I unfriended this person as the result
of his misogynistic rant where, in the crudest terms imaginable, he railed against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
and other members of the #MeToo
movement. For the record, I
believe Dr. Ford’s claims were credible and warranted a thorough
investigation. Brett Kavanaugh’s unhinged
reaction to the claims was an indicator that he is not emotionally fit to sit
on the high court – regardless of how one felt about his judicial philosophy. The Senate thought differently,
unfortunately. But my virtual
ex-friend’s response made Kavanaugh seem like a paragon of balanced
impartiality. His explicit references to
several sexual acts made it clear he had been thinking, and likely fantasizing,
about these acts for some time.
I would never have accepted this
person’s friend request if I’d known he held these views, that he was so
immature and possibly unstable. While I
certainly have friends, both online and in real life, who are Republicans – he
crossed a line that I would not stand for.
Indeed, I ceased contact with a relative for this very reason (sadly, I
expected this to happen, as he’s been a bully since childhood).
There was a time when I thought people
with certain characteristics were likely to be of higher sensitivity,
intelligence, or insight. I’ve never
believed that held true on a racial or ethnic basis. But when I was young, naïve, and coming out
of the closet, I labored under the false notion that, for example, LGBT persons
were more disposed to be open minded based on their coming out experience. Then I encountered LGBT people who were
racist, trashy, vulgar, and downright stupid – and that notion was put to
rest. For a longer period, I though the
same applied to Classical musicians.
Again, that notion has gone the way of the dodo.
The
incidence of classical musicians engaging in behavior once thought more the provenance
of the most decadent popular stars has been on the rise – or perhaps it’s
merely that this behavior is finally being reported. The Cleveland Orchestra was in the headlines
recently due to accusations against two players – who have since been dismissed from the
orchestra. The
accusations centered on behavior that George Szell would certainly not have tolerated. But the question arises – in the atmosphere
of the 1960s, would Szell and orchestral management even have known about such behavior? Doubtful, judging by how Szell was clueless
about the behavior of his protégé James Levine.
Of course, the sexual escapades of
Classical musicians from Liszt, to Toscanini, to Arthur Rubinstein have become
the stuff of legend. Whatever their
faults, these were sophisticated, well-read men. But there are a good many classical musicians
who, I’ve learned from experience, are racist, trashy, vulgar, and downright
stupid. Some may be intelligent, but
entirely blinkered within their careers and the center of their own world. And even those with artistic insight are too
often lacking insight into the human condition.
Take, for example, Wilhelm Furtwängler. The conductor’s decision to stay in Germany
after the Nazis took over the country has been the fodder for debate, some of
it vehement, for 80 years. I’ll skip
that overly discussed topic for now. Seldom
mentioned is that, outside Furtwängler’s obvious gifts on the podium, his was
an entirely provincial mentality, shuttered to matters outside music – and his
musical insight was mostly confined to that of his home region. Nowhere is Furtwängler’s provincialism clearer
than in his desperate letters to
Bayreuth during the
1930s, objecting to the presence of an Italian conductor (Toscanini) at the
high temple of German music. While there
are Classical musicians who are evolved people gifted with general
intelligence, the list of those who are socially inept, politically obtuse, and
just plain stuck in their own world is easily as long. I would suspect the percentage of evolved
versus devolved popular musicians – or performers of other genres – is
approximately the same.
Another music blogger* has opined that
“Classical musicians are artists, popular musicians are performers”. That sweeping generalization – arrogant,
ignorant, and errant – is pure elitist balderdash. But it brings up the question: What
constitutes an artist? I don’t consider
performers – whether dancers, instrumentalists, singers, or actors – to be
artists. If these performers had a hand
in creating the work they are performing, that would be exceptional. But when it comes to classical music today,
few performers could be correctly termed artists, any more than a museum
curator who decides on a frame for a painting.
Over the course of music history, there were those who were both
creators and performers – including Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, and
Rachmaninoff. While some performers,
including Stokowski and Horowitz, were more creative with the source material
(i.e., the score) ultimately, they were still performers. Partially as a result of faulty, pedantic
conservatory training, the dividing line between performer and composer has
become starker and less permeable in recent decades. Creativity within the bounds of performance
has been banished – although there are a few performers today, like Arcadi
Volodos, who are more imaginative than others.
But it’s small wonder that many classical musicians cannot improvise,
cannot learn even the basics of a composition without the score, who perish at
the thought of an onstage memory lapse – the notion of composing a cadenza to,
say, a Mozart Concerto, is anathema to them.
When all they are doing is reproducing the dots on a page, how can they
possibly call themselves artists? In
reality, they are glorified manual laborers.
Lest that remark seem needlessly dismissive and even cruel, let me point
out that I was once a manual laborer in a piano factory, and while the
brochures advertising our hand-built pianos touted the builders as “artisans”,
I doubt even the most pretentious among us would have considered ourselves “artists”.
* This was the same blogger who began
latching onto Kanye West when the hip-hop star voiced his support for Donald
Trump – so it’s utterly transparent where this blogger is coming from.
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