I honestly can’t remember when I started caring about orchestras. The pages that far back in my brain are coffee-stained and stuck together. But I know I always have. I spent my days floating around on a sea of my dad’s tape of the month club recordings of Jean-Pierre Rampal, which is when I decided to be a flute player. Every day, I’d wait for him to walk in the door from work to see if he’d brought home the flute I kept begging him for. Then there was the year they sent us a stack of the Kathleen Battle albums and I traded my flute aspirations for dreams of singing high notes for days. When the club sent us the Cleveland Orchestra and Leon Fleisher playing Beethoven, I practiced the piano harder than ever before.
I couldn’t live without it, this music. It saturated my life. And to be honest, nothing has really changed since then.
Except that I no longer take it for granted.
Baltimore: SEE US
As a long-time resident of Baltimore, the protests in 2015 (some describe them as “riots”) touched my neighborhood, I’ve watched The Wire play out in endless news reports of mayoral scandal and police corruption, and embarrassingly, I barely notice any more when as I’m drinking my coffee and scrolling Instagram, the morning headline news features the shootings that happened last night just blocks away from my door. But you know what news always captures my attention? The labor disputes at my city’s orchestra.
And as a keen over-analyzer of my own and other’s behavior (you could call me the Carrie Bradshaw of my group of friends, but with less amazing hair) the astounding ridiculousness of this is not lost on me. Tuck in your privilege, Jessica, it’s showing again. In denial much? Systemic racism and inequity, unmitigated poverty and addiction, I walked by people without a home and a drug deal just as I was writing this, and all I want to read about is the latest in the orchestra contract negotiations? I totally get why funders are having a hard time coming up with the cash to devote to orchestras. I can feel it in my body when I write a check myself: there are kids living just under the overpass from me who don’t have enough food. Where do I get off giving money to the arts? We’re all thinking it.
In 2016, Fred Bronstein (my dean) gave me a project. He said, “Jessica, you’re going to produce MASS in Bernstein’s centennial year. Marin’s going to conduct, and we need to find a community space to perform it and then convince some people that don’t go to school here to participate. Here’s how much we can afford to spend. Go for it.” I had never heard the piece before, but I was both flattered and didn’t really have a choice, so I agreed. I got a score and listened, and immediately started to panic. It wouldn’t physically fit in our hall, the forces were huge, it was going to be impossible even to find a place to rehearse.
Underneath my cheerful exterior, I was terrified for a lot of reasons. I worried that that no one from our neighborhoods would want to perform with us because we as an institution really hadn’t spent a lot of time working on relationships with our neighbors beyond buying up blocks of their homes and forcing them out. I worried that my guilt about all this would come across as patronizing. I worried that there wasn’t a community space (read: NOT A CONCERT HALL) big enough to put the show up. I worried that I couldn’t afford it with the exceptionally lean budget Fred had given me. I worried that we would never be able to convince the opera students that this show was as worth their time as a “real opera role.” I worried that something bad would happen to one of the kids during a rehearsal and we’d get sued. I worried that the caterers would get the orders wrong and that the bus company would send drivers to the wrong school or community center to pick up the wrong people. I worried that I would inadvertently insult one of the community groups during my visits to their rehearsals. I worried that the conductor of the Morgan State Choir (an alum, no less) would never forgive me for getting his name wrong repeatedly. I worried that the director of the production wouldn’t show up for meetings, which was frankly pretty typical for him. I worried about the mics, the sound, the video projections. Nothing was coming together. Meanwhile, I was walking around pretending everything was beyond great and I had it all completely under control.
As the performance approached, I slept less and less and looked more and more haggard. I’ll never forget what Marin Alsop said to me one day after rehearsal.
“Jessica, he [Bernstein] wrote it to be this way. We’re supposed to feel like this. It’s part of the experience of the piece to feel like everything is chaos, for us, for the production team, for the performers, for the audience.”
That was when it hit me. The whole point was to acknowledge that, just like Stephen Schwartz wrote in the Fraction: things get broken.
What was life-changing about this discovery is that it’s freeing. We are free to be broken, free to fail, free to need a hug sometimes. Free to say: There is a lot about this city that is going horribly wrong, and even more terrifying, I don’t know how to fix it.
Nearly three thousand people showed up that night in a driving rain storm. Almost a third had never been on the other side of the marble columns at Peabody or heard or our orchestra play. They came because we invited them. They came because the show was in their church, in their neighborhood. And what we shared that evening was a moment of space to acknowledge the discomfort, the distance between us, a piece that offered no answers, only one poignant question after the next.
American orchestras: asking for a friend
There are so many disconnects in my city I’m not sure where to start, but I can’t imagine the students at Frederick Douglass High School feel a depth of concern about our orchestra taking a pay cut. I often wonder why so many assumptions are made about what getting paid to create art means, and what that money and sense of security is supposed to stand for. I live and breathe orchestras and the worst thing that could happen would be to not have them, but I am beginning to acknowledge just what I said a couple paragraphs back: things get broken. Did the old ways ever really work or were we all just smiling and pretending everything was fine as we plummeted into the red?
No one would disagree that we are in an uncomfortable era for American orchestras. We’ve successfully identified a lot of the contributing factors to the discomfort: decline in arts education, populations without access to art, lack of diversity, decreased or non-existent government support, incomplete training in conservatories for the current challenges facing musicians, and so on. Which all give rise to more questions: How do we teach conservatory students the breadth of skills they need to become civic-minded entrepreneur art ambassadors and still ensure they have enough time to practice excerpts? How do we compete with all the other fun things there are for our ticket-buyers to do instead of come to our concerts and try to remember not to clap between movements? How do we convince funders that this art form is as important to the survival of our species as donating to cancer research?
I’ve made an effort to understand the trajectory of the orchestral model in the United States, but I don’t have the personal experience to make proclamations about what actually happened with the Ford Foundation, the decline of orchestras in daily American life, the greying of the audience, and I still haven’t figured out who killed classical music.
The closest I’ve ever felt to finding a solution was in that church in West Baltimore with a couple thousand people I didn’t know. The longer I acknowledge the questions and embrace the idea that building a future is going to be difficult, uncertain work, the more our collective challenges are starting to look like major opportunities.
What are the steps to solvency and sustainability? Quite literally, the only thing I know for sure is that the music isn’t the problem. So, I’m starting with myself: I’ll be authentic, transparent, and curious. I’ll keep asking questions about the processes and protocols—why do we do it like this? Is it to feel like we have some control? Or does it serve the music and the audience? Does it invite and welcome, or alienate and make “others” out of neighbors? I’ll work to remind people of the research supporting the importance of art for our children’s development, and how access to beauty should be considered a basic human right. I’ll keep going to the neighborhoods to ask them to come. I’ll keep thinking of ways to get the music to where they are. I’ll plop right down in the middle of the lumpy couch of discomfort and make myself at home, because the only version of the future I’m not okay with is one without our orchestras.