There is a crisis in the arts and humanities today. The crisis is particularly well exemplified by the condition of the country’s major orchestras, saddled with multi-million dollar debt, threatened by empty concert halls and mounting costs, under increasing financial pressure. The situation gets worse every year as the older audiences slowly disappear. The lack of the importance of reading in our culture threatens the livelihood of every writer and publisher. The recent NEA report on reading in the US, entitled “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” shows that readers are reading less today, and they are even less likely to read literature (poems, dramas, novels, or literary non-fiction).

Why is this happening? Why are we failing? Where is the future audience for music, the reader for serious literature? Of course, the internet, email and multi-channel television in the new information era of the twenty-first century are some of the causes. These are quick, easy sources of information and communication. Can they replace the contemplative encounter with another mind, a great mind, that comes from reading? I don’t think so.

One place where important countermeasures can be taken is the modern university, one of the great achievements of our culture. We need to make better use of our considerable resources in the university. In many cases we have failed because we have become preoccupied with abstruse language and here I join with Gerald Graf in saying that academic writing would improve if “professors had to explain” their “research to the undergraduates.”

My recent experiments in the classroom over the past few years have been designed to address some of these issues. I have operated on a small scale, as a humanities professor at a school (Indiana University) with considerable resources available to any interested academic, but I am looking for help and collaboration. I would like to reach a larger audience, to see more activity on a wider scale, to see others implement their own ideas in addressing the problems I am discussing today.

Over the last two years I have offered two new courses in the IU Honors College, “Debussy and his Era” and “Beethoven and his Era,” designed to contextualize and open up the experience of great music for the students. The classes have been taught in conjunction with a festival and/or required attendance at a variety of smaller concerts, sustained over a fourteen-week period. Students have also studied the art and visual imagery of the era in which each composer worked and they have been prodded to attend the university art museum. In each case, readings were introduced from pertinent poetry and philosophy. I have turned to the life story of the composer to make the personal experience of the artist more alive for the students. In each case, I have selected the most literate and clearly written biography of the composer and assigned that to the students. If there are published letters, I assign them too. I also assign a variety of interdisciplinary writings about the composer and the era. The drama of the life story becomes more intriguing as we come to know the music. It also gives students who have less technical training another way to investigate and contribute to the overall learning. After all, every life has a shape--a beginning, a middle, and an end. And many cultural factors intersect in the shaping of a single life. Why not begin with something simple and branch out from there?

All performances and outside events have been contextualized in the classroom, sometimes with detailed analysis. The idea is to connect the cultural life of the arts with the classroom study. The visceral experience of music also enlivens the classroom. In the case of Beethoven, the Hegelian dialectic and synthesis of the sonata is immediately apparent. I say Hegelian because Hegel (1770-1831) was born in the same year as Beethoven, wrote profoundly about music, and was famous for his theories of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Beethoven was more well-read in literature and philosophy than most people know. And he copied out statements from contemporary philosophers for contemplation (one from Kant in his letters, one from Schiller under the glass on his writing desk). Beethoven was a master at setting out contrasting themes in his sonata forms and bringing them together in a remarkable synthesis. We can just as easily speak about the Beethovenian dialectic as the Hegelian, or perhaps we should call Hegel’s dialectic Beethovenian. Within the single movement of Beethoven’s sonata forms, elemental and simple musical ideas are introduced, then set apart, brought together in imaginative synthesis and then reconfigured for a final summation. It has been a great pleasure to have the time to go through the tremendous varieties of musical experience to be found in B’s thirty-two piano sonatas (most of which I play myself in excerpts for the students) and show the diversity of this musical enterprise to my students.

I have found that it has been well worth reestablishing links between important textual materials and the musical art works. This does not usually happen in the music history class as much as it could and there is no time for it in the concert hall. For example, Beethoven’s charming letter to Julia Guicciardi should be read in the direct context of a performance (be it live or a recording), of the “Moonlight”Sonata (op. 27, no. 2), which is dedicated to her. In another letter, Beethoven complains that his grand Sonata in E flat major (Op. 81a) should not be called “Les Adieux,” but instead, “Das Lebewohl.” The words Das Lebewohl are clearly inscribed in the authoritative Schenker score, directly connecting words, notes and the expression of departure and loss in musical sound.
Debussy, a rebel from a later period, turned away from Germanic structure. He particularly complained, with sarcastic humor, about the repetitiousness of Beethovenian musical structure (particularly development), and opened up western music to the sounds of Asia. We know Debussy attended the World Exhibition at the Champs de Mars in Paris in 1889. He heard Javanese music. After that his sound changed. This was the World’s Fair for which the Eiffel Tower was erected. It was music written for a different time and different culture, the birth of the modern era, and it is not surprising to find that it has a different stylistic basis from the ground up.
All of these things take time to introduce, to teach, to explain, to discuss. But there is more than enough time within the framework of the humanities class. The coordination of music in the humanities classroom with the contextualized encounter with it outside class and in the concert hall is an important way to introduce students to a life of exploration and pleasure and an important way to cultivate tomorrow’s audiences.

Last year I taught a music student who thought Debussy composed during the French revolution. This year I have a bright business student who had never, not even once, entered the Musical Arts Center, our university opera house, until I dragged my whole class there to hear Peter Serkin. The student later thanked me.
Another class to mention is my opera and literature class. I’ve had some rewarding success there over the years, but that is partly because of Indiana University’s vast infrastructure for the study of opera. I require attendance at the university opera productions as part of the coursework. I’ve been amused to see my students well prepared for a night at the opera, well-scrubbed, dressed up, and with a date. And on occasion I’ve seen their parents who thanked me for forcing my students to go the opera. This happened after weeks of cultural conditioning in class intended to prepare for a meaningful experience. That means reading the novel or play on which an opera is based. For example, reading Prosper Merimée’s Carmen serves as a wonderful preparation for Bizet’s Carmen, as does Tirso di Molina’s Burlador di Sevilla for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camilles (Lady of the Camilias) for Verdi’s La Traviata, or Büchner’s powerful early nineteenth-century play, Woyzeck, for Berg’s even more powerful opera, the twentieth century Wozzeck. After the initial study of the literary raw material, I explore scene by scene to see how music takes over to tell the story. Consideration of mis-en-scène comes after that, as time allows.

Have I given my students weeks of cultural conditioning so they can better enter the world of la grande bourgeoisie? Pierre Bourdieu might be right about the cultural capital of art. If so, why should only rich people with privilege enjoy it? If cultural conditioning is necessary, let’s give it to our young people and find a way to usher them into this culturally rich world, a world that offers lifelong pleasure, solace and the best of company.

The NEA report on reading contains disturbing confirmation of a situation that many of us already suspected. The group least likely to read literature is the 18-24 age group. The young and future readership for literature is not there, and I suspect they are also missing from the audience. These people know everything about music swapping and ipods and googling. They are not very likely to read War and Peace or to hear a Beethoven sonata. The report also indicates that those most likely to read go to the art museum and the concert hall, confirming my suspicions. They are also absent from the classical music audience.

This is one more reason that I have a Crocean belief, possibly instilled by my old friend, teacher and colleague, Giancarlo Maiorino, that the arts are best taught together.

Reading is not separate from looking at and listening to art.

Leon Botstein’s summer music festival (Bard Festival) at Bard College is in many respects an admirable model. For fifteen years or so, he has hosted a summer festival that concentrates on the work of a single composer, assembling scholars and performing artists to investigate unfamiliar and well-known repertoire together in an academic setting. Scholars, often speaking on interdisciplinary subjects, discuss and lecture. All of this takes place in two weekends in the summer. A scholarly book, published by Princeton University Press, is published in time for each festival, and those who attend often buy it. I was lucky enough to be asked to participate once, and the whole experience was very stimulating, provoking some of my continued thinking on the topic of how the humanities can help classical music.

In my view this type of thing should be emulated and done elsewhere in different ways. More should be done over a more sustained period, covering perhaps an entire academic year. Activity over an extended academic period is sorely needed to create a sustained impact and to find tomorrow’s audiences, thoughtful engaged, dynamic and young audiences who will bring something new to something old, however worthwhile and worth saving. We need the young to save the old. From this young audience will emerge tomorrow’s philanthropists.

In the case of Debussy, a festival was needed and pianist Jean-Louis Hageuenauer (an authoritative interpreter of Debussy) and I organized one, benefiting from the tremendous talent in the School of Music at Bloomington. Beethoven is more commonly performed in a great conservatory, but I have still required attendance at a minimum of five concerts this fall. There have been two performances of the Diabelli variations by Edmund Battersby, who played both on an historical instrument and a modern piano. We have had the first, third, fifth symphonies, the mass in C, excerpts form the Prometheus ballet and more. However, I have been very disturbed about the sparse audiences in the symphony concerts. There were many enthusiastic music students in the orchestra on stage, not many more in the audience. I noted a few friends of the musicians. Of course, older people, among them the usual retired professors, were the majority. This is in Bloomington, where music is usually free of charge. It is a cultural Camelot. It parallels what we know about the diminishing attendance around the country in professional venues, but it is a protected environment.

As of September 2004, four of our top orchestras were facing major contract problems. The Cleveland Orchestra has a 7.4 million dollar deficit. The Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra have multi-million dollar deficits. These are the best of the best, all with huge endowments and mutual funds, and they will survive. They have huge endowments and mutual funds and someone will bail them out. But imagine what is going on at the middle and the bottom tiers. [The falling mutual funds and very high salaries for conductors are part of the problem, but so is falling attendance, and that is my concern]

A few more indications of the crisis. No serious classical musician is ever featured on the endless talk shows in the media. They are simply out of the mainstream now. The parent company of Tower Records, the biggest chain record/cd store, was recently in serious financial trouble, which is itself a cause for concern. For years before this recent trouble I’ve been saddened to see classical music hidden in the back of the superstore, or off to the side, through heavy doors. Tower Records has lost market share to Wal Mart and Best Buy, where it is almost impossible to find any serious music. Billboard the financial journal of the music business hardly bothers to list information about the classical music industry.

The conductor James Conlon, speaking at the Juilliard commencement last spring, told the young musicians graduating there that they should be ambassadors of culture. They will have to be. But we should do our best to create a future for them. And we should train students to be ambassadors for music, to speak well about it in addition to training to play perfectly in a competition. They will need diversified skills.

I close by making some general recommendations about what to do. The problem of classical music is a case that applies to the general situation in our culture. We need a better coordination of resources in undergraduate education. I recommend that teachers take a special look at whatever is local or at hand: museums, theater, architectural sites, obviously, in the case of music, musical venues. These should be related to classroom study. Study in the classroom should be enlivened by cultural practice. Cultural practice should be supported by humanities study, extensive reading in biography and cultural history, teaching simple tools of analysis, scholarly activity, exploratory research papers and projects, discussion, review and everything else that can be done in the humanities classroom to stimulate students. In general, classes should be coordinated with cultural events on a continuous basis, and on a much larger scale than I have been able to do so far. Sustained study has lasting meaning for students. A quick trip to the concert hall or museum or theatre is not enough. (once again, I operate on a small scale, a pleasure in itself, but I call for a larger range of operations)

I would like to see large humanities classes connected to many types of arts events: master classes, concerts, plays, also museum visits. A clear course of study should be the basis for coordinated resources. A variety of interrelated courses could be offered at the same time, justifying increased funding for a large cluster of students. This would give the best framework for special scholarly events--bringing outside speakers and performers, for example. Required attendance at these events could be linked to classroom study more efficiently. Performances and “Informances” should go together. Panel discussion, community discussion, classroom discussion is essential afterward. The institution could arrange for public panels featuring artists talking about what they do (many otherwise educated people today have no idea). Some master classes should be open to interested, prepared humanities classes, and perhaps to the public. Selected artists do this well (the legendary master classes of George Sebok and Janos Starker are examples). Find them, select them, court them.

A strong theme is needed. One is the organization of events around the study of a single figure, but there are obviously others.

There are great opportunities for cultural tourism and development at each college campus. The possibilities are enormous.

The Lotus World Music Festival is an example of how an innovative non-profit organization, without any permanent university link, has stolen the thunder from the university at Bloomington. Our School of Music, great as it is, has done nothing like it. The Lotus Festival appeared out of nowhere and now has become a trademark event in our small midwestern city, attracting people from all over each fall, offering a combination of educational and cultural activity. But more could be done with a better humanities plan behind the festival.

Doors have to be opened in a welcoming manner. Snobbery and intimidation is of no use. We have to pass on the accomplishments of a civilization and make them available to the young. There is an emergency, but we have considerable resources at hand at the universities and colleges and community colleges around the country. Leadership is needed. The humanities should take a leadership position in opening up doors and in opening up those doors the humanities can find a new identity and purpose.