talk with – characters, narratives, scenarios, quotations – to help us make sense of things we have to deal with in our own lives. Sports helps in this way too, but shallower, less accurately, and less adaptably. The world of sports is simple, bound by hard rules and boundaries; while life tends to be complex, with the rules and boundaries (if they exist at all) constantly changing before we recognize them. You can say “Lear” or “Lady MacBeth” and anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s characters will instantly appreciate a complex set of circumstances that would otherwise require endless explaining (in the same way that we can repeat a joke from Seinfeld as shorthand to refer to an awkward situation we don’t want to fully describe).
And we know that stories, images, and music have real physiological and cognitive effects on us. These can be used (or abused) to make people think and feel certain ways. Come to think of it, the power of sports is largely dependent on these aesthetic features. What would the power and appeal of the Olympics be without uniforms, flags, and anthems — not to mention all those story-segments in the media that make us heroize or sympathize with the athletes — to make the whole spectacle more compelling?
But none of this makes a case for using public funds to build a performing arts centre or guarantee Orchestra London’s loans. To start, the fact that music is important doesn’t necessarily mean that music by dead white guys is especially important – though I happen to believe that it is. (There’s something to be said for representing various traditions as well as emerging styles and techniques. I believe this too but I will take it up another time.)
It isn’t just a figure of speech to say that some music is timeless. Someone like myself, somewhat musically inclined but not trained, can get a sense from listening to Bach’s music for solo instruments that we’re being taken on a tour of Platonic musical forms — or universal harmonic truths. Centuries after it was composed, it still provides insight as a metaphor for how our minds work.
It would be a waste of time and resources to make this music — or anything like it — again. Instead, it’s better to preserve it and continue to teach it to each successive generation, so the musical geniuses of the present and future can start from “the shoulders of giants,” just as Newton was able to build on the work of Pythagoras and Euclid all the best of what came in between. Even the rebellious creators who develop alternative, countercultural styles need something to reject – they need a canon of past greats every bit as much as people who adhere to conservative repertoires — or there would be no rebellion.
But this still doesn’t make the case for backstopping Orchestra London with taxpayers’ money.
Today music doesn’t need to be performed in order to be conserved — or at least it doesn’t need to be performed widely. Glenn Gould himself — one of Canada’s great classical musicians — realized this fact in the 1960′s and focused his career on recording rather than performing live (a few years before the Beatles made the same decision). By becoming a studio- and broadcast-oriented musician, Gould did far more for the public’s awareness of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (for example) by recording and distributing it throughout the world all at once than if he had toured the country, the continent, the world city-by-city… and we still have Gould’s Goldberg Variations (in two versions) long after his death – and the power of scalable distribution is even greater today (here you go).
In a way then, Orchestra London actually “competes” with classical recordings made by the world’s great orchestras in Vienna, Berlin, Chicago, LA, the other London, etc. So my argument that it’s important to preserve classical music doesn’t make an effective case for Orchestra London either.
To make a case for Orchestra London we need to make a case for the experience of an orchestra live. I’m not the appropriate person to make this case (but anyone is free to do so in the comments).
At the risk of sounding cold, I’m afraid that economics effectively makes the case against live classical music. It’s pretty hard to argue against the receipts. I mean, I don’t really know what ticket sales are like, but it’s my understanding that people aren’t exactly flocking in droves to see symphonies performed. There are a few factors holding us back (in no special order): one is the “reverse pretentiousness” I mentioned earlier, second and third are the proliferation of entertainment options and the fragmentation of people’s preferences, fourth is the cheap and easy availability of recordings, and fifth — perhaps the most important — and related to all of the above is the simple fact that most people just don’t really care to listen to the stuff (at least not when it isn’t the score to a Steven Spielberg movie).
So here we are. To summarize, Orchestra London is an important chunk of social capital. It’s a “flag pole” that represents London’s stature and generates social cohesion, while simply being a venue for people to interact, share experiences, and build relationships. And it’s also essential for its educative value. It’s a local vessel for some of the best music that history has to offer; it provides creative capital for present and future artists to build on (or react against).
The truth is that I’ve written this much but don’t have any specific suggestions about where to go from here. I can’t even decide which position I lean towards, out of the two I quoted above. The general position I seem to be developing is that support for Orchestra London is ok for now (speaking as someone who knows absolutely nothing about the city’s balance sheet, and on that basis the loan guarantee could be disastrously wrong for all I know), but I don’t think we ought to conceive it merely as a “bridge” through tough times, beyond which will be business-as-usual.
Rather than choosing one side rather than the other, I’m choosing one side followed by the other (after all, we’ll amost certainly have the same discussion in the near future).
I think the institution’s leaders – no, the community’s leaders, or anybody who’s interested – ought to think about substantial changes. I’m not just talking about “belt-tightening” or “fresh blood,” or more pop tributes either. I’m talking about looking at what the orchestra does on a very fundamental level, and reconceiving the whole thing, developing a new model: a new centrepiece for the city’s music community, something of and for London that resonates with the city’s distinct character — maybe something that makes a little more room for “various traditions as well as emerging styles” I mentioned earlier — or rather, something that helps us get a better sense of what London’s distinct character is to begin with.
[Update: After sleeping on it I realized a couple of things that might undo the pseudo-proposal I made in the previous paragraph. One is my assumption that Orchestra London isn't already doing that, or at least trying to do that. The bigger problem is my huge bias in favour of "developing a new model" in almost every circumstance to address every kind of problem and opportunity. In fact, that's my stated mission: to "keep thinking alive." So like everything else I write, consider this in the context of high creative aspirations, not as an accusation that anybody failed.]
I was going to write more about the summer festivals and how all of this is involved in defining London’s character and how that helps to build social and creative capital, and in turn, what use that is to us, but this is already pretty long, so I’ll have to come back to that — hopefully before Christmas, but we’ll see.
