Nostalgia
Lay it down.
It’s just another classical music Monday, 72 hours or so into the newly published revelations about the industry’s latest decade-or-more-old open secret, this time an awful, lurid story of drugging, rape, harassment, threats, dismissal, reinstatement, and retribution. It’s at the New York Phil, this one is, which matters because individual people matter, but also which doesn’t because *gestures wildly around* this business, my God.
I felt very lucky to have a new puppy at home this weekend.
A Sunday with Minerva meant mostly skritches and treats and walks instead of primal screams.
On my drive back to work this morning, though, the usual reactions were there for me, having waited patiently (they know the drill, since we do this every couple of months or so). There’s the residual anger and grief over the physical, emotional, and material harm I (we) suffered in a system that always put us second, didn’t believe us, told us to be tougher, said we had to suck it up if we wanted to participate. Then there’s my (our) continued participation in that same system, in spite of the harm done to me (us) and the ongoing harm to (so many) others, all ostensibly in the service of playing and creating music at the highest level.
People much more greatly harmed and much braver than I have been writing all weekend about this latest. I hope you’ll read the work of Lara St. John and Katherine Needleman and Abbie Conant and other warriors in this arena.
Me, compromised old middle manager that I am, I’m gonna write a little about nostalgia.
My favorite writing about nostalgia recently comes from Amanda Montell, author of Wordslut and The Age of Magical Overthinking. Montell is a linguist, and I love the way she writes about language, how its structures both reflect and shape our minds. She is wonderfully subtle in leading a reader to the realization that hey - maybe the words I’m using have meaning and consequence I have not considered. Her latest book, the Overthinking one, has a chapter on nostalgia that got me thinking about all the old music in my life.
Nostalgia is a romanticizing of the past, either your actual past or a made-up one (pro tip: these are not so easy to distinguish). Montell points out in her book that nostalgia can be an effective coping strategy: when times are tough, it can be soothing and even empowering to remember the happiest, easiest stretches of our lives. But the cold water of historical understanding will inevitably dilute nostalgia’s warm bath. I liked hearing about the Grange dances and homemade pies of my grandma Alice’s youth, but would I want to actually live a life before penicillin, contraception, and the ability to control my own money? Not a chance. But even so, I still can get nostalgic feelings around stories of Alice’s girlhood - a past that isn’t even mine. A made-up past, as it turns out, regardless of how connected I feel to it through people and stories.
Anyone whose work delves deeply into the past has to contend with the temptations and pitfalls of nostalgia. That’s true of my classical community. We immerse ourselves in the music of the past and dedicate ourselves to performing it. We learn its aesthetics and practices primarily from other people, practitioners who themselves are connected to practitioners, each of us tracing a lineage back to the relatively small number of titanic creatives who dominate our lexicographical and programmatic landscape. Looking backward across those ties with reverence and ambition, it’s challenging to look forward with the same energy.
Especially since we edit a lot out of our backward viewfinders. We spend a lot of time, for example, both debating and imaginatively recreating exactly how J.S. Bach might have asked his musicians to articulate and embellish his written scores. But we almost never wish to recreate the lack of rehearsal time or electric light or exposure to smallpox those musicians had when contending with his new cantatas each Sunday morning.
The future of our industry is uncertain and challenging. A highly curated glance into the past, a Little House in the Big Canon, if you will, is much easier to take.
At least it is if you can see yourself in that version of the story, that made-up past. Which is always political.
Amanda Montell said in a recent interview for Audible:
“The trouble is when public figures, politicians, attempt to weaponize something called historical nostalgia or a nostalgia for a time that never even existed, maybe a long-ago time before anyone was born, and they will sort of catastrophize the present in order to paint a picture of some era that was ostensibly the… ‘glory days.”
It’s an election year, so we’re currently soaking in exactly that, speechy versions of an America that never was and is therefore easier to love than the real one.
Easier, again, for the people who can see themselves in the nostalgic version.
I never wanted to think of myself as someone drawn to eighteenth and nineteenth century music from Europe because of nostalgia for a made-up past, and certainly not for any reasons I would identify as political.
Did my attraction start that way? I don’t think so. I loved my first Bach Two Part Invention with the same inchoate love inspired by Karen Carpenter, Stevie Wonder, and the seventh grade choir’s arrangement of “Philadelphia Freedom.” There was a time when it was all just music, beautiful and freeing, alive and growing somewhere in between the beats of my heart.
But I did learn, gradually, that classical music required training, repetition, obedience, auditioning to be chosen repeatedly into ever more exclusive circles. And I wanted those things so much! I wanted them before I realized that they were political choices; I edited that understanding out of my viewfinder. I wanted to be part of a small elite, worthy and smart and fancy and above the troubles of the world, because I could see that those people had things that I did not.
And yes, I was in love with music, but I didn’t work to tease the creative threads apart from the economic or political ones. I didn’t pay attention to who was left out of those storylines. I just wanted in.
Nostalgia for a made-up past isn’t the only reason musicians and fans love classical music, but it’s always a part of our relationship. We like to know the answers. We like to be insiders. We like to sneer at the shoes and appoggiaturas of people who haven’t learned the rules. And if we make it into the club, we’re historically not very good as a group at holding the door open for the next person.
If something goes wrong inside the club, our silence can be deafening.
Not many people would describe me as reticent, but for the sake of my own advancement I was long able to keep quiet with the best of them. I’d shrug and say, what are you gonna do. Politics. Turns out, I did understand, after all.
Later in life, when I did experience consequences for speaking up, they were presented as the result of problems with my music-making. Reading about other musicians’ similar experiences brings no solace.
I’ve written before about the insidious nature of “feedback:” because we are always working toward elusive musical perfection, there will always be something musical to criticize in our performance, which can always be offered as the reason we don’t get picked. This week, Katherine Needleman recounted being dressed down by her teacher for an undesirable vibrato on tied notes, the ostensible reason given for her not winning a job. This struck me as a classic, classical move, to claim a tiny flaw in a very specific context, something an obsessive brain might latch onto even as common sense cries out over the comment’s cruel banality.
A comment made by Alan Gilbert a few years back reads as anything but banal today. When he was the NY Phil’s music director, one of the women in the orchestra who supported the rape victim in the above referenced case failed to get tenure. At the time, Gilbert said it was because she “didn’t lay it down enough.”
That particular turn of phrase is a whole situation, right?
Laying down like, giving in to something that steamrolls you, or like, delivering legal consequences, or like, playing your instrument with confidence?
Or like, all of it?
Stories like this can make you - have made me - nostalgic for the days of Bach Two Part Inventions and the peace of mind my daddy never had, for a time back before I knew how things worked, before I knew responsibility or consequences. I mean, okay, that’s human. Nostalgia is an effective coping strategy, for sure.
But it’s no place for an ethical person to set up shop.
In the few hours since I started writing this, the NY Phil has announced that they are suspending the two players accused of the rape indefinitely. The orchestra had dismissed them years ago, and the musicians’ union had fought for and won their reinstatement (note: the rape victim, Cara Kizer, and her advocate in the orchestra, Amanda Stewart, were members of that same union. What are you gonna do. Politics). Never underestimate the power of good journalism, still kicking despite everything we do to make it impossible. In the past few hours, the musicians of the Seattle Symphony and the St. Louis Symphony have also made public statements in support of Kizer and Stewart. Social media is filling up with supportive statements by women and men as well.
And the new president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, Sara Cutler, “struck a different tone than her predecessors” per the New York Times:
“She said in a statement on Monday that the decision to keep Mr. Wang and Mr. Muckey offstage for the time being ‘are good first steps but they can’t be the last…As a woman, a musician and a new union president, I am horrified by what was in the story and we are committing the full resources of Local 802 to erase the culture of complicity that has raged at the N.Y. Philharmonic for too long.”
Another thing Amanda Montell writes about is declinism, the feeling that everything is getting worse, and its relationship to nostalgia. Stereotypically, the only thing classical music world loves to do more than idealize the past is talk about how everything today is worse: singing, playing, theatrical values, you name it, it’s all just going downhill. And it sure might look that way if you’re focused on a made-up past, ignoring who was left out of that story, who never had a shot, whose work was co-opted by someone else, whose story was changed to make someone else look good. It might even look that way if your eyes are on our imperfect present, where people hesitate to speak boldly and risk their own comfort, where that damn arc of justice bends so slowly that you can’t see the angles shifting.
But I can’t look away from the results of brave people’s work, how it begins to embolden others or force their hands to do the right thing. Even at the end of this essay that began in a dark place, I have to admit that the arc may indeed be bending.
As for nostalgia, I hope that’s a burden we can collectively lay down.
Enough.
Gratitude to a bunch of people who inspire me every day Katherine Needleman, Lara St. John, Abbie Conant, Karen Slack, Kenneth Kellogg, Anne Midgette, Sammy Sussman.
And love to everybody who’s out there afraid to speak up. I get it. I hope these words help just a little as we try and lay it down enough.
Courage, thy name is Kathy. Thank you, once again, for helping us sort through the facts and the feelings.