I'm very angry tonight, because an strain of anti-intellectualism has reared its ugly head on this website, and in the process of doing so, has personally attacked me as a worker in the field of music. But first some background.
A couple of recommended diaries covered the "Requiem for Mike Brown" demonstration yesterday right after the end of the intermission of a performance of Brahms' German Requiem by the St. Louis Symphony, chorus and soloists. Some musicians participating in the discussion criticized the demonstration as taking place in an inappropriate time and place, and I understand their point of view. It was also stated that the views of no-one in the audience would have been changed, and I suppose that's probably true, too, though there's no way to be positive of that.
But my feeling is that a performance of a profound, deeply humanitarian work was a very appropriate place to bring in the here and now, and the juxtaposition of a great work that speaks to the place of human life relative to eternity with a sung demonstration about a recent death and its place in the lives of this country today could have given some people more to reflect on.
Some musicians and others participating in the discussion thread felt that it was disrespectful to the concertgoers for the demonstrators to wait until the conductor was ready to start the second half of the concert to start singing. I definitely understand that point of view; I think they were respectful, but it's OK to disagree about this.
So none of this was a problem for me. If you want to know WMFP was, go past the segno.
[Edit: To clarify, what follows refers to some comments in the response threads to the diaries linked above, not to the diaries themselves, which were great.] First of all, don't act like all lovers of classical music are either rich, conservative or bigots. It was repeatedly pointed out in one of the response threads (I can't distinguish which anymore, but probably both) that, although it's certainly fair to say (and unfortunate) that audiences for classical music tend to skew older, there are students and also musicians of all ages who attend, plus many non-rich people who buy the less expensive seats in the balconies, and in this particular case, the St. Louis Symphony provides free tickets for many people. So no, we're not all rich by any stretch of the imagination. And even expensive Orchestra section seats are often cheaper than tickets for a lot of sporting events and concerts in stadiums that sell out. And if you think we're all conservative, still less bigots, that's just offensive, and also belied by the response from the audience at that concert, which included quite a few who applauded the demonstrators.
Second, I can't stand it that there are people on this site who want to end all contributions to arts organizations and artists. If you cut off the already extremely meager support from the government (funding for the arts is a minuscule percentage of the Federal budget and just about every state budget) and then also want to end deductions for charitable contributions because you don't like rich people taking them, that means that there will be nothing left but slickly-packaged top-40 types, because no-one else will be able to afford to do the increasingly difficult job of being a musician. (Please read through the response threads I linked to above if you want to see expressions of this kind of sentiment.) The truly elitist position, which some of you are fine with, is that only mass commercial successes should be able to work in the arts. It's a crass elitism of laissez-faire capitalism of the type that many of us wouldn't tolerate in most other industries, which we want regulated, taxed and policed for the benefit of society. I live in New York, thanks to rent stabilization, but it's increasingly impossible for artists to live here anymore, and that's a big problem because what draws visitors to New York in the first place to a large degree is the creativity of artists here. Yet some of you want to unite with the worst regressive elements in the right wing to defund us. And this is in no way just about classical music: It's about anything that can't make it as a huge commercial success.
In countries that have societies I believe most of us consider much more humane than the US, like the more socialistic European democracies, there is much more governmental support of the arts, both because Europeans give a damn about culture as something more than just the rapidly changing commercial style of the minute and because in supporting artists, they are helping the working class. These countries' support for the arts didn't prevent them from having universal guaranteed health care, free or very low-cost education, free day care, generous family leave provisions, generous unemployment benefits, 5-week vacations for workers, and good pensions. Instead, it was a part of their humanist approach to creating and sustaining their concept of a good society, much as was the case in the US during the New Deal, our most nearly socialist period, when the WPA employed artists throughout the country at the same time that it was employing workers in many other professions and extending more benefits, such as Social Security, for the benefit of the non-rich.
When you fight against murders of black people by cops, don't make that into a fight against the workers called musicians. We don't murder people with our instruments. And don't make that a fight against people who like any particular kind of music. That's not what the demonstrators at the SLO concert did. They sang "Whose side are you on, friends." Some you want to instead chant "We are against you." And if you're against me, for trying to make it as a musician who's classically trained and mostly performs classical music and jazz, you are against a decidedly non-rich person and a whole lot of other workers who are having more and more trouble trying to support themselves in the profession they are most suited and trained for (and too many of them went way into debt to get degrees in). Instead, you should understand that we are in a position that's fundamentally no different from the factory workers and the teachers - threatened by indifference and hostility from the government, union-busting, loss of funding, and competition from cheap (or even free) products, which in this case aren't outsourced from abroad so much as they are downloaded right here (and my feelings about copyright are complicated, but you can't deny the truth of this observation).
If you really think you're progressive, stop collaborating with the ruling class by buying into the effort to "divide and conquer" the working class, and fight waste in government by demanding an end, finally, to subsidies for moving factories overseas, investment in petroleum, etc.; fight to eliminate spending on unneeded types of military procurement; insist on less regressive payroll and income taxation - there are a lot of things that are really worthwhile and important to fight for or against. And for all of us, one of the most important fights we should take part in is the fight against trigger-happy cops and the persecution and murder of people of color in this country, which is what those diaries were about in the first place! But while we're fighting for all these worthy causes, would you freakin' leave us musicians alone to practice our craft as best we can without your unwarranted hostility toward us or the people who come to hear us perform? Thank you.