In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on September 15, 2008

“The question comes down to how we can as artists make the case to Canadians that the arts deserves healthy vigorous funding,” S. Randy Boyagoda, a novelist and a professor of literature based at Ryerson University, said on Thursday.
Source CBC.ca

Canada seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Arts.  On the one hand, certain arts are valorized and held up as “High Culture”, while others are almost sneered at as being “low Culture”.  This splitting of art and performance into so-called “high” and “low” is certainly not unique to Canada, it’s done throughout the Western world.  What is if not unique then at least distinctive about the split in Canada, is how we, as a society, have dealt with the funding issues.

As with many things “Canadian”, we seem to take the worst from our neighbors to the south and the worst from our British traditions, and this is certainly the case with Arts funding.  From the British, we have inherited a perception of a division between high and low culture which really doesn’t fit in with the actuality of the experience.  We have also inherited the concept of government funding from them and the idea, at least in government circles, that Arts funding is directly related to a government use value (this comes via the National Film Board and its use as a propaganda tool, at least in the early years of the NFB).

From the Americans, we have this idea that the Arts should generate their own income, hence Boyagoda’s comment.  Unlike the US, however, there is a belief that this funding should come from the government rather than private sources.  The frustrating part of this general perception is that it really doesn’t take into account much about either the business side of many arts groups or the temperament of many artists.

Let me star with a rather bald stereotype: most artists working in “High Culture” arts are a) pretty driven and b) have the business sense of two-year olds.  If you want to succeed in one of the high arts, you have to sacrifice incredible amounts of time, energy and personal money learning the skills.  Furthermore, most of the places where you learn these skills have an almost unreal disdane for business skills: Arts Management is the antithesis of Arts Production / Performance.  I have often suspected that this comes from a perception that the “Arts” (actually, the High Culture Arts) are viewed as a “calling” in the religious sense, while Arts Management is viewed as merely being “in Trade”.  Indeed, if you listen to some of the catty commentary amongst many artists about those who actually are successful in business, it is fairly common to hear that attitude being expressed.

By now, some people reading his are probably muttering along the lines of “where does he get this Sierra?”.  Okay.  I come from an artistic family.  Both my great grandfather and my grandmother were professional portrait painters and, when I was growing up, I frequently went to various shows with my grandmother.  Both my parents were musicians and my mother had taught acting for a while.  On my own side, I’ve been involved in running a theatre company and I’m also a singer who has been involved in a lot of different choirs, as well as singing in bars.  Over the years, I’ve met and chatted with almost every type of artist in almost every type of venue and performed in many of them. ’nuff said…

Returning to the Boyagoda quote, the key phrase is “that the arts deserves healthy vigorous funding”, where the artists must make that case.  The implication is that this funding comes from one or more governments, an implication I find troubling. The artist in me finds this troubling because it assumes a measurable ROI on a shared experience, while the Anthropologist in me finds it troubling because it shows so clearly that the universe of discourse surrounding the Arts assumes that they are not generated by a community.  These two concerns are related.

What is Art?  Well, without going into a major academic paper on it, the simplest answer is that all Arts are communicative genres that tell certain types of stories, myths or visions of some facet/perception of “reality”.  Some art forms are designed (or evolved) to take advantage of certain facets of our neurophysiology.  For example, early epic poetry such as the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Mahabarata all use mnemonic keying devices both as an aide memoire for the person reciting it and, also, as a way of keying the listeners with certain cue phrases.  Other art forms, such as singing and instrumental music, rely on creating resonance effects in the listener which influence parts of their bodies (e.g. heart rate, states of consciousness, states of expectation, etc.).

Most performance art, as opposed to, say, literature, painting, sculpture, etc., relies on telling a story through evocation of both cognitive and affective sequences in the listener.  What is quite fascinating is that even if the cognitive cues cannot be understood, the affective cues often can be.  As a case in point, I used to play the third part of Heinrich Schütz’ Musikalishe Exequien for my first year students and ask them what it was written for.  Now, the piece itself is in German, which most of the students don’t understand, and there are very few recordings of it (5 I believe) and it doesn’t get that much airtime (maybe 10 times on CBC Radio 2 in the past 4 years).  The interesting thing was that consistently, over 85% of those students correctly identified it as being written for a funeral (and no, it doesn’t sound like a funeral march ).

Now one of the interesting things I learned from Daniel Leviton‘s book This Is Your Brain on Music is that children develop and “ear” for tonal structures at about age 6 months or so.  In effect, listening to a musical tradition establishes neural recognition of “right” and “wrong” tonal intervals very early on (a lot of it comes down to how many intervals are recognized between octaves).  Now these systems of tonal intervals are the musical equivalent of “grammar” for musical systems; trying to switch between them can really cause problems for listeners since their expectations are not met (as an example, think about bagpipes playing in Beethoven’s Ninth wihout being retuned).

With the exception of octaves, the “grammar” for music is not set and each musical tradition starts from their own “grammar” and developes “conventions”.  These conventions can range from fairly simple, and limited, “meaning”, to quite complex, multi-layered meaning being conveyed.  But, of course, to comprehend the more complex musical meaning structures, you have to have the expectations symbollically and neurologically “set” in you.  Which, in my usual round about fashion, brings us back to the “High Culture / Low Culture” distincton I was talking about earlier.

“High Culture”, at least as it is generally cnceived of in the Western (musical) world, tends to use fairly complex meaning structures that are not, generally, used by most people and have very little connection to everyday life.  High Culture is also professionalized to the point where it has, on the whole, been taken out of everyday life.

As a case in point, albeit a generalization, most people in North America are uncomfortable singing in 4 part harmony (we won’t even talk about 8, 12, 16 and 32 part…).  Again, as a generalization, this is because 4 part harmony really developed in churches and church attendance has dropped as have the musical standards in almost all churches (except for the professional musicians in some churches).  The major exception to this is in some of the African-American dominated churches whose musical traditions are not onlyflourishing but, also, getting more complex (e.g. Moses Hogan writes a lot of 8 part pieces).  Now, if you compare the congregation singing between, say, a Baptist church and an Anglican church, you will see a major difference.  In the first, people sing; they harmonize, they make noise, they move to the music and, in general, they own it.  In Anglican churches, people tend to be stiff, music is “owned” by the choir and organist, and singing is not really encouraged amongst the audience (on the whole, they tend to be “audiences” rather than “congregations”).  Baptist musical traditions don’t “need” to make the case for funding; the case is made by the popular ownership and performance of the music.

But other musical traditions do need to “make a case” for funding simply because they are not a part of everyday life.  And, since they aren’t a part of everyday life, they tend to be expensive to do well.  For example, a production of Handel’s Messiah can cost anywhere from nothing (with a pick up orchestra, choir and soloists) to 50,000 – 100,000 if you get the best.  Now, I said earlier that most artists are “driven”, and this is certainly true of Baroque musicians.  A truly driven conductor / impressario will want the “best”, and that means trying to pay for them.  But will the audience know the difference?  The Messiah is not “owned” by any community outside of the community of musicians.  Where you do have a tradition of performing it in a community, you are most likely to have the community version of it – the “Sing Along Messiah” performances that show up in Ottawa, Montreal and Edmonton.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I applaud sing along Messiah’s and community ownership of Baroque music.  They are a lot of fun (I’ve sung in about 40 of them) and they really act as a communal “glue”; a shared experience, expression and act of story-telling.  But I will also be singing them the “right” way, and that will be two or three orders of magnitude more “powerful” and, yes, more expensive.  Why should they be supported?  Simple, they are a part of our heritage; a set of stories that we have told ourselves about ourselves.  They are our emotional history as a culture and if they are not funded, by the community, by private sponsors or by governments, then that history will be lost.  All of the Arts are stories; our ongoing dialogues with ourselves, our communities, our ancestors and our descendants.  We give up control over these stories and that dialogue at our peril.

Category: Anthropology, Music, Professionalization, Social Theatre
Tags: Music, The Arts