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WASBE Conference Keynote Address
30 June 2003
It is both an honor and a pleasure to speak to this assembled body of distinguished musicians, conductors and teachers from throughout the world. I thank WASBE's Past President, Tim Reynish, for the invitation to do so, and WASBE President, Dennis Johnson, for his support of Tim’s proposal. Incidentally, we all owe Tim our gratitude, not only for his artistic vision that guided the organization of this conference, but for his personal support of many important projects at this conference including Chris Marshall's commission, Christian Lindberg's residency, and the appearance of Wayne Rapier. Additionally, on behalf of CBDNA members, let me take this opportunity to thank WASBE for its support of Bastiaan Blomhert's appearance at the CBDNA conference in Minneapolis. Hopefully, such collaboration between the two organizations can continue in future.
The topic about which I have been asked to speak is at once vital to each of us and guaranteed to create disagreement amongst us. That topic is the future of the wind band field.
At present, wind bands of various flavors can be found throughout most of the world. In some countries, bands exist primarily as functional units, reflecting the part of our field history connected with the military. In others, wind bands are woven into the fabric of schools and communities, ostensibly serving as vehicles for music education and for the social and musical edification of amateur players. And in a few nations, professional wind ensembles have formed, competing with other musical entities for public support and artistic recognition.
When we gather together as members of band organizations, like WASBE, we tend to honor our distinct and varied heritages, celebrate our individual and collective accomplishments, offer each other sage advice on all matters concerning the band, and reassure one another that the fruits of our passion are vital to humankind and, therefore, universally cherished. Who can blame us when, in many ways, the recent past has been such a vibrant time for bands? It is tempting to sit back, enjoy our daily routines, and let the wind band field naturally evolve, convinced that the field’s future is secure for our heirs. Evolution, by definition though, is purposeless and without design—it has no regard for outcome. If we agree that watching our movement unfold in such a purposeless way is unwise, then in what strategies should we invest our energy to insure a good return for our efforts?
If we put on a different pair of shoes and step out of this sanctuary, where everybody worships the wind band, how do we look when viewed from the outside? If suddenly, I am the member of a string quartet, a rock star, an opera singer, or a non-musical professional person, working as a doctor or engineer, how does the wind band appear when I look at it through any of those windows? What does that view reveal about our present state and indicate relative to our future?
I wish that I could proclaim to have discovered the proverbial crystal ball in which our future is made clear or that I could tell you that there are simple answers to our fate. If that were the case, this address could be as short and clever as the reply of the student in an English class at Harvard who, when asked to write a concise essay that contained the elements of religion, royalty, sex, and mystery, wrote, “ ‘My God,’ said the Queen, ‘I’m pregnant! I wonder who did it.’ ” Unfortunately for me, I am not that clever; regrettably for you, I am not that concise. However, I do propose that a sneak peek at the future of the wind band might be had through the lenses of those same four elements: religion, royalty, sex, and mystery.
At the same time, I contend that to advance our field, we must ask impertinent and challenging questions of one another. As cartoonist Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame points out, those who have courageously questioned conventional wisdom—Copernicus, Darwin, Martin Luther, Daniel Defoe, the Wright brothers, Bill Gates, and others—have moved civilization forward. When we avoid deeply meaningful dialogue about our beloved field, because we are afraid of upsetting the status quo, we risk our field's future well being. Pulitzer prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon speaks to this dilemma eloquently in his poem, “Paris”:
In each fresh, neutral place
Where our differences might have been settled
There were men sitting down to talk of peace
Who began with the shape of the table.
Those of us who remember the Vietnam peace talks of thirty years ago, recall that such absurdities often accompanied those negotiations. Let’s begin this conference by pledging to one another that we will talk about more than the shape of our table! Our future as a wind band field will be determined in great part by the strength of our commitment to get beyond our profession’s surface issues and into the meat of our subject.
By framing our field in several different ways, and by posing a few impertinent questions, I hope to encourage us to be less self-referential, more flexible about how we define ourselves, and to continue our journey by choosing a path that will lead us to a place where we are real, rather than marginal players, in both art music and music education.
Religion
No honest look at a field can be done without first contemplating the context in which that field operates. This is crucial, for it is likely that the actions of those working in a given field will be guided by their understanding of the field’s context. For example, if I have determined that the whole context of my work is the concert wind band, then I will probably act in accordance with the customs of concert wind bands, as I know them, without reference to the work of those in related fields. In his landmark book Creativity, Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi warns that "When a field becomes too self-referential and cut off from reality, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant."
I suggest that each of us here is a member of the larger field of wind and percussion studies, whether we are a performer, teacher, or conductor. Further, that multifaceted field is a part of instrumental studies, which resides in the domain of music, a domain that encompasses an enormous diversity of human musical thought. Even then, as large as it is, the domain of music is but one member of the even larger arts community, which itself is a part of an extensive web we call the humanities. In short, we are organically connected to a vast spectrum of human endeavor, with a narrative more ancient than recorded history.
We don’t need to look far to realize that the golden age of the humanities—that long period of time when education and discourse were centered on matters of cultural character—is over. To be sure, the degree of emphasis on such matters certainly varies from country-to-country, with highly capitalistic nations, such as mine, having the tendency to focus more on the immediate “bottom-line” and less on long-term cultural values. As Daniel Gioia, Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States points out, “Our commercialized, entertainment-oriented television-based culture has cheapened and trivialized public discourse.” Even the world’s great universities, longtime bastions of a liberal education, have in many cases become little more than trade schools, emphasizing career training over education in the humanities.
Moreover, the past century or so has been increasingly dominated by the sciences, with evolutionary biology and bioengineering currently leading the way. The agenda du jour is about using technology to unlock the myriad mysteries of living matter, particularly us humans, with the promise of creating a better quality of life tomorrow. Coincidentally, the answers that such inquiry produces continue to expand the already-wide gulf between formally educated societies and more traditional, tribal societies where many people lack access to rudimentary education, let alone contemporary scholarship. Consequently, one can conclude that life well into this century will continually be dominated by hostilities between these factions.
For several millennia, religion, the arts, and other humanities have served not only as the primary font of human wisdom, but to feed the needs of what we commonly refer to as our soul. Will our need to nourish the sprit diminish as we evolve into ever-more technologically supported creatures, perhaps living unimaginably long lives, courtesy of nano-machinery embedded in our bodies? If, as neurologist Antonio Damasio asserts, our emotions are generated by genetically encoded bodily reactions to appropriate stimuli, and bioengineering subsequently overrides those tendencies, that development is at least plausible. While a longer lifetime is an exciting prospect, let’s hope that such a sterile definition of “living” never comes to pass!
Meanwhile, in many developed nations, substantial societal upheaval continues to unfold, as many institutions, religious and otherwise—particularly those maintaining rigid adherence to antiquated dogma—loose their authority over basic human truths. Will the humanities become even less important in such a world? Or is it possible that many of our children’s children will become avid practitioners of art, thus sustaining their needs for spiritual fulfillment? As historian Barre Toelken reminds us, “The artistic urge among humans is ancient and universal: It makes up the core of all cultures.”
Many, from futurists like Mathews and Wacker to anthropologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, suggest that the arts and sciences are natural partners. After all, both are pursuing the same goal: the expansion of consciousness. Neurologists exploring the human brain support this notion with physiological data: through the use of fMRI technology, it has been documented that the arts in general, and music in particular, have a positive affect on mental processing, appearing to enhance cognition in several ways. [A post-WASBE- conference note: the July issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience has many articles devoted to current investigations by neuroscientists into the phenomenon of music.] With the assistance of technology, artistic novices are doing things only dreamed of a few years ago—composer Ted Machover’s Music Shapers, for example, allow young children to create musical textures by manipulating fabric-covered balls. Could it be that German painter Gerhard Richter was anticipating our future when he proclaimed that “Art is our highest form of hope”?
Mystery
Let’s move our focus to mystery.
As the human brain grew into an organ with the unique capacity for self-awareness through consciousness, we began to ponder the fundamental mysteries provoked by our expanded minds—for example, where did we come from, why are we here, and where are we going?—and then began to communicate our musings to one another. It seems reasonable to suggest that even if science eventually solves such complex riddles in a manner considered definitive by all, human beings will continue to ask questions. We innately crave mystery, perhaps because uncertainty is the root of creativity, and the need to create is a universally shared trait. It has been said that creative behavior solves problems and orders chaos, creativity is the antidote to destruction, and that creation is a prime source of human realization.
Because creativity is vital to all human beings, and greatly valued in today’s knowledge-based economies, I believe that there is a bright future for the arts and arts education. However, I am compelled to argue that all education in the arts must be aimed more directly toward the cultivation of creativity, or risk becoming even more marginal, if not eliminated altogether. A moment ago, I implied that it is entirely possible that the arts will become more important to most people in the future—at least to nurture the sensual parts of our being, if not as spiritual practice. Such significance, however, would not necessarily mandate that formal education in the arts be considered essential. At present, with mp3 files and the world-wide-web’s facts and figures instantly available 24/7, many now view the need for such instruction as superfluous. With that in mind, why not make creativity a prime focus in music education?
Do most current models in band education promote creativity? In other words, do we teach student performers to develop as improvisers, composers, and arrangers, thereby cultivating their capacity to think in novel ways? Or are we clinging to an anachronistic model of music education left over from the era when the industrial-age assembly line was king?
Royalty
That thread leads us from mystery to royalty.
Who are our music students? Do we secretly long to “keep the best and shoot the rest” or are we willing to move outside of that gilded box and toward a more egalitarian system that is open to all? I am not suggesting that we abandon the modern wind ensemble; without question, the select, well-trained wind band, playing music of depth, is a distinctive and viable medium for musical expression. However, I am urging those of us involved with music education to consider that occasionally relinquishing our thrones to teach and coach small ensembles—ensembles freely comprised of any available combination of instruments—alongside our elite wind ensembles, may be a better way to engage more people in music education and, by extension, the study of creativity.
This hybrid model of music education—what Randall Allsup of Columbia University refers to as a “garage band model” of learning music—carries the potential to bring into being an environment more conducive to musical creativity—improvisation, arranging, and composition—than does the milieu found in most traditional ensemble settings. It must be noted that to realize the full potential of this sort of hybrid model—especially its promise of attracting many students holding a wide array of musical preferences—we would need to sanction musical practices of all kinds, including popular styles, like rock and hip-hop, and music from both locally indigenous and global cultural heritages, such as mariachi bands, Polka bands, Chinese opera, and African drumming ensembles. To unconditionally use this model, we might, at any given time, find ourselves helping members of a wind quintet, a jazz combo, a Reggae band, and a group comprising violin, saxophone, guitar, and conga drums to structure their improvisations into compositions.
For many us, the prospect of such inclusiveness is distasteful, for it seems to represent the antithesis of promoting wind band music of great artistic merit. Barre Toelken asks us to consider that all art exists in a spectrum ranging from “expressions in which community values and aesthetics impinge upon the artist to expressions in which the artist impinges upon the culture.” This view of art helps us to understand that the range of musical practices, from folk music to finely crafted art music, simply constitute different parts of the same strand. While we may not prefer some of the music along that full spectrum of practices, it is essential to recall that much of the art music we now treasure is strongly infused with culture-specific references, musical snippets that mostly pass through our ears completely unnoticed, because their long-past context is lost on us.
Writing in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, eminent scholar J. Peter Burkholder makes clear that the "use of existing music as a basis for new music is pervasive in all periods and traditions." Further, Burkholder and his co-authors point out that the concept of "originality" in the composing of art music is a fairly recent development. This concept grew into favor during the late eighteenth century, when the reworking of the compositions of others began to be considered plagiarism, and blossomed in the nineteenth century, when individualism of artistry defined the "Romantic genius."
Burkholder goes on to point out that borrowing of all kinds—including the use of allusion, quotation, and parody—was still prevalent until the mid-twentieth century, when music's avant-garde rejected the use of musical references in their works. As we now know, the wholesale dismissal of musical borrowing as a compositional tool was a short-lived trend, with many composers today again borrowing music of all kinds and using it in many ways.
Art music—despite an almost constant reference to it or its actual use in movies and media—has, for many in our world, lost much of its allure. Recent research confirms that support for professional orchestras is diminishing in many locations. Some scholars claim that art music’s zenith was reached in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when orchestral music and opera replaced painting and sculpture as the pinnacle of high art in the public’s mind. It is not coincidental that the peak of amateur music making occurred during that same era. Art music requires its listeners to be knowledgeable and to pay attention for long periods of time. People who comprised art music’s audiences a century ago also made music at home—they played and listened to music because they loved it! When this public went to a concert, they could actually imagine playing what they were hearing; they knew what to listen for and their pre-TV attention spans were longer. According to the Knight Foundation's recent study of American Orchestras, 74% of those who continue to buy orchestra concert tickets played an instrument or performed vocally at some point in their lives.
In his book about amateuring, For the Love of It, Wayne Booth drives this point home: “music is heard more fully and felt in the body by those who have tried to play it [and] listening pleasure is heightened by admiration for players performing the impossible. ”If those of us in band education are willing to advocate music making of all kinds, in addition to our wind band ensembles, we might stimulate a resurgence of amateuring unimagined at present. Admittedly, much of that activity might be focussed in non-art music practices. I suspect, though, that if the principle focus of these amateurs’ musical training with us is on creativity, then they will naturally become curious about those who have mastered musical creativity, eventually leading them to an interest in our part of the spectrum. In any case, can enhancing our societies’ collective musical intelligence through greater involvement in music education be a bad thing?
Further support for the prospect of increasing amateuring in today’s world is found in the research of Richard Florida. In his seminal book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida submits that the millions of workers he labels the “Creative Class”—a group that includes those engaged in the creation of ideas: artists, engineers, architects, creative professionals, etc.—look for interactive leisure activities. In short, they don’t want to sit in a concert hall—they want to make music, or at the very least, rub elbows with those making the music. Florida asserts that “For members of the Creative Class, every aspect and every manifestation of creativity—technological, cultural, and economic—is interlinked and inseparable.”
Have we inadvertently left many of Florida's tens-of-millions, who account for about 30% of the population in knowledge-based economies, with the impression that what we in the fine arts do has no place in their lives? Are we missing new audiences because we continue to present “formal” concerts, based on staid formats and programming? By morphing into a field genuinely open to musical exploration of all kinds and becoming more inventive about how we present performances, I believe we have the opportunity to become something more than the field that is building its own museum down the street from the "real" one.
How can we become more innovative in our programming and in the way that we perform our music? Perhaps Florida’s discoveries can stimulate our thinking on this, as well. Our potential amateurs and audience members from the "Creative Class" tend to seek out an eclectic mix of authentic cultures, while repelling things that are inauthentic. (Perhaps this explains why “reality” TV is now so popular!) Again, they also crave interactive pastimes—it is unlikely that they will develop an interest in what we have to offer by reading about it. Besides, as Isaac Stearn says, “Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.”
Sex
Which, of course, takes us from royalty to sex! The bad news is that the wind band field is much too male—and in this instance, I am not speaking about the percentage of males versus females working as band conductors, but about our repertoire. Let me explain.
In both sex and art, the desire to participate is based on the primal urge to create something. In fact, every medium of art is known through the products that have been created by those working within that medium. Like living beings, every artistic product reflects, to a greater or lesser degree, those that have come before it—it carries that field’s genome in its DNA. The wind band’s DNA, then, is its repertoire—the body of literature that we study and perform is what we are made of and determines how we are identified. So, how is that DNA too male?
You may recall from your school days that males are male because they have one “Y” and one “X” chromosome, while females have a pair of “X” chromosomes. The female “X” chromosome has the ability to shed its defective genes, in many instances by swapping them for their good counterparts found on the male “Y” chromosome. Although biologists have long known that the “Y” chromosome is incapable of this process, called recombination, they have recently made several significant discoveries. First, because of its inability to recombine, the male “Y” chromosome has badly decayed over time. In fact, it is estimated that the human male chromosome will completely vanish over the next ten million years. (Well, at least all-male golf clubs and certain bandmasters’ associations are safe for a few more years!)
In any case, it has now been found that the “Y” chromosome converts mutated genes from its damaged end to its undamaged end in an attempt to replace flawed genes and preserve its genetic sequence. In other words, the male chromosome is completely self-referential. Unfortunately, a similar tendency has created problems in our repertoire.
The literature of the modern wind band suffers from a good deal of genetically defective music—crude imitations of music from previous style periods, music injudiciously transcribed from other mediums, and poorly crafted music, often cleverly marketed under the guise of “educational.” And yet, like the “Y” chromosome, we continue to replicate our musical defects by commissioning, buying, and performing more of the same, despite the efforts of enlightened wind band leaders who, for several decades, have inspired wonderful composers to contribute to our family tree, and blissfully ignorant of the fact that such a self-referential process will eventually lead to musical extinction.
The healthy alternative is to use the model of our “X” chromosome, with its capacity for recombination, whereby it permanently discards defective genes. Such a shedding process is a natural part of evolution—in music, it is the reason Schubert and Mozart are now played more often than Spohr and Salieri. For our field to mature artistically we must first shed our inauthentic and simplistic music—this means casting out thousands of works! I am referring to all those works where "effects" have been ladled on in an attempt to make the piece sound important. I am speaking about the countless band compositions where one or two interesting gestures are surrounded by common material, often less inspired than what many of us invented for the private enjoyment of our music theory teachers.
Simultaneously, we must more assertively stimulate the creation of new works by those composers who we believe will write with an authentic voice and who have the capacity for or have already achieved a fully developed craft. In short, we should be seeking the highest quality DNA available!
Naturally, there are many opinions about what constitutes quality in music. When asked to evaluate the serious artistic merit of certain works of music, well-known wind scholar and editor Daniel Leeson replied, “I am unable to say if Mozart’s serenades represent better music than 'Turkey in the Straw.' I am the world's best expert in telling you what music pleases me. And in that vein, I will say that I believe the Mozart wind serenades to have greater artistic merit than 'Turkey in the Straw.' That does not mean my statement is true for everyone, only for me."
In his book Free Play, author, composer, and violinist Stephen Nachmanovich sheds light on the subject of quality in art. “Quality [and] beauty cannot be defined, but they can be recognized. The hundredth time I taste an artwork I love, I still find something new in it, because I am different, and because there is some largeness or manyness in the art that can resonate with the changing versions of myself. [In Bach], there are beauties that evoke the ground of being, against which emotions and ideas play as ephemera. Quality arises from, and is recognized by, resonance with inner truth.”
Obviously, individuals define "inner truth" and "quality" in diverse ways. The human genome gains strength and longevity, quality, if you will, through diversity in its gene pool. I assert that our collective DNA—the repertoire that we are defined by—will also improve through a conscious effort to bring about new compositions that are inspired by that full spectrum of music mentioned earlier. Our body of literature needs a greater number of authentic wind band compositions that reflect the range of human expression, from vernacular folk and popular music to abstract art music. In other words, it must be about beauty and quality, not whether the music is complex or simple. To paraphrase the last line of poet William Wordsworth's Ode: Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood, “the simplest flower that blooms can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
We are not, of course, the only genre that struggles with this issue. Two weeks ago, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere of a work by Aaron Jay Kernis. Reacting to that performance, music critic Anthony Tommasini writes, “Preceding the Mahler with Mr. Kernis’s 25-minute song cycle for soprano and orchestra, a homage to Bernstein that evokes Mahler, must have seemed a good idea. But Mr. Kernis’s music is wanly derivative. 'Simple Songs' is beautiful music, but it was more beautiful when Mahler, Barber, Copland, and Bernstein wrote it.” Exactly what does this criticism imply? After all, borrowing is a time-honored practice in music composition.
The key word in that critique is not derivative, but the word preceding it, wanly. Webster’s dictionary helps us to see that Mr. Tommasini is calling Kernis’s work “feeble, sluggish, and dully” derivative—in other words, lacking vigor and without clear-cut quality. While the use of earlier music to create a new composition can run the gamut from influence to allusion to out-right quotation, it is how the old material is used that determines the quality of the new composition. It seems that what we should look for in adjudicating such works, then, is whether or not the borrowed material is used in new and ingenious ways. Superb examples of such use are abundant.
Bach comes immediately to mind: his borrowing is beyond resourceful—its results are profound. Among contemporary composers, Burkholder notes that “most works [of Tippett, Henze, Crumb, Andriessen, and Holloway] have dramatized the distance between current aesthetics, idioms, and procedures and those of the past.” On the other hand, the neo-romanticism of the 1980’s and 90’s, as heard in the works of Corigliano, Rouse, and others, has lessened the gap between the current and the earlier, and between concert music and popular music. How does one sort this out?
Perhaps if we bear in mind that no amount of borrowing or, for that matter, true innovation, can hide poor technique, we will be less inclined to support certain composers. Long ago, members of royalty accrued musical fame through patronage. Our field is presently providing several “band” composers, who are no more talented than the amateurish composers found in European courts of past centuries, with similar sponsorship. In doing so, we divert our precious resources away from superior composers, we rob ourselves and those we conduct of opportunities to deepen our corporate musicianship through the study of more substantial literature, and we give credence to those who continue to argue that wind bands are "second class" artistic entities.
Let's return to the lens of sex for a look at our orientation. As a field, we are intimately engaged with opposites: amateur music making and the world of art music. If the wind band were a person, several labels could aptly describe the field—I’ll let each of you deal with that allegorical conundrum on your own, perhaps after-hours in the pub. More importantly, this duality of aim often drives a wedge between those in our field who teach and conduct amateurs and those who conduct accomplished or professional musicians. I encourage us all to celebrate our field's musical duality; as I hope I have successfully demonstrated, bolstering both attributes—our capacity to educate amateurs on the one hand, and to make beautiful art music on the other—will improve our field's outlook.
Traditions Worth Fighting For?
All that I have spoken about during the last quarter hour concerning the future of the wind band field comes down to one, somewhat impertinent question. Are all of the traditions that we now cherish worth fighting for? I can, of course, only answer for myself; for me, the answer is clear.
We are living in a time of rapid societal and cultural change—a period of dramatic transition from what has been to what will be. Consequently, we must follow the lead of our wind band predecessors whom, during such extraordinary times throughout our field's history, have refined and redefined the wind band, thereby preserving and enriching the genre. I am speaking of the 16th century musicians who collaborated with composers like Gabrieli, Susato, and Tromboncino to bring medieval wind playing into the Renaissance, a period when wind bands flourished; of those whose efforts led to Harmonien and collusion with the best composers of the 18th century, including Mozart; of the composers and founders of the Garde Républicaine in the early nineteenth century, and of John Philip Sousa and others who formed free-standing professional bands in the latter part of that same century; and finally, of those who, led by Fredrick Fennell a half-century ago, conceptualized and promoted the modern wind ensemble, a wind band that has tapped the creative gifts of many first-rate composers. All of those visionaries refined the wind band by setting standards of artistic excellence within their spheres of influence and redefined the wind band by stimulating the best composers to write for them.
Likewise, I believe that our future lies in embracing our role as new music ensembles, ensembles willing to adapt to the whims of imaginative composers by defining "wind band" as a community of musicians who employ a fluid instrumentation to achieve innovative artistic results. I think that our future will be determined in large measure by our willingness to create and support hybrids in music education, new models that carry the potential to increase involvement in the art that we love. Finally, to me, it is mandatory that we clean house where our repertoire is concerned, discarding the trite, studying and performing the truly stellar wind band music of the past five-hundred years, and pursuing only those composers likely to write works of high quality that reflect the broad spectrum of musical practices.
Our hope for a better tomorrow lies not in "teaching the way we were taught," in perpetuating worn-out paradigms of performance, or in preserving a second-rate body of literature, but in moving the wind band field from its present place on the cultural fringe, where it is a marginal player, to the cultural edge, where it can become "the next big thing." It is only from there that the fervent dream we have, a dream inherited from our ancestors—to see wind bands share center stage in both music education and art music—can someday be realized.
[Publisher's Note: The subheads were added for publication purposes. They did not appear in the original manuscript.]