My fervent wish: covid kills our transactional relationship with the arts

vol. 2 issue 44

‘We’ve let the tangible inform the spiritual, when it should be the other way around.’

~Timothy Nelson, artistic director, IN Series Opera

Apologies for the late release of this issue. Migraine + tech issues + deadline = no muy bueno. I regret and am irritated by these events, but that’s life. Have a great weekend!
WMF

Greetings,

South Dakota Symphony Orchestra conductor, Delta David Gier, once remarked to me that one reason why orchestral music outfits in the US constantly found themselves struggling to remain solvent was because they tended to view themselves as one of a range of entertainment options rather than keepers of our unique national cultural flame.

A follow on to this is that in order to compete with big screen movies, stadium sports, and musical theater, among other live activities, American orchestras pre-covid tended to resort to gimmickry such as thematic programming and an appeal to their patrons’ sense of fun (think “Beethoven and blue jeans, for example).

Boil that down and the residue that remains essentially says, “You give us your money, we’ll give you a distraction.”

But, what if the performing arts were not just one of a range of many distractions, but a consistent vessel of our sacred national heritage as well our means of experiencing individual and communal spiritual transcendence? That is, after all, how the Greeks who invented theater, intended it: as a place where members of society across all strata could come together as one, where through witnessing comedy, tragedy, and satire, they could be educated, emote, and have their world reflected back to them in order to observe how it functioned. This empowered them as both actors in their communities and audience members of the performance to consider how they might possibly engage differently in the world at large and in their own homes.