A dream, an observation, a question

I wrote the following three years ago for the now-defunct Desert Advocate and reprint it here because its subject is the roots of national culture. It ends with a question I would love you to answer in the form of posted comments.

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I just returned from Kaua’i, the farthest west of the major Hawaiian Islands and, some would say, the most beautiful. (Don’t ask me — Kaua’i is my only experience of our 50th state.)

On the first night there, I had a disturbing dream, a nightmare vision wildly out of sync with the idyllic languor of the place.

I had fallen asleep with the smell of salt-sea breezes in my nostrils and the glow of strange, gold-and-vermilion flowers in my memory.  So, why did I dream of angry Hawaiian warriors rushing toward me in a kind of hypnotic trance? In the vision, they pushed passed me violently, and I felt their power as I fell downward into some empty place beneath them. I don’t usually remember my dreams. This one woke me up. And I remembered it.

As I discussed my nocturnal encounter the next day over lunch with my wife, our waiter felt it apt to interrupt.

“The Night Marchers,” he said.

The what?

“You saw the Night Marchers, the spirits of Hawaiian warriors killed in battle. They died too quickly to know they are dead, so they keep marching.”

Apparently, they are all over the Hawaiian Islands, a place that has seen as much violence as any other, less paradisiacal place — and not just after the white man came. There, where fruit drops freely from the trees and fish fill the warm ocean waters, where year-round tropical mildness means shelter and clothing may be minimal, and therefore cheaply provided, tribes battled bloodily against each other for centuries, over what? Never underestimate man’s ability to find excuses for war.

So, what does this have to do with the arts? Nothing, by itself, but it made me wonder just what we are doing when we talk of a country’s “culture” and by that mean its food, its crafts, and maybe some of its more pleasant music. You know: Japan is sushi, bonsai and some strains on the koto; Ireland is corned beef, step dancing, and maybe a crocheted leprechaun. Hawaii, of course, is all flower leis, kahlua pork and the ukulele (which, incidentally, is Portuguese).

We do it to ourselves, too. America is hamburgers, cool cars and rock ‘n’ roll, right? We reduce culture to things we can consume, and in doing so, we gloss over the purpose the arts have to connect us to the realities of human love, human joy and human failing. I don’t know if the Hawaiian people ever developed a theatrical or poetic form into which they might pour the saga of the Night Marchers, but if that were done, it would go far to dispel the Hallmark image of luau and the hula.

Every time a people looks at itself plainly and honestly in the mirror of art, great stuff happens. In the 19th century, a group of Italian composers, Verdi chief among them, stared down the violence and the intrigue of the Europe around them and put those elements into the music they wrote for the operatic stage. Long before that, the ancient Greeks found the rhythm of tragedy and composed dramas that live to this day as embodiments of human feeling at its most profound.

When one people oppresses another, it invariably makes the oppressed culture look “cute” through cheap art. While England beat up the Irish with one hand, they created silly music-hall ditties like “My Wild Irish Rose” with the other, songs that no more resemble real Irish music than Playboy pinups look like real women. Notoriously, the American South created blackface entertainment to keep the slaves looking less than dangerous.

The oppressed eventually get theirs back, and when they do, it’s through art. The Irish produced Joyce and Yeats, a literature that beat the English at their own game. The African-American experience compressed suffering into blues and jazz, still the most distinctive forms of American art. Some people would call this art’s “political” function, but it’s not that, really. Rather, it’s artists breaking through political (and economic and social) restraint to get to what politics and economics and society always try to guard us from: reality, in the form of unrestrained human experience. If anything, it’s anti-political.

What American art today looks past distractions to embrace the real world of feeling?

Let me know your nominations.

– Ken LaFave

Training the ears not to hear

From a somewhat rambling but useful entry at Canadian composer Colin Eatock’s blog, this spot-on observation:

“What concerns me is the hegemony of pop music, which has, I think, had a profound effect on the way people listen to classical music – indeed, on their ability to listen to it. People who have heard nothing but popular music all their lives (again, a considerable chunk of the population) will, of necessity, develop certain assumptions about what music is “supposed to” sound like. Someone who only knows a repertoire of three-minute Top 40 songs in verse-chorus form may find a lengthy, textless orchestral work daunting and interminable. Someone weaned on percussive rock or rap music at high volumes may hear a string quartet as feeble and wimpy. And someone who admires the “natural” voices of Bob Dylan or Tom Waits may experience Plácido Domingo as artificial and overwrought.”

Teaching general music K-8, I constantly encounter kids who find classical and jazz pieces “scary” (their word) because they’re long and they change tempo and dynamic and do other “weird” things. In short, Beethoven and Coltrane are not what music is “supposed” to sound like. It’s “supposed” to sound like the pop music they hear every day.

Pop music’s hegemony is destructive of musical diversity, and deadly to the ear. It should be understood to be one kind of music among many, many others. Instead, the culture represents it as the totality of the musical universe.

– Ken LaFave

A Dizzy-ing encounter

From the sub-department, “Quick-before-it-fades,” the first in a series of memories recounting encounters with some of the greatest artists of my time:

Meeting fabled jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie on his last swing through Tucson in 1978 was an amazing experience in itself, one I owed to the Arizona Daily Star, which had asked me to interview him and review his concert. But when the first words from his mouth were, “You look like Bill Evans,” I was so flummoxed I didn’t know what to say and had to excuse myself (falsely) to the bathroom to regain composure and to look in the mirror. With a thick sweep of dark hair and a full, dark beard plus glasses, I actually did look like Bill Evans back then!

The interview went well enough, though Gillespie wanted to talk about his Baha’i faith and I wanted to talk about Charlie Parker. But the concert! Those cheeks blew out in exact proportion to the quality of the playing, and that night he was one helluva bullfrog.

– Ken LaFave

Lenny’s Mercedes

Have you seen the new Mercedes-Benz commercial that includes a brief clip of Leonard Bernstein conducting? The ad is made of a series of clips of people with arms raised “in triumph.” Sports figures are also pictured.

I can’t say I really knew Lenny, though I met and talked with him on a few professional and personal occasions. But I can’t help but wonder at his association with a German car. His sensitivity to the history of the Holocaust was keen. While he dismissed Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on musical grounds (he once called it “gilded shit”), those who knew him said part of his dislike was Orff’s connection to the Nazis.

Everybody’s different, but I have several Jewish friends who would never buy a German car. And then there’s Sarah Silverman’s bit, “Jewish people driving German cars.” (Warning: Strong language.)

Your thoughts? Any readers with an informed guess as to whether Bernstein would have approved? Or not?

– Ken LaFave

Chuck Ives, meet the kids

Played the last movement of Charles Ives’ Second Symphony for my school kids today.  The kindergarten LOVED it – went crazy moving to its changing rhythms and moods, laughed at that last blast of a dissonant chord, and after it was over yelled “Again! Again!”   Grades 1, 2 and 3 were less overt in their enthusiasm, and in each of the grades someone called the music “weird” and/or “scary.”

Some in the 3rd grade listened with a maturity beyond their tender years, yet the overall response was that the piece sounded odd and “off.”

When are kids taught to listen with prejudice?  How do their ears get the message that music must sound a certain way and no other?  When I asked what was “scary” about the music, students said, “It got louder and softer, and slower and faster.”  Music they hear on the radio tends to stay at the same dynamic and tempo, and to stick to a meager harmonic vocabulary.

The challenge in general music education is not getting kids to learn this or that kind of music, but getting them to listen with open ears to everything.

– Ken LaFave