"The Challenging Pleasures of Art"

The thought-provoking title of this post comes from a commencement address given by Dana Gioia, NEA Chairman, at Stanford University in 2007. It is encouraging to know that there are people trying to start a dialogue about cultural impoverishment in our society. Here are some excepts from his address.

"I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players and American Idol finalists they can name. Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, classical musicians and composers they can name.

The Loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways...

When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few roles modes [do we] offer the young.

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has become one vast infomercial...

But we must remember that the market place does only one thing: it puts a prices on everything.

The role of culture must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the prices of things, but their value.

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being; simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as songs..[emphasis added]."

Mr. Gioia's address discusses many of these ideas in greater depth and is well worth reading.
(I will add link to the full text soon. )

meb

Music as Art

As the place for art music diminishes in our lives, so does its importance and its ability to enhance and enrich.  Newspaper "Arts" sections are replaced by "Entertainment" sections; classical music never makes the Evening News, unless perhaps somebody is stabbed at a concert; and not one person in a hundred can name a living American composer under 50.

That there are numerous gifted and interesting composers under 50 (under 30, too) and why they persist against all odds in offering their sonic expressions to an unwilling, uninterested and uneducated public is the theme of this blog.

Perhaps if we would listen often to interesting and even challenging musics, we could begin to hear.  We'll see.

meb