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Of Riots and Relevance: An Orchestra in Baltimore

As I sat on the front steps of our downtown row house writing this piece, police and National Guard helicopters circling overhead, several dejected neighbors came by to chat with me about the sorrowful setback our city has suffered. This week, as riots and demonstrations ravaged parts of Baltimore, business-as-usual came to a stop for practically everyone in the city, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). The orchestra’s members were left wondering, like so many of their neighbors, what we could do in the face of the upheaval and heartbreak of a city in turmoil, especially since our schedule had been cleared for the near future. To everybody’s mind sprang that quote of Leonard Bernstein’s, familiar to nearly all classical musicians:

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

The BSO musicians decided that our best response to such dismal darkness would be for us to turn on our brightest light – to perform an impromptu concert, and to do so as soon as possible. It did not take long for us to reach the conclusion that the best way we could help was to do essentially what we do every week.

Businesses boarded up in Baltimore. — Businesses are boarded up just a block from our home in Baltimore – and only several blocks from the city’s concert hall.

But this week the BSO had had to cancel its children’s concerts as well as a program aimed specifically at technologically fixated Millennials – namely, a concert of the music of Pokémon. While children’s concerts have always been an important part of our 100-year history, the Pokémon program was a stretch. In wandering out of the usual territory of our huge, sophisticated repertoire, we were making an attempt to ameliorate our greatest fear and insecurity: that we and what we play are not relevant to people today.

So in place of these canceled concerts, we decided simply to perform in the driveway of the hall in the middle of the day and to spread the word via social media, to which most of the city was understandably glued. The very next day at noon we assembled outside, surrounded by roughly a thousand eager listeners – some with strollers, some from day care centers with throngs of children, some neighbors and friends, some just passersby, many familiar faces and many new ones, too, all eager for a glimpse of something that could transcend the very tense situation we found ourselves in. As we played, we were enfolded by the gratitude of our audience; and afterwards they showered us with words of heartfelt thanks, some even assuring us that this impromptu concert was one of the most moving things they had ever been a part of.

This kind of event is not unusual for orchestras. Throughout history, when entire societies have been at war, even at the very apex of conflict, people want to go to hear a concert of classical music. The Israel Philharmonic (IPO) has long been the healing salve for generations of emigrants from war torn Europe, a great consolation for those who lost their families in the countries they left and later lost even their own children during Israel’s wars at home. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, the IPO and Daniel Barenboim immediately assembled a concert just days later in his name. For many people including his family, Beethoven’s Heroic 3^rd Symphony and Egmont Overture were the proper way to remember one of the IPO’s greatest supporters.

There is a famous recording of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony in Berlin during the Second World War that includes the sound of bombs dropping on the city, killing its people. What on earth moved people to attend a concert in a large, domed building during a bombardment? Shostakovich saw his city’s premier of his 7^th Symphony during the siege of Leningrad, surrounded by the German army, performed by musicians who were literally starving to death – some of whom did succumb to starvation between its rehearsal and performance.

These are just a few examples. It seems that, in Western culture, with war and tragedy comes classical music – a most non-material yet profoundly meaningful response where words and physical circumstances fail. It would seem that transcendence is in fact one of our basic human needs, felt all the more when circumstances conspire to chain us to our miseries. It has long been observed that from history’s worst periods some of the best art sprang forth.

Baltimore’s recent events remind us of war, both in their scope of destruction and in the long-term effects they will have on life inside poor neighborhoods. Our orchestra has long searched its soul – like others in Detroit, St Louis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and London – for a way to relate to these wars within our cities. If some people’s lives are so full of suffering, where are we in relation to that suffering? Do we just fiddle while Rome burns? What real thing can we offer our community if we accept our critics’ characterizations of classical music as merely “pretty sounds for rich people”? Hollywood, ever the counter-culturist, never tires of portraying immoral, upper class twits as being steeped in classical culture, set to the sound of Mozart’s string quartets. Indeed, our critics who advocate progress have demanded that, unless we can directly impact the pressing problems of material poverty and childhoods that result in an utter lack of preparedness for gainful employment, we are not only irrelevant to our communities but we are actually a standing mockery of material poverty itself.

When we look at the long-term decline of the underclass and now the demise of the middle class, we see an abandonment of what worked so well for so long. There was a time when the hallmark of American achievement was the fact that we had a robust and growing middle class as well as a tradition of public education that distilled the best writings, disciplines, and knowledge of the past into a transmitted inheritance for future generations. And the founding fathers of our cities not only established bedrock institutions such as universities, hospitals, libraries, and museums, they also founded symphony orchestras. For them, art and music were a vital dimension of the fully developed human being. To be wise and learned was the great goal of the common man. To be successful was to be cultured. Only in the last half-century did we decide to make a utilitarian beeline for success and cut out the hard-won holistic learnedness that temporarily delays access to material gains.

The people we might call the quantifiers in the American arts sector are the people who are always looking to measure outcomes and impact. And unless we can justify ourselves by their measures, they assure us, we risk being branded “irrelevant” either by outsiders who prefer other music or by insiders whose work is driven by administrative mandate. The situation is utterly frustrating for the arts administrators who fight for their organizations’ survival simply for the sake of all the beauty they sow.

What was most magical about the BSO’s impromptu concert this week was not that it was “free,” but that it was offered as a salve for frayed souls. While the circumstances and emotions surrounding it were extreme, I feel quite certain that the offering itself was not substantively different than what the orchestra offers on a weekly basis. How can we know what has happened within the minds and hearts of the millions of people who have listened to the BSO over our 100 years of concertizing? Where did their imaginations take them? What personal tragedies did Mahler help them immeasurably transcend? What new untapped inspiration did they discover in Berlioz? What have children dreamt up during their first experience of Pictures at an Exhibition? For many people I talk to, including those who continue to meet me on my front step while I write this, classical music is one of those most lovely things that make life worth living – ranking higher in meaning and fulfillment than even anything basic material goods can offer. Certainly, for those starving musicians in Leningrad and their audience on the brink of death, it mattered as much as bread.

But when it becomes a game to prove our “relevance” through altruistic opportunism and grandstanding, we lose the very thing for which our supporters love us. We risk deserving the scorn reserved for shallow sentimentality. As our friend Roger Scruton reminds us, sentimentality cries two tears: one for the object of its pity and one for its own exquisite sensitivity. We will not move people with our sentimentality, but rather with our music – the music itself that has moved mankind through history’s tragedies as well as its triumphs. Music is a salve for the soul and when it’s great music, it points us towards transcendence.

What people were rioting about in Baltimore was certainly more than a few bad cops. It was, if I can venture to characterize the hardships of other people’s lives, about a sense that some things in our society have gone completely wrong, off the rails, and are unconscionably unjust. The lives of the poorest of Baltimore’s children – even the ones who manage to stay in school – are indeed devoid of order, beauty, harmony, and truth. In our work at FSI, we are deeply concerned about the fact that our society has lost its way. What’s more we are raising a lost generation. And that is the much larger problem to which classical music, like classical education, is part of the solution. Questioning the relevance of our orchestras is like discarding the legend to our map of Western civilization and still expecting to find our way again.

Orchestras share the plight of many of the struggling in America: we are searching for meaning. We think that our meaning pulled out of the station a long time ago and we have to catch another train. Perhaps what really happened is that we left our meaning at the station behind us. We are at a loss to understand ourselves without it, and yet we know in our bones what we don’t have the ability anymore to explain.

Postscript

Tonight in Baltimore there are celebrations in the very streets that were set ablaze several days ago, and at their center are our city’s marching bands.

My Sister’s Piano

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay appears in the author’s book The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and Its Pleasures, published by St. Augustine’s Press in 2014. We reproduce it here with the generous permission of the publisher.

My sister Norma Jean has a Baldwin Grand Piano. She acquired it when she and her husband were living in Phoenix in about 1982. It has since moved to Texas, Wisconsin, Oregon, and twice in Southern California. For ten years before Phoenix, she had a console-type piano. Before that, ever since I can remember, she had an upright piano that belonged to our mother. My mother died in 1937, when Jeannie was about six years old.

And Fran, my mother’s next older sister – my mother had thirteen siblings – told Jeannie that when she was younger, my mother was the only one in the large family who could play the piano. Her parents used to love to hear her play, which she did at family occasions like Christmas and family reunions. This would have been in the big farmhouse outside of Pocahontas, in Iowa.

I can vaguely remember this upright piano. My mother had taken it with her when she married our father. I was old enough to recall her playing in the house on Main Street in Knoxville, also in Iowa, not long before she died. While I am something of a klutz with regard to music, I was given piano lessons while my mother was still alive. I often have wondered, had she lived, whether I would have learned to play. But my sister Jeannie as she grew up inherited the piano. We all knew it was hers. She learned to play. One of our Schall cousins recalled Jeannie playing when she was quite young. She became better and better as the years went by. She minored in music in college at San Jose State.

When, some five years after my mother’s death, my father remarried a lovely widow with two daughters my own age, I recall often that Jeannie would play in the big front room in the Washington Street house in Knoxville. She, with our new stepsister, Jeanne Louise, would sing together at Christmas and indeed often. I can still hear them laughing and singing together. Christmas to me means, in terms of memory, Jeannie playing the songs of that season on that piano that had belonged to our mother. Sounds somehow can make things more real than sight. I recall my father sometimes singing, but never realized till now when I think about it that what he sang was probably from the piano that mother played.

When our family moved to San Jose in California in 1945, the piano was boxed and shipped with the other household goods. In a way, that piano still gives me nightmares. When the truck arrived, it backed into the narrow driveway of the McKendrie Street house. My father, brothers, some neighbors, and the truck driver came to the point of unloading the heavy paino. They used a sort of steel track on which to slide the boxed piano down to the ground from the truck. I was stationed next to the house with some bushes alongside.

As the piano came down, it began to tip off the railings in my direction. I could not hold it up. Fortunately, it fell against the bushes and house, thereby saving Schall, at an early age, from being smashed by his sister’s piano. It taught me a first principle: “You can never be too careful unloading pianos.” If I close my eyes, I can still see the piano tipping over my way. Every human life, I suppose, includes a near-miss or two. We call it luck or providence, no that luck does not fall under providence in a sound philosophy.

After Ordination and my early Roman time, I have been in my sister and brother-in-law’s home almost every year no matter where they were. It is always something close to my being to sit quietly as my sister plays her Baldwin piano. She has collected a considerable amount of sheet music over the years. While she lived in Medford, in Oregon, she used to play in various senior citizens’ homes. She would often comment on the effect of music on those good souls almost too old to remember anything; how they would light up on hearing some song that they knew.

Jeannie plays a wide variety of music – classical, church, Protestant hymns, Irish, western, Spanish, popular, from various decades. As I listen to it, her music always – how else to put it? – refreshes my soul. How very nice to have such a sister who will play for her brother! Jeannie usually knows when the song she is playing was written, by whom, who sang it, what movie or play, if any it was in. Sometimes she will also sing it, if it is sing-able.

Jeannie does much of her own arrangements, which she learned to do from a course which she once took while they were living in Simi Valley. She plays in her parish on an electronic piano. I am not much of a fan of electronic instruments. I cringe when I go into a church for Mass to find a line of electronic guitars and keyboards waiting for me. So I am glad the Baldwin is simply a classic piano, even though her church piano sounds fine.

Over the years, I have often taught courses that include Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, each of whom wrote a treatise on music. At first, I never took seriously what the classical writers said about music. I was somewhat puzzled by the amount of space that music took in the Republic and in the Politics. Indeed, they said that a change in music will signify a change in polity. What finally woke me up, I think, was the chapter on music in Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. I have known families who send their children off to rock concerts as if they are just another “entertainment.”

But Bloom too has read Plato. Music is not just another “entertainment.” I often realized while listening to my sister that music does move one’s soul. Listening to her play can change one’s whole mood. As Aristotle says, music will reproduce in us the motions in the human voice under emotion. We are formed by what we hear, whether we know it or not. A disorder in music leads to a disorder of soul. This subtle influence is why Bloom said that the real educator of youth today is not the school or the parents but the music-makers. Robert Reilly’s essays in his Surprised by Beauty on whether music can be sacred have also taught me much. The association of music and divinity is not merely accidental.

By now everyone has noticed that we have a pope whose brother is a Kappelmeister. Benedict himself plays Mozart on the piano just because he loves it. This ability is not a requirement for the Office, I suppose, but it surely does not hurt it. Reading between the lines, one senses that Benedict is rather annoyed by the awfulness that we too often hear in church music in recent decades. Indeed, he says as much. “Is it just a difference in taste?” we wonder. Benedict seems to think that one of the main consequences of revelation is in fact beauty, including, perhaps beginning with, beautiful music.

The notion of the “heavenly choirs” in which we will all participate is, I suppose, both profound and amusing. “You mean all you do in heaven is sit around and sing?” Surely part of the answer is, “Well, yes, of course.” There is probably on this earth no experience quite like singing a Haydn or Bach Oratorio in a large choir with full concert orchestra before a silent, riveted audience. Music is not an occupation but a celebration of something beyond itself. Let us hope, in any case, that the heavenly choirs are closer to Mozart than much of the raucous music we hear. Still, I think of my sister’s piano. It means that any home can have its own music played by someone within it. German and Czech families will often have string quartets midst their members, at least in the days that the Germans and Czechs had children. Eric Voegelin, himself a lover of music, once remarked that no one needs to participate in the aberrations of his time. This is true of music too, something I learned listening to my sister play her Baldwin Grand Piano.

Of Riots and Relevance: An Orchestra in Baltimore

Postscript

My Sister’s Piano

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