 George W. Bush |
This one is REAL
“America has one national creed, but many accents. We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We’re a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.”
From George Bush’s August 25, 2000 speech entitled “Century of the Americas,” Miami, FL
 Al Gore |
The REAL quote
“National Public Radio has been indispensable to its local listeners across the country. Each station across America tailors its programming to meet local needs. For example, when school funding for classical music training was cut, it was KUER in Salt Lake City that produced a series introducing elementary school students to classical music.“
From Vice President Al Gore’s Remarks on Public Broadcasting, March 2, 1995, American University
Al Gore |
This is the FAKE quote, but not very far away from these Gore comments about Napster and explicit lyrics.
“I think that the Internet has wonderful potential to bring diverse kinds of music to new audiences. Schoolchildren in Georgia may, before long, have the opportunity to hear orchestra concerts in New York without having to leave the classroom, and university students in Japan may have the chance to experience their first fiddling contest without having to get on a plane. At the same time, like any new frontier, the internet poses dangers, as well. Napster is a useful tool, a great idea, but we need to find a better way to protect the rights of the musicians whose music is, in essence, being stolen. And it is becoming far too easy for our children to stumble onto websites promoting music that contains explicitly violent lyrics; we need to find an appropriate way to shield their eyes.”
 Ralph Nader |
This was FAKED, but not very far away from these comments.
“With hundreds of radio stations owned by a single company, it comes as no surprise that the programming reflects the economic desires of that company, not the greater interests of its listeners. Instead of challenging programming, we get mind-numbing mock analyses of non-stories crafted solely for entertainment value. Thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, poets and musicians and scientists and free-thinkers around the nation are finding that it is becoming harder and harder to get heard.”
In the fall of 1992 I was in Washington D.C. to serve on a panel at the National Endowment for the Arts. The day our panel convened, Pat Buchanan declared a “cultural war” in America. The principal battleground of that war was the NEA. The next morning a staff member informed our panel that President Bush had just fired the chairman of the Endowment.
Clearly, politicians think the arts have some influence on politics.
The most prominent objects of Mr. Buchanan’s wrath were visual and performance artists such as Karen Finley, Andres Serrano, and Robert Mapplethorpe. But if Mr. Buchanan, Senator Helms and their allies had ever heard and understood the music of Cage and Oliveros, composers might have drawn even more rhetorical fire and brimstone. The vision of society embodied in this music is one that many people in political power would find threatening.
Although composers were never a primary target in Mr. Buchanan’s war, we were among the earliest casualties. Composer Fellowships were one of the first NEA grant programs to be eliminated in the ensuing assault on public funding for the arts.
Obviously politics can have a direct influence on artists.
Like many artists, I wrote my members of Congress. My representative in the House, Congressman Don Young, wrote me back stating his view that the arts should not receive government funding. The Arts, he said, should make their own way in the free marketplace of ideas.
Soon afterwards, I learned that Congressman Young was supporting legislation that would allow restaurants and other establishments to use recorded music in their businesses without paying performing rights to the artists who created the music.
I wrote Congressman Young again. I reminded him of his contention that artists should make their way in the marketplace, and told him that as a working composer performing rights royalties are an important part of my earned income. He never responded.
Artists in the United States are caught between the rock of vanishing public funding and the hard place of mass-market economics. If the business of America is business, where do people who dedicate their lives to creativity fit into the politics and economics of this country?
What role, if any, is there in American society for music that doesn’t have entertainment or commerce as its primary objective? And what impact can the new music community have on politics?
Is the most effective political action for composers and performers the creation of new music that inscribes change and contributes to the gradual transformation of society? Should we vote and actively participate in electoral politics?
A Statement of Purpose
Over a month ago, Frank and I set about contacting five Presidential candidates to ask them for thoughts on American music. No one responded.
Al Gore’s campaign was the only one to dignify us with a response. Other responses ranged from clueless silence (Nader’s campaign; then again, they don’t even provide a public phone number, just a fax) to abrupt rudeness (Pat Buchanan’s press secretary cut me off and hung up the phone). Ah, America, land of the free…and the disempowered.
The sad thing is, as serious musicians in this country, we are used to being “blown off.”
Frequently the disrespect surfaces in ways that are perhaps too trivial to merit serious complaint: having to pretend to the person sitting next to you on the plane that, no, really, you like Britney Spears. But there are other, more serious problems that all of us face all our lives that not only merit complaint, they merit the serious attention of politicians.
The cultural attitude that the work of musicians is not “real work” is still all too prevalent, and it is reflected in the low wages doled out to many excellent performers, teachers, and composers. Unfortunately, evidence of a small income, no matter what the source, serves as a “green light” to many people, ranging from landlords to airline attendants, to treat all of us as if we were uneducated slackers.
Why should any politician worth his or her salt be working to change this attitude? Perhaps because a healthy respect for music, instigated through disciplined and creative education, has been proven again and again to not only turn young people away from cheap sex and violence, but to make them smarter, more profound, and more reasonable human beings. And while this surfaces in various isolated programs across the country, we have yet to elect a President who makes this kind of an initiative a national priority.
Here’s our quandary: to create a cultural respect for music, we need a President’s help; to get the President’s attention, we need more money, money that we likely won’t get unless we gain cultural respect. So what do we do?
To begin with, we need to get better at getting angry. The prevalent attitude that “small income equals stupid” frequently cows us into silencing the articulate and cutting thoughts running through our heads. Many of my musician buddies are at their most creative when elaborating a grievance – but that stream of words rarely makes it to the ears of the offender. Take the time to make the phone call to the airline that made you put your cello in with somebody’s skis.
Second of all, we need to make more money. Unless capitalism goes mellow, money will always talk loudest in this country. Gigs are gigs, and most of us will still take a good gig that pays poorly sooner than we will take a bad gig that pays well. But one of the negative effects of the “you don’t have a real job” attitude is that many musicians believe it, and they don’t plan wisely with the money they do make. Hire a financial planner, and make sure your students do the same. Boycotts are powerful things, but we can’t do it if we are all “scraping by.”
Lastly, vote, whatever you do, even if it is only for a candidate who represents “the lesser of two evils.” With voter turnout consistently declining for the past thirty-five years, our small demographic becomes larger and larger, by comparison. If you need a reason to vote, vote for an education policy that will ensure the funding of an arts program in your local public schools. Without that program, there will never be a shift in cultural attitude.
Partly from a latent adolescent desire to “get even,” we decided to go ahead with the “Hymn and Fuguing Tune,” simply making up the comments that we tried to pry from the candidates’ mouths. We have also mixed in actual comments by these men on the subject of music. It may frustrate you to know that one of the candidates has given interviews to not one, but two prominent pop music media mouths. For the most part, however, it appears that the word “music” has rarely graced the lips of any of these men during the past few years.
Politics has become the realm of the wealthy and few, and I suspect that we could have been calling from NewFishBox and we would have received the same treatment. Making up comments is tame revenge, because the candidates will never read this and they won’t respond. Then again, if you are one of the Presidential candidates and you are reading this, we are more than willing to run anything you have to say about American music, regardless of length. Just send us an email.
In the jovial spirit of disenfranchisement, we invite the rest of you to try your luck at guessing which of the comments we made up. Click on the name of the candidates below to read both sets of comments. To unmask us, simply click on the remark to reveal the source.
 Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard |
Frequently when I travel outside of the United States I’m simultaneously thrilled and disheartened to discover great composers on paper currency: thrilled to see composers be such a significant part of the day to day life of everybody; disheartened at what the absence of American composers on American money implies…
The appearance of Sibelius on paper money in Finland, Villa Lobos in Brazil, or Clara Schumann (a woman composer to boot) in Germany (to cite just three examples), is not perfunctory. This seemingly mundane homage is an important metaphor for the cultural value placed on composers in these societies. In all of these countries, most people are aware of these composers and the important contributions they have made to the world.
Everyone here knows who George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are, as well we should. The ideals and accomplishments of these two men shaped our nation more than anything else. And while their appearance on our most widely used coins and bills is not the sole source of their fame among all Americans, it certainly helps public awareness that their images are reinforced every time we buy a newspaper or make a call from a pay phone. But do we really need daily reminders of Andrew Jackson, a man of questionable character, or Ulysses S. Grant, a man whose administration was plagued by corruption? Or, for that matter, Alexander Hamilton, who was never even elected President of the United States… Moreover, he died as the result of a duel with a sitting U.S. Vice President which was fought in part over a mistress who was married to neither, an event that makes today’s media-hyped indiscretions pale by comparison?
Why not put Charles Ives on the money? Or Duke Ellington? Or Amy Beach or Gershwin? How about putting John Cage on the standard form for a government-issued money order, which, after all, is a bill of indeterminate value? Would so doing make people more aware of the rich cultural legacy that American composers have bequeathed to the world?
At the least, there needs to be a greater musical awareness among the people who hold our elected offices. But there also needs to be a greater political awareness on the part of people who make and shape music in this country, the “unsilent minority,” to coin a phrase countering the so-called silent majority. As we enter the homestretch of another Presidential election campaign, we thought it would be valuable to look at the connections between American music and American politics.
We tried to get comments about American music from the Gore, Bush, Nader, Buchanan, and even Hagelin campaigns, but did not get a response from any of them. This is a sobering reminder of what the American new music community must still do in order to get our voices heard. So, instead we offer a cornucopia of music-related comments by the candidates mixed in with some comments of our own and ask you to decide who said what. We offer a HyperHistory of the political leanings of people in various roles in the music industry, from composers and performers to the people behind the scenes who make concert life happen on a daily basis. We’d like to know your views as well.
As our centerpiece, we tested the 42 men who have already held our nation’s highest office on their interest in and knowledge of music of any kind, and found revealing comments by all but 6 of them (one of the missing six was Andrew Jackson, by the way, and the only reference to music made by Grant was inadvertent). We’ve assembled these comments into a virtual fireside chat allowing for a serious yet sometimes amusing comparison of their views.
I often take solace in knowing that a string quartet is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, a really unusual maverick-type piece at that, scored for three violins and cello in unusual tuning and played solely on open strings. Of course Franklin, though an important father of our country, was never elected President of the United States. (Some folks at the time claimed he never got elected because he tinkered with the glass harmonica.) As a composer, though, I’m doubly thrilled that Franklin made it onto the highest bill currently in use, which is as it should be!
Unlike the impending Presidential election, there are tons of musical choices in SoundTracks this month ranging from new recordings of acknowledged American musical masterpieces to rediscoveries of overlooked musical treasures to works from newly-emerging composers never before on CD.
In the orchestral music department, there is a new recording of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2, which is the first-ever recording of a new critical edition prepared for the Ives Society, and a collection of recent orchestral works by Michigan-based composer Will Gay Bottje. And, the music of Steven Gerber is the focus of not one, but two, new recordings devoted to his concertos and other orchestral works.
There are a wide variety of new chamber music recordings including discs featuring recent works by Andrea Cavallari, Donald Erb, Binnette Lipper, P. Q. Phan, Yehudi Wyner, a collection of flute and piano music by women composers, a collection of solo and chamber works by ten different composers with cultural roots in Latin America. However, nothing is properly more imposing this month than yet another recording of Morton Feldman’s massive 4 hour For Philip Guston for flute, piano and percussion, now appearing in its 4th complete CD recording. It boggles the senses!
The guitar surfaces in a variety of guises this month. One disc is devoted to solo guitar works composer and performed by Christopher Berg, another presents both solo and chamber guitar works by George Rochberg, and all three jazz titles we received this month prominently feature guitarists: Donny McCaslin‘s quartet features Ben Monder; Todd Sickafoose‘s quintet features Justin Morell; and Bill Frisell shows up as a special guest on a new recording by the trio Livingdaylights.
There are two new collections of solo piano music this month, one devoted to recent works by six different composers, the other devoted to an unusual pairing of music by John Cage and Philip Glass, cleverly titled Glass Cage. New approaches to electroacoustic sound surface in new CDs from David Dvorin, John Schott, and Paul Koonce. A new disc devoted to the music of Matthew Davidson features solo, chamber and electronic works.
In the rediscoveries department, the new Paula Cooper Gallery-run label Dog Without a Bone (who issued this month’s Feldman Olympiad) have issued a three-and-a-half hour excerpt of Petr Kotik’s massive 1978 Gertrude Stein setting Many, Many Women, proving themselves unafraid of the task of issuing works of extended durations. The other, very timely rediscovery is Leonard Bernstein’s White House Cantata, a recasting of material originally written for his final Broadway musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue which he wrote with Alan Jay Lerner in 1976. I would also include a new retrospective disc devoted to music by Elodie Lauten in this category as well because her revolutionary music is still too frequently overlooked when there are assessments made of American music of the past three decades.
Patrick J. Buchanan |
“Everyday we see new evidence of the corruption of our popular culture: Filthy art financed with tax dollars. Television steeped in raw sex and romanticized violence. Movies that mock religious faith. Music that extols social chaos.”
“There’s the American music that the elitists at the universities want you to believe is American music, and then there’;s the real stuff, the music of the American people, the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and ‘God Bless America.’ And there are new songs, there’s a new one by Steve Vaus, ‘Take America Back,’ something like that. A good, proud, American song.”
George W. Bush |
“America has always played home to the greatest minds in all professions. Not just in the sciences or in sports or in business, but also in writing, and in music. Our children must be taught take pride in America not only as the home of Tommy Lasorda and Dinesh D’Souza, but also Clint Eastwood and Howard Hanson.”
“America has one national creed, but many accents. We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We’re a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.”
