The Ecological Arts
In February, the first performance of my choral work Green Dances occurred at the Convention of the American Choral Directors Association, NE, in Providence, RI. Since I had also to deliver the Keynote Address, I connected the title of the commissioned work to some thoughts I've had about the relationship of music to the community, and this is the result -- a reworking of that speech.
Ecological: from the Greek oikos, house + -logia, study; the study of our house - the world, the environment. We are apt to use this most frequently in relationship to the biological sciences, but I think a case can be made for its extension to all the arts. What we are examining is relationships: the function of each part within the whole, and the interrelationship of all the parts.
The Arts are the glorification of those five senses we are born with, our windows onto the universe, the basic means of perceiving. They are all based on the immutable laws of physics, founded in the stuff of which all the world is made. Music consists of sound waves, pitches and overtones, acting through the concept of time in tempo, pulse and accent, creating forms through the natural occurrences of repetition and contrast, line and curve, tension and release. Our ears and voices are created in response to sound, not the other way around: the sounds of water, wind, birds, insects and animals predated us.
For the last eight hundred years in western music, our perceptions of the form and function of music has undergone an enormous shift. Compared to the rest of the world's musics, our tradition glorifies the composer, the large orchestra with its conductor, complex forms which depend on the page for transmission from the writer to player. The art has become more and more rational, more and more concerned with form over function, with following an intellectual idea without regard for its effect on the listener. Or, in ‘popular' music, almost the reverse: the abdication of mind for emotional affect. Both extremes separate the composer from the listener, and the concert hall or recording studio or arena become the places displace the home as the locus for performance.
In contrast, think of the performance of folk music in Africa, in Asia, even in the Americas where a true music of the ‘folk' can still flourish. Imagine a child sitting in on an evening ceremony, surrounded by all the extended family, listening to the story-teller tell the history, the adults he knows in everyday life singing and dancing and playing the ancient rituals. It is a multi-sensory experience: the light and heat of the fire, the smell of the night and the close bodies, the sounds of voices and instruments, animals and weather, the touch of the ground and of feathers, furs and beads. The child becomes acculturated by this experience that has been a part of the growing-up of each adult in the group. This is truly an ecological experience, where the whole body, mind and soul of each participant are nourished within the community.
Now make a parallel picture of a child in a classroom -- isolated from the larger group by age, room, desk and subject matter -- studying only one discipline at a time from books, expected to advance in step with his classmates, carefully shielded from seealthy art along to the next generations?
-- Alice Parker
Table of Contents
