Deceptively Simple

And….we’re back. Team DecSimp moved from the South Side to the Near Northwest Side, ran the Chicago Marathon, and is now engaged in keeping a classical record label moving forward, because, much in the manner of a shark, if it isn’t moving forward, it is dead and the carcass is spending money for no good reason.

Riccardo Muti laid out The Plan (PDF) yesterday for when the new era commences next fall, with plans to bring music to juvenile offenders and at-risk youth, naming Mason Bates and Anna Clyne as the new CSO composers-in-residence, and creating the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Competition and Apprenticeship (SGGCCA). Fun trivia: Bates and Clyne’s combined age (61) is less than Muti’s (68).

How it will all shake out is going to be nothing less than interesting, and could very well end up as mind-blowing. Each of the new music directors who’ve taken up music directorships recently have singled out outreach as a key priority for their organizations. Alan Gilbert with the New York Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, and now Riccardo Muti in Chicago are aware that their organizations have a role to play in their communities that goes beyond concerts at the highest level and that something extra is needed.

How they’ll go about that task is going to stem directly from their own individual temperaments and how they go about solving problems, and the solutions they devise with the orchestras’ staffs will end up bearing their imprints as well as their own communities’. Heady stuff, and no one really knows what success is or how to define it (at least, I don’t), but the important thing is trying, and showing what this music means to us, and what it could mean to others. Four to five years from now, the combined efforts of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago (the three largest cities in the US, after all) could not only show ways to integrate the arts into the lives of young people from all backgrounds, but point a way for orchestras of all sizes to reach into their communities. Ways of approaching outside community leaders to get their buy-ins, the best way(s) to utilize staff, and other details could very well be ironed out in the coming seasons. The staffing question is key, says this staffer, since oftentimes the most important question is simply knowing who is to do what.

There’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all model; this country is too big and too diverse for that. But if some methods can be found and commonalities discovered from situations as diverse as New York, LA, and Chicago find themselves in today, there ought to be some applicability for others to learn from. readysetgo

Photo: Guido Harari

Names exist, partially, to remove doubt. We put them on things to eliminate what they are not as much as to say what they are. “What is [this]?” “It is [that].” Names also create attachments between the person, or people, who did the naming and the thing that’s been named; if you find a stray animal, the last thing you should do if you have no intention of keeping it is to give it a name. A name is a tie that binds.

Once that attachment is in place, and we agree on what a thing is named, the name begins to settle in and take root, becoming nice and comfortable and part of the mental furniture and clutter that we carry around with us. But what happens when everyone doesn’t agree on the idea behind a name? What if I say that’s a comic book, and you say, no, it’s a graphic novel? More pointedly, what if we don’t agree on what to name a war?

Many skirmishes and upheavals take their names from the undeniable facts of their histories: The 30 Years War (its length), the Franco-Prussian War (the combatants), or the War of 1812 (when it was fought). But the wars that the US has fought and waged most recently take a different route, one that absolves much of the blame that could land on the US: They’re named after where they were fought, which ends up being about who we fought against.

The Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War—none of these says who the other side of the fighting was done by. The Gulf War at least fits some historical precedent by being named for where it was fought, and, to be fair, doesn’t name Iraq or the US. But I think that by taking the US out of the equation, our country is shrinking back into the shadows somewhat, even as we address these wars—in the media, in other nations’ media, and with our armed forces—on a daily basis. It’s as if we want to fight them (why else would we be there?), but would prefer that a quick reading of history not take note of our presence, thanks.

H.L. Mencken mocked the seeming cowardice of Americans in this direction in 1923, writing that we only ever entered wars we thought we could win. (Technically, Mencken was deriding the Anglo-Saxons, but we’ll extrapolate out to all of America for convenience’s sake.) The American empire was “built up by butchering and swindling unarmed savages, and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations.” And as we now know, the Powell doctrine suggests that the US will only enter into war with overwhelming force, and even when we entered Iraq in 2001, despite the suggestions that it would be a “cakewalk,” we embraced “shock and awe.”

Maybe the prerogative of naming is one that falls to the victor—much like writing the history. (Although, we have Niall Ferguson to remind us that the winner of a war is the one who ends up paying for it.) So, wouldn’t the gallant, honorable thing to do be to at least nod in the direction of admitting some blame? “The Iraq War”—doesn’t this sound somewhat as if Iraq is to blame for this war, and not actually the country that got invaded, without making any threatening gestures in our general direction?

This also holds for the War in Afghanistan. We aren’t fighting the government or army of Afghanistan; if anything, we’re helping to prop up their leader, Hamid Karzai. But “War in Afghanistan” seems so muted, somehow, so distant. “Did you hear about the War in Afghanistan?” “No, did you?”

I understand that both are part of the “Global War on Terror,” but there, too, exists a misnomer. “War on Terrorism” could’ve worked better, maybe even “World War on Terrorism” if we wanted to rope in our allies a little more firmly. I would’ve preferred “Terror War,” but that admittedly opens up all kinds of last-book-of-the-Bible-esque associations, which probably wouldn’t help when you’re fighting a group of people who do want to watch the world burn.

The names we put on conflicts matter. Southerners know this instinctively, or almost instinctively, having been raised being told that the Civil War was the War of Northern Aggression. I kind of like the honesty of that, frankly, as dishonorable as some of the South was during that time. Call it the Civil War, and all of a sudden everyone’s on equal footing, showing an equal willingness to fight. But if was the Northerners who sailed and marched down there to fight, and not the Southerners storming the great factories above the Mason-Dixon line who tried to lay waste to, say, Watervliet, New York.

What to call these events will always be ambiguous, given the sensitivities and points of view involved. Everything can’t always be a World War. Rivalries stretching back centuries make the task difficult and muddy up what could be reasonably clear waters—or maybe even make them easier; after all, everyone knows who the Hatfields hated. But when there are two parties, and one of them happens to be one of the world’s superpowers, is it asking too much to drop their name into the title?

“The Deeds campaign sent out a fundraising appeal with the thesis as its main focus. The state Democratic Party produced a video, “Bob McDonnell’s Secret Blueprint for Virginia,” setting a news report about the document to driving, apocalyptic classical music.”—Amy Gardner, Rosalind S. Helderman and Anita Kumar, writing about Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s graduate-school thesis. The thesis criticized working women, homosexuals and “fornicators.”

Awesome! Yes! You’re the Virginia Democratic Party, you’ve just been given the gift of a Republican who told his academic advisors that women shouldn’t work outside the home and that the gays are all sorts of problems, and what music do you pick to frame this? The last movement of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (the so-called “Apocalypse”)? Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony (at 2:45)? Ride of the Valkyries? Or do you go with something more in the mixture-of-Gustav Holst-Bernard Hermann-minor-key-John Williams mode?

Yeah, I think we all know the answer to that, especially when you have all of 1:30 to make your point. Bring on the snare-drummed 16th notes and thudding chords!! The horror!

“I lit the lamps, put the kettle on to boil, and, to counter the noise of the discordant ship’s orchestra, plugged in a tape of Mozart’s clarinet quintet in A—the Amadeus Quartet, with Gervase de Peyer on clarinet.

“First the violins, joined by cello and viola, made a hesitant, exploratory descent into the bass, where they discovered the clarinet, sounding as fresh and wild as the pipes of Pan. In 1789, the clarinet was still a vulgar novelty, and Mozart was breaking new ground by writing such a star part for the instrument. In this piercingly beautiful recording, de Peyer gave every note a liquid, experimental quality, as if sounding out a course through uncharted territory.

“Mozart—just eighteen months older than Captain Van [Captain George Vancouver]—was another figure living on the cusp of the Romantic revolution. Hearing his music framed by all the noises of the boat in a small gale, I found I was listening to the clarinet as the symbol of that unfettered liberty to which Mozart’s late work seems always to be gesturing, pointing the way to Beethoven and beyond.”—Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings, 1999

“Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,”—Seth Grimes, founder of Alta Plana, in the New York Times‘ “Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts.”

They’re subjective, they’re open to interpretation. Thankfully. After all, no one ever sang “I’m Getting Factual over You.”