Real class

Disrespecting the masters.

I’ve been listening to this great podcast called Classy. The host, Jonathan Menjivar, is a media guy from a working-class background, and the eight episodes of the pod navigate his and others’ rough crossing of the class divide with smarts, humor, heart, and bracing honesty. It resonates with me, and I think the stories it tells will resonate with a lot of people who hang in classical spaces.

I grew up working-class too: Hamburger Helper at dinner, work in the elementary school caf to get a break on lunch, babysitting at twelve so I could pay my own way to the movies, normal stuff for most of the people I knew. But when I went to my first professional opera training program in San Francisco, a different world opened up, one populated by people who could drop a few casual thousand bucks on part of my summer training. Some of us apprentices came from families who easily afforded elite summer festivals and designer tuxes, others had a graciousness learned from a few years experience in accepting patronage. But some of us were completely and obviously at sea, ordering tea and soup in chic restaurants after performances and allowing kind donors to take us shopping for dresses worth months of our college rent.

Back then, as is still true today, a big part of our early classical performance careers revolved around outreach, a term encompassing performances for schoolkids and community organizations and which implies both audience education and marketing. There is something truly insane about overdrawing your checking account to pay for flights to auditions, using a Sharpie to hide the scuffs on your shoes, or buying an outfit from Saks knowing you’ll lie about never wearing it when you return it after the gig - and then showing up in the cafetorium at 8:45 am to talk about how relatable and cool your art form is.

You can wear whatever you want to the opera/symphony/ballet, we would say. Outreach performers are still saying it.

It’s not true.

That reminds me: I promised to write about a dress.

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Marshall’s was on the way.

It was two and a half miles from my student apartment to the music building at Arizona State, a straight shot down Mill Avenue. I didn’t have a car and didn’t have a license anyway, so everything I could do on foot or on a bike, I did.

(There are at least four people reading this who are thinking, wait, wasn’t I always carting you around in my car? And yes, yes you were. Thank you. But also, there was a lot of walking).

When I started my collaborative piano degree, there were suddenly so many recitals that my poor black choir dress, fraying and basically standing up by itself in a corner, was clearly not going to survive my masters. Something had to be done. I didn’t have much money, so begging a friend for a ride to the mall might well have been pointless. I decided to check out the Marshall’s I passed twice a day on foot. And what do you know, I found a dress that seemed acceptable.

We were just about a decade past the premiere of “Chicago” and “The Sting,” when drop-waisted, flapperesque dresses were briefly the rage in middle America (another reborn twenties craze, tax evasion, would have its comeback a few years later). The trend was dead by the time it hit Marshall’s in the mid-eighties, but I thought the dress was cute. It was striped deep teal and black, hit me above the knee, and cost thirty-seven dollars. Being both desperately poor and pretty proud of my legs at the time, I was sold.

I wore it to play a recital with my favorite collaborator, Schubert and Poulenc announcing our seriousness as Art Song Practitioners. The next day, my teacher told me that she refused to evaluate my performance for two reasons. She had been unable to listen to my playing, she said, because I had showed so much leg on stage that I had a) distracted from the soloist and b) shown disrespect to the composers.

It was bad enough, she said, without the dress being so cheap.

I still don’t know whether a better dress would have helped my legs show more respect to Poulenc. Might a more expensive gown have backfired and distracted from the singer more? Would a cheap long black dress have helped me disappear in just the right way? Would smaller earrings or better makeup have made my playing more audible?

Would any dress, any shoes, any fig leaf have been enough to position me exactly right, hologramming me, revealing me now as valuable artist, now as invisible laborer, depending on your angle?

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I know that women collaborative pianists to this day still regularly get comments on their bodies and clothing choices, but all women do, and indeed all performers do. This is more than just feedback about how we look on stage, which could be seen as something that folks who wish to perform publicly must learn to deal with. We can be made to look like anything on stage. What’s the role we’re playing when we audition or study or work? The costume for that role is still the costume of a person with money; displaying wealth, or performing the display of wealth, is still paramount for someone trying to enter our business.

It has to be just the right kind of display, however. The most expensive thing you can afford might mark you as a real poor. The most tasteful and valued fabrics from within your cultural traditions might garner you the advice to “never wear a dress louder than your voice!” That gold pendant could mark you as either rich or gaudy, depending on your skin color or accent or vocabulary.

You may have seen jeans at the opera or team jerseys at the symphony. And yet I think it’s clear we’ve taken but the tiniest of steps away from the outward signifiers of (specifically European) wealth and class. It’s not surprising. Opera, symphony, ballet - all these art forms require large numbers of people who must train tirelessly for years to practice their craft. The professions are unbelievably costly, and they continue to be run on systems of patronage. You might ask, how can we avoid courting, and therefore trying to emulate, the people and organizations whose money we need?

I’m encouraged to see so many smart people trying to answer this on a practical level - the “run it like a business” folks who are questioning the patronage system at its core. And all of us can do this kind of work. I don’t mean we have to understand spreadsheets or get an MBA, but that we can interrogate the structures that have been handed down to us, and maybe start to understand them, and understand ourselves. Then maybe we can change - and change the structures.

The jewel tone wrap dress is not yet dead. But it could be, if we stopped believing in its power. And if we put our minds to it, maybe some other old money-worshipping practices could breathe their last as well.

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There was A Facebook Post that made the rounds this week, basically a Jazz Old at one of the Important Music Schools talking about how lazy kids are these days, they don’t show up to class, they have lame excuses like their heater isn’t working, they should show some respect, and if they won’t show up to class he certainly won’t recommend them for jobs because he won’t trust that they’ll make a “6 am lobby call.”

I don’t know what hit me hardest about this. The cringey and sad “nobody cares about your problems” attitude from someone who clearly wants people to care about his? The weirdly adorable, old-man-yells-at-moon energy of imagining that people will still make money going on tours? The total privileged blindness of considering no heat to be a lame excuse? Or this person’s absolute comfort, in the year 2024, of trashing and professionally threatening students on social media?

Tough call.

Great commentary has been written about this post. I hope you’ll read here and here to enjoy some grade A brainwork, bracing straight talk, and startling compassion.

It all gets at what lies underneath the wrap dress and the blazer, the straightened hair and matte lipstick, the polite jewelry and the covered knees and the expensive teeth. If a system is one in which those who hold knowledge and access take other people’s problems personally, where work and fealty to the point of physical and mental pain is praised (or its refusal punished), where respect is demanded but not given and curiosity is expected in one direction only - well, that’s a supremacist system. And I think the students, whether they have heat or not, are just not about to play by that system’s rules anymore.

Every day I wonder how we can work together to see the pyramid that lives unconsciously in our systems and minds, how we can work deeply and work hard without having to prioritize the demonstration of compliance to authority or our willingness to crawl over each other, how we can convince students and colleagues trained in a system of ratings and prizes to prioritize excellence for the sake of one another’s experience. It’s hard to unpack what we believe about competition and overwork. I have been convinced that excellence was inseparable from these things (to be fair, it’s hard to say it’s not when so much financial gain in both professional performance and academia is tied to outdoing your peers).

I learned these things a hundred years ago without knowing I was learning them, at the same time I didn’t know I was learning how not to seem poor, or proud of my body, or as though I believed I should take up as much space on stage as a man who died centuries ago.

I learned them as I learned to pretend I had class.

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I may have attained the age, finally, where expectations about appearance start to wane from both inside and out. Like most sixty-year old people, I think especially women, I regret that I ever hated my young body or let anyone else criticize anything about it for any reason. God, it worked well! It learned things when I was bad at knowing how to learn, it remembered things when I wasn’t even trying to remember them, and apparently it had legs capable of disrespecting the greatest masters. Looking down at my big thighs as I write this, I’ve no idea whether they express disrespect or inspire awe.

But they take up space. More than ever.

Here’s to more room, not less, for my thighs and yours, for the lame excuses, for as much curiosity and conversation as possible, and for lots of hard work, especially for the people with the most knowledge, for whom things are changing so drastically.

With all due respect, Schubert and Poulenc are going to be fine. The rest of us, we got some work to do.

Class dismissed.

Thanks for this one to Lois. I did remember what you taught me eventually.