In the days between posts in this series, Halloween Frank and his Green Lady have been carted to the landfill for their eternal repose. In my mind’s eye, I see Great-uncle Auggie shaking his head at my wastefulness. The Thanksgiving weekend and my banjo-playing Texan nephew, Barry, have come and gone. On Saturday after Spanikopita Day–as we refer to the celebration in our vegetarian household–Barry, husband Kit, and I went downtown to the landmark Zion Church for the annual Christkindlmarkt. We drank Gluhwein mit Schnapps in the sunny courtyard, loaded up on Hannover stollen and enjoyed the brass band playing holiday favorites in the loft of the Aldersaal.
I’d like to believe that my great-uncle would have approved, but I can’t recall him drinking mulled wine–with or without cherry brandy. The thousands of boxes of imported candies and baked goods spilling across the upper floor of the Aldersaal would have offended his sense of proper proportion. The band, however, would have struck a chord. Auggie would have loved the band.
Auggie knew his German music and his Lutheran composers. He knew Schutz from Schein. He sniffed at the tainted commercialism of the gadabout, Handel. He had a passion for Praetorius. Above all, in Auggie’s esteem, stood J.S. Bach. The works of Bach were his divine inspiration, and over the years they have become mine.
THE SILVERMAN YOUNG ARTISTS
There was no Bach this past Saturday, but I did think of my great-uncle the last time I heard a fugue. That was back in summer, and the piece was Fugue and Prelude in B-flat Minor, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 (1722). It was performed at Hood College, in Frederick, Maryland. The date was July sixteenth, the Thursday evening before the Baltimore County 4-H Fair and Otakon 2009. The occasion was the annual concert of The Sidney Silverman Young Artists. This year’s young artists were David Conway, Justin Furnia and Jeremy Rosenberg.
A rising junior at Hood, Furnia opened with the sublime Bach. I could have spent the evening in the eighteenth century, but Furnia jumped into the nineteenth via the Chopin barcarolle and Liszt’s sixth Hungarian rhapsody, the one in D-flat major. His selections were canonical, and his playing had an uncommon purity. The young man’s slender build, precision and preference for the left hand reminded me of Luke Gillespie at that age. Gillespie is on the faculty of The Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University; he’s an accomplished performer of jazz and classical piano. Youngest of the 2009 Silverman pianists, Furnia is on the path to an equally rewarding career.
The second young artist, Conway, reminded me of no one. He is a sui generus kind of guy. A Hood alumnus (2008) who double majored in music and computer science, he pursues classical composition and performance. Before playing two original works, he favored us with a couple Kapustin etudes, the Prelude and Toccatina from 1984. Kapustin writes quirky contemporary classical music. Conway is crafting his own distinctive sound, encoding jazz idioms and rock riffs within classical structures. There are moments of brilliance here, along with a bravura that could be worked into Hollywood movie magic, should Conway wish to go down that road.
After intermission, it was Rosenberg’s turn. This rising senior at The Boston Conservatory reminded me of another established pianist and composer. That man is Keith Jarrett, who needs no introduction for listeners of jazz or classical. More than technique, the resemblance was one of personal style in the concert hall. Rosenberg gave a muscular interpretation of Chopin’s Fantasy in F-minor, Op. 49. He followed with another muscular interpretation of another fantasy–de Falla’s Fantasia Betica.
The de Falla had the heft to match Rosenburg’s fingering, but the work may have been chosen on other grounds. I later learned that the Andalusian composer had dedicated Betica (1919) to the piano virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein, whom he met in Spain during the First World War. Rubinstein was the great-great-uncle of Rosenburg, on his father’s side. With his parents and paternal grandparents in the audience of the Hodson Theater, the performance became an insider’s tribute to family history.
The evening ended on a blustery note, with five brief works by Rachmaninoff. In round-robin pairs, the artists performed three of Six Pieces for Piano Duet. They then elbowed one another through two selections for piano, six hands. Few are the pieces for one piano and three pianists. If the reason for this scarcity was in doubt, the Hood performance clarified the matter. I imagined Great-uncle Auggie up there in a child’s heaven, stubbing out his cigar on a cloud in a fit of pique.
Other than this blogger, no one actually present seemed to mind the Rachmaninoff folly. Afterwards, the performers took their bows, as the audience of family, college friends and Silverman supporters applauded pridefully. Noel Lester joined the young men on stage to more hearty appreciation. For non-cognoscenti, Lester is the faculty member who coordinates the annual festival and mentors the young artists. He radiated intelligence and unflagging good humor on that sultry summer evening.
PRO MUSICA RARA @ THE WALTERS
The last time my banjo-playing nephew came to town was in late May. We attended a matinee of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (1676), performed by Pro Musica Rara at the Walters Art Museum. The Biber was part of the grand finale for the exhibit of the St. John’s Bible. The group bills itself as “Baltimore’s premier early music ensemble,” and I’ve never known anyone to quibble with the billing.
Pro Musica Rara is permanently based at Towson University, as artists-in-residence of the Center for the Arts. (Kudos to Towson!) The ensemble is ably led by artistic director and cellist Allen Whear. Whear was one of three performers at the Walters on May twenty-fourth. The featured soloist was Cynthia Roberts (violin), and Yale University’s Avi Stein (harpsichord) was the accomplished guest artist.
I had only a passing familiarity with Heinrich Biber (1644–1704). His works were not part of my great-uncle’s legacy. Auggie was an upright German-American Lutheran, and his church defined his musical tastes. Recordings of the Bohemian-Austrian Catholic were not played on the gramophone by the horsehair sofa in his parlor. It’s a pity that Auggie didn’t live to appreciate the majesties of our ecumenical age.
The heart of the Mystery Sonatas is the stunning passacalgia for solo violin, and Robert’s interpretation was breathtaking. During her solo, everything fell away from me in the narrow hall known as the Jacob and Muriel Blaustein Gallery of Italian sixteenth century art. The gilt-framed masterpieces on dark velvet walls, the men of my family seated beside me, the performers themselves dissolved in a meditation of sublime sound. Applause and shouts of “Brava,” brought me back.
I took note of the hundred people in the gallery. There was a sprinkling of the curious and a double handful of museum elite, but the majority were serious musicians. Many, no doubt, came from the other side of Mount Vernon Place, from The Peabody Institute of Music of The Johns Hopkins University.
The longer I watched the men and women around me watching Whear, Stein and especially Roberts, the clearer it became that these folks knew Biber inside out. I could see them anticipating each note, each chord. With every masterful fingering of string or key, I could feel their immense satisfaction. Emphatically, the collective response of the musicians in the audience was satisfaction. It was the satisfaction an insider derives from a peer’s accomplishments, when they redound to all within the sphere of knowledge. A sense of professional satisfaction is immeasurably far from the uncritical pleasure I took in the passacalgia. It is equally remote from the aura of familial pride pervasive among the audience of The Sidney Silverman Young Artists.
On our way out the door, nephew Barry turned and said with a grin, “You don’t hear that down at Emo’s Austin, Ltd!”
cheers,
dkb
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Campus Notes 
Children @ Play, Part IV: Cultural Systems and Social Choices
Posted in Commentaries, tagged Baltimore County 4-H, Hood College, Howard Becker, Otakon, parenting, Pierre Bourdieu, Sidney Silverman Young Artists, youth activities, youth culture on December 7, 2009|
A quarter century ago, before I gave up the notion of writing a dissertation about Hello Kitty, I sat down at my IBM Selectric to compose my doctoral qualifying exams. One late spring day in upstate New York, I tackled the exam in the sociology of art and culture. Details have grown hazy, but I believe the question concerned differences between art called “high-brow,” “middle-brow” and “low-brow.” High-brow meant stuff like Tosca, and The Simpsons is contemporary low-brow. Nobody was really clear about the middle, but Josh Groban would probably fit the bill.
I had no more to say about brow art then, than I do now, and any variant of the two preceding sentences seemed insufficiently academic for the occasion. Not knowing what else to do, I rewrote the question and answered it. No one objected.
CULTURAL SYSTEMS
Being enamored with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I shaped my question with his notion of cultural capital in mind. Being a good French intellectual, Bourdieu had been shaping a new understanding of patterns of inheritance. The inheritances that most interested him were the intellectual and artistic legacies of the children of educators, clergy, scholars and arts professionals–basically, people like himself, whom we now call knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers seldom amass fortunes. Compared to industrialists and high financiers, their economic capital is limited. Short of a sudden, rabid demand for IBM Selectrics, it will remain limited. The bequests of knowledge workers are the intangibles of their professional lives: intellectual sophistication and artistic appreciation. In the august culture that is France, these intangibles are matters of consequence.
Intellectual sophistication and artistic appreciation are what Bourdieu meant by cultural capital. Cultural capital as a love of Bach is what I acquired from Great-uncle Auggie, who was a teacher–unsurprisingly for Bourdieu. Instead of high brow art, I typed pages about a cultural elite system, which traded in the currency of cultural capital.
That left two brows. Whatever one may think of either man, Matt Groening and Josh Groban have more in common than the first three letters of their last names. They’re making fortunes, respectively, by drawing cartoons and crooning tunes for the American public at large. Compared to the Rockefellers or the Gateses, their fortunes may be small, but relative to faculty salaries at Towson University, they look damn good. I decided to lump low and middle brows together under the umbrella notion of a cultural industry system. Although perks like fame draw some, in the final instance, cultural industry systems trade in the bottom line: economic capital.
I was out of brows, and I had a dichotomy of elites and industries. I dislike dichotomies (think: good/bad, win/lose). I needed a third cultural system. I turned to my number two sociologist of art, Howard Becker (no family relation). There’s much to commend Becker. He’s a jazz pianist; he lives in San Francisco; he travels in France. In the tradition of American pragmatism, Becker promotes clear communication and derides sociological jargon.
Becker developed the concept of an art world, “the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for” (1982). Don’t be misled by a first impression of verbosity; after a couple readings, the definition shines as a gem of concise writing.
Becker also wrote about folk art as the transmission of expressive community traditions. In common usage, we think of an activity such as quilting as a folk art, but Becker includes humble rituals like singing Happy Birthday. It is not necessary to have sung the role of Floria Tosca at La Scala to croak out a passable Happy Birthday.
I had my third option: the cultural community system. Nowdays, I believe that cultural communities primarily exchange social capital, or the access to reciprocity within social networks. Sane folks don’t expect a recording contract or a gig with the Met just for singing Happy Birthday to a great-uncle. We do hope to be feted in turn when our birthdays come around. I answered my question and passed the qualifying exams.
SOCIAL CHOICES
I also soon forgot about the formalism of cultural systems. It came back to me recently, when I was trying to make sense my social calendar last July. There they were, one after another: a cultural elite system (The Sidney Silverman Young Artists), a cultural industry system (Otakon 2009) and a cultural community system (The Baltimore County 4-H Fair). In case you skipped the earlier installments, I’ll rank the three events on a scale of one to five Trophies for Global Betterment.
The Sidney Silverman Young Artists: 2.5 trophies for global betterment
Otakon 2009: 1 trophy for global betterment
The Baltimore County 4-H Fair: 4 trophies for global betterment
Ethics and activities co-exist in dynamic tension, particularly for individuals in formative stages of the life course. What emerging adults do today shapes who they become tomorrow. As a corollary, the activities that parents and other caring adults promote now influence the choices that mature adults will be making ten or twenty years in the future. For these reasons, I encourage all to consider the consequences of our social actions. Here’s a multiple-choice question to ponder.
Who do you want [your child/ren] to become?
A. a member of an elite that preserves its privileged status
B. a member of an industry that encourages wasteful spending
C. a member of a community that transmits core values to the next generation
D. none of the above
Feel free to compose your own question, if you have trouble with mine. You’ll be part of a fine tradition in critical thinking.
cheers,
dkb
p.s. If you a need a gently used IBM Selectric, don’t hesitate to call.
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