Killing us softly

This thing appeared in the Boston Globe a few days ago: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/10/24/revitalize-catholic-church-let-kill-all-organs/9FpzZPSQzhfd4uUeCJNDbK/story.html

Below, my response.

Dear Ms. Graham-

As a professional organist and current doctoral student in the aforementioned, I was dismayed to read your recent opinion piece for the Boston Globe ("Save the church! (kill the organ)") wherein you advocate the widespread removal of the pipe organ from Christian worship in an effort to make worship services more appealing to young people. To be sure, the organ makes an easy scapegoat for observers who are unable to (or simply don't care to) take a detailed look at the many complex issues driving down attendance at American churches. That problem requires a book-length investigation, not a 750-word online-only opinion piece, and cannot be laid at the feet of any single cause. As a member of the press, you are held to a higher standard, and bear a certain responsibility to make a good-faith effort to uncover the truth, rather than resorting to tired cliches and easily digestible scapegoating. Sadly, this essay displays no commitment to this kind of responsible journalism and, as such, I feel compelled to defend my instrument, colleagues, and profession against what is in essence a baseless, childish, attack. I hope you will indulge me for a few more lines but, if you read no further than this, please know that there are hundreds of organists who have spent thousands of hours honing a beautiful craft, and to reduce our efforts to 'scary horror-movie music' is demeaning, hurtful and, frankly, ignorant. I encourage you to consider attending the weekly organ performance class at The Juilliard School, which is open to the public and occurs every Thursday of the academic year, from 11am to 1pm. I am certain it will change your opinion of the organ, and its capacity to elicit emotions other than fear and discomfort. 

To begin with, I must question the sources on which you base your argument. The top-ten list on i-Tunes is not a valid arbiter of artistic value, as the success of Justin Bieber and others gives ample testimony.  To take this radically populist approach is untenable, and incompatible with the fundamental ideal of the religion to which you adhere: that is, that there exists an absolute truth that is independent popular judgement and the fickle dictates of fashion. Are the Gospels also to be edited to be more palatable to today's children? Are Jesus's difficult demands and sometimes harsh proscriptions to be watered down for mass consumption? You say that you worry whether children will still regularly attend Mass as adults. The answer to this questions must depend on whether one as a parent is successful in instilling a respect and appreciation of Christianity and a desire to grow in a relationship with God, not on the popular or entertainment value of the worship service. 

As you are obviously aware, the post-Vatican II Catholic church made a serious effort to incorporate non-traditional music and musical instruments into public worship, an effort which was copied by many protestant denominations, and is still ongoing. The steep decline in church attendance over the past 40-50 years coincides directly with the proliferation of "popular" liturgical music, not with an obstinate commitment to traditional repertories and instruments. Praise bands abound in rural and suburban parishes; music publishers are falling over themselves to turn out indistinguishable anthems, songs, and hymns of light, popular character; most clergy receive almost no training in the traditional repertoires of the Christian church. The goal of all this has been ostensibly to make Christian worship more timely, relevant, and informal, characteristics which, it is presumed, will attract the ever-elusive "young people." As the statistics demonstrate, however, these efforts have had at best a negligible effect for the so-called "mainline" Christian denominations, whose attendance continues to decline despite efforts to make worship more accessible and less demanding: efforts that go far beyond music and into the core issues of theology and morality.  There's no reason to go off on a lengthy digression about the relative merits of these decisions: suffice it to say that you are not the first to have the the idea that traditional music should be banished, and that its relatively systematic application over the past 40-50 years has failed to bear any fruit other than the general feeling among young people that religion should adapt to the fashions of the day, rather than hold fast to temporally immutable truth.

It seems obvious to me that the music in your particular parish is somewhat lacking in quality, and this is a problem that can and should be addressed. The solution, however, must be better education and training of organists and choir directors, not placing responsibility for liturgical music in the hands of the totally untrained. If this is your only exposure to organ music, I can certainly understand how you would come to regard it as a tiresome nuisance but, I can assure you, this is not a ubiquitous situation (although it is an all too common one.) Once again, I invite and encourage you to attend the performance class at Juilliard. We would welcome the opportunity to change your mind about an instrument with a venerable past and, we believe, a bright future. 

Sincerely,

David Crean

C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow

The Juilliard School

david.crean@gmail.com

Something Stinks, and it's not Tchaikovsky

Well, it's not just Tchaikovsky.

For reasons that are unknown to me (although I strongly suspect it must have something to do with financial solvency), Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center is frequently rented out to groups with little or no connection to music. When I first arrived at Juilliard nearly three years ago, it seemed as though there was a red-carpet movie premiere nearly every week during the warmer months, complete with outdoor canopy and press area (which effectively blocks traffic on 65th st.). A few that stick in my memory are The Last Airbender, which included a massive stage erected literally in the middle of the street, and Michael Moore's Capitalism, a Love Story which, despite its ostensibly anti-establishment message, was presented with as much fanfare and extravagance as any other Hollywood blockbuster. More recently, the premiere of the 8th Harry Potter movie filled the street with so many slack-jawed gawkers that Juilliard students had to exit the building onto Amsterdam Ave. The movie premieres are a nuisance, but one could at least argue that cinema, however degraded its popular incarnations may be, is still a legitimate art form and not totally out of place in a performing arts center. It might be best to not cite The Last Airbender in that argument.

This past week, however, Alice Tully hosted the FiFi awards, an event billed as "the Oscars of the fragrance industry." It was certainly a star-studded event -- Nicole Richie, Chaka Khan, Martha Stewart, not to mention the inexplicably popular Jane Lynch, who hosted the festivities. As usual, pedestrians were diverted across the street by glaring security guards and traffic was backed up all the way to the Hudson. A few people stood on the grassy area next to Avery Fischer attempting to catch a glimpse of this or that B-lister.

Now, I'm not even sure why the fragrance industry needs or deserves an awards show, but that's not really the point. They needed a venue, and Lincoln Center apparently needs money, so what's the problem? The problem is that this was intended to be a place for the arts, where the various performing groups that were previously scattered throughout the city would come together to create an atmosphere of mutual support, creativity, and vitality. That's why Juilliard moved here -- it was intended to be the artistic nerve center not just of the city but of the entire country where students could learn from and observe the best of the best. To see one of its primary venues pimped out for such an orgiastic, unapologetic display of superficiality is something that should make artists, and anybody who has any respect for the arts, cringe. In this cynical and post-modern age it sounds hopelessly anachronistic to suggest that the arts (whatever that means!) should be given a place of honor and that their spaces should be sacred, but this was exactly the intent of those who donated to, and built, this complex. Less than 50 years later, however, the nerve center of the arts in New York has become a a high-class brothel of event spaces available to any disease-ridden organization that can slip a twenty to the bureaucrats whose enormous salaries necessitate the practice in the first place.

Where now is the messiah who will drive the peddlers of frivolity out of the temple of art?

At long last, another post by me!

The old adage "he who rests, rusts" is applicable to everything. I had a teacher who used to talk about "practicing life" as if 16-yr-old hormone-crazed high-school students understood, much less cared, what he meant. What he meant, I can see now, is that literally every aspect of our existence requires practice in order to improve, or even maintain, proficiency. From behaviors we wish to adopt to skills we wish to acquire, it all requires effort -- sometimes rewarding, enjoyable effort, sometimes pure slog work; frequently a mixture of both.

This is all a roundabout way of coming to the point that my ability to write has, I believe, begun to atrophy from disuse. The reasons are not difficult to discern. Now that I am no longer forced to produce significant amounts of relatively meaningless prose on a weekly basis by any educational establishment, I've taken the liberty of producing virtually nothing for the past year. Surely the world is no worse off for this, but I am worse off because, next to performing music, writing is one of the two things that I both enjoy and at which I seem to be decently skilled. So, here I am in the blogosphere for the umpteenth time, foisting my half-baked, obsessively scrutinized opinions and ramblings on an unsuspecting, already hopelessly cluttered, internet. This time I am determined to exercise at least a modicum of self-discipline and write something -- anything -- every day, in much the same what that our more industrious ancestors kept painstakingly detailed accounts of their day-to-day activities in diaries. Some people still keep diaries. A small subset even keep private diaries. I'm old enough to remember that the phenomenon of blogging grew out of the phenomenon of the online, public journal. No more than a decade ago, most of my friends had a livejournal. Some who fancied themselves societal outsiders had deadjournals. I was one of the latter, and I recently discovered to my horror that my angsty late-teen drivel is still stored in some remote corner of that website. I can't get rid of it, as I have long since forgotten the login information to both that site and the email address I used to set it up. I hope it doesn't make it into my obituary. I hope this doesn't make it into my obituary. 

Those sites still exist for some reason, though much of their purpose has been ceded to Facebook/Twitter, where people who don't really want to write anything can post brief sobriquets and exquisitely capture the mood of the moment, and to more respectable blogging sites, like Blogger and Wordpress, where people like me can flood the marketplace of ideas with cheap, disposable, kitsch. I'm sorry. No I'm not. I need to maintain my technical skill at writing just in case I am one day struck with the kind of inspiration that makes it a skill worth having. I don't have it now. I probably never will. It's ok, most people don't, but I'll wait, and pray. 

If my generation had any shame, we'd hide our externalized thoughts between two pieces of leather like our ancestors, perhaps to be discovered by a distant descendant or, for the extremely fortunate, an intrepid biographer. That instinct to hide our foolishness in privacy is gone, obliterated, absolutely extinguished by social media. It's so foreign to the contemporary mind that I'm embarrassed to even admit that I remember it, because it makes me feel like an antique. An old lady will bring me on PBS and inquire about the worth of a petulant gasbag that still ruminates about meaningless notions. Worthless, she will be told. I'm certainly not going to date myself any more by actually submitting to the shame I'm ashamed to remember. No, this exercise will be public. I'm sorry. No I'm not. 

Anway, I'm going to make this go this time. I swear. I can't vouch for the content, but the form will be excellent.