Editor:
Why am I continuing to worry about a recent “Soundoff” opinion that “Symphonies, along with ballet and opera, are cultural baggage”? I suppose my main worry about such a needless, pointless condemnation of the arts is that it might be symptomatic and contagious. For if such an aggressive misunderstanding of the musical and dramatic arts became epidemic, not only our schools and concert halls, but our entire society would have surrendered to callous shallowness and hopelessness in regard to the search for beauty.
Music is not baggage. It is in our blood, in our rhythms of heartbeat and breath. And music has been coursing through human social life since the rhythms and sounds of language began to emerge in hunter-gatherer groups and perhaps even earlier among our hominid predecessors. Since pre-history, music has strengthened emotion, has psychologically deepened rituals, and has guided or inspired the motivations and actions of groups.
Music is not baggage. Ask TV advertising experts. Ask movie producers. Ask politicians who choose musical backgrounds for their attack ads. Ask ministers and churchgoers. Music is integral to society.
The advantage of symphonies, ballets and operas is that they search into, reorganize and bring to spiritual rebirth newly found strengths of music (often by means of silences) which we feel to be, in and of themselves, beautiful. Like Orpheus in ancient Greek stories, musical genius can explore, awaken and liberate a deep, otherwise hidden world where some awareness of existence had been imprisoned.
The musician’s search for beauty can also be a search for truth. In this regard musicians have some similarities with scientists. In “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession,” Daniel J. Levitin writes, “The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view and that today’s truths become tomorrow’s disproven hypotheses or forgotten objects d’art” (Dutton, 2006).
However, there is this important difference: “For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey ‘truth for now’ — to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new ‘truth,’ because that is the way science advances” (Levitin, p. 12).
In view of the musician’s concern for universal truth, when we experience a work by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or Rossini we might say, as Keats says of the Grecian Urn, “When old age shall this generation waste,/ Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe/ Than ours, a friend to man....”
Such experience is not baggage. It is a living rediscovery of the journey itself.
Luther Scales
Statesboro