Coming to Terms Together Dr. Nicholas DeMaison Director of Orchestral Studies John J. Cali School of Music Montclair State University
What exactly is an orchestra1 good at? This question assumes an orchestra is good at something, and that the something an orchestra is good at is essentially unique, otherwise the orchestra as a social practice would have been abandoned long ago. Further: it must be that I/we (still) care about the uniqueness of orchestral engagement, because there are few collectives outside of professional sports that are so expensive, require such an absurd amount of training of its membership, demand such specific and not terribly versatile spaces to work in, and (perhaps most egregiously) subsist on a group of technologies that are between 100 and 500 years old. In what other sphere of life do we strive for mastery of 200-year-old technologies? Yet, when our musical lives vanished in a disorienting flurry of forced abandonment due to COVID-19, it felt like a deeply acute loss. Why? We have not lost music. The idea that “humans can lose music” lands logically impossible. We are human, therefore we music. It’s just that right now, it’s more complicated. Please note: I don’t just mean that making music together has become more complicated because we cannot gather. At a faculty meeting of the John J Cali School of Music, a representative from a student organization called Musicians for Social Justice2 raised a number of concerns to the faculty. One that struck me in particular (yet again) was the issue of representation. The point was (is), quite simply, that representation matters. It matters if the composers we program are culturally homogenous or not. As we know, the banding together of a mixed body of wind, brass, percussion, and string instruments, tuned in equal temperament (etc.) was a social practice TEMPO
cultivated in aristocratic Europe, and the body of literature extracted from said practice is, therefore, not exactly one of diverse authorship. The possibilities for representation within pre-1900 classical composers, is, to say the least, limited. If we are working solely from within this received canon, is it possible to overcome the problem of inadequate representation? Sometime after that meeting, a professional violist friend of mine introduced me to the Instagram account @OrchestraIsRacist. I’m not so naïve as to think that the Classical-Industrial-Complex isn’t inherently racist, but reading such a long stream of personal narratives brought home for me in a different way just how hard it can be to be a person of color striving to achieve within classicallyoriented musical-social spheres. The kinds of discussions being initiated here are not the kinds of discussions that have been readily or openly held in the classical music world. So given the above, we have two crises we all must address, both of an existential nature: a.) we cannot gather together to make music, and b.) even if we could gather together, we would find ourselves in the rather dubious business of attempting to forward what has been a pervasively racist institution. I submit here a path forward, one embraced at Montclair State this fall, and one that, given a degree of persistence beyond the pandemic, I believe can address both crises for better and in the long run.
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JANUARY 2021
