Kathy and I had quite a fun gig this morning with the Racine Symphony Orchestra, as part of their annual fifth grade concert. For the zillionth year in a row, Kathy began the concert by singing the National Anthem- and a few minutes later I took the stage as narrator for Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” The real stars of the show, however, were the men and women of the RSO, who were there doing their part to expose these young people to the glories of orchestral music. And actually, this concert is about even more than that. When Racine Unified music coordinator Ed Bergles welcomed the kids, he asked for a show of hands of how many of them had ever been to a live music performance of any kind – not just a live orchestral concert. And it was rather shocking how few hands went up. Of course, some of them probably misunderstood the question and didn’t know how to answer, but the fact is that more and more people – and young people especially – seem to think of music primarily as something that emanates from your headphones or speakers – rather than from living, breathing human beings. And at the risk of sounding like a crotchety old geezer (which I suppose I am) I hate that.
So did the venerable John Phillip Sousa, America’s March King, whose “Stars and Stripes Forever” was the rousing finale for today’s concert. Sousa came to prominence in the late 19th century, just as the fledgling recording industry was first emerging – but Sousa had grave reservations about this new technology. He testified in congressional hearings:
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left! The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man as he evolved from the ape.
The year was 1906 when Sousa delivered this stinging indictment! And in fact, Sousa only set foot in a recording studio once or twice over the next 25 years. (He allowed the Sousa band to make recordings with others as conductor- but the recordings actual conducted by Sousa himself number approximately half a dozen.) And when the next big technological breakthrough – radio – emerged around 1920, Sousa was just as resistant because he didn’t like the thought of personal contact with his audience being lost. It was not until 1929, when Sousa was 75 years old, that he was finally persuaded to allow his band to play over the airwaves- and they were a smash hit.
As someone who has worked on radio for over thirty years (if you count my days at KWLC during college) – and as someone who owns thousands of recordings – I obviously can’t agree with Mr. Sousa without sounding like the world’s biggest hypocrite. But he had a point. People must have regarded music in a different light when the only way you could experience it was in live performance; I suspect that it was much harder to take it for granted. Perhaps even more importantly, it was in that world without musical recordings that people gathered around the piano in the parlor whether gifted to do so or not. If you wanted music in your life, you had to make it happen. Now most of us have all of the world’s music pretty much at our finger tips – which is a glorious thing that enriches our lives immeasurably. And yet, oddly enough, this also can leave us a little poorer, if we’re not careful.
When I visit Matt and Randi in Decorah, what strikes me more than anything is how much music is woven into the fabric of their daily lives- and into the daily lives of so many of their closest friends… and not just music from iTunes or Youtube … but music which they themselves create and share. Just the thought of it makes me smile- and makes me sad, too, that not everyone can grow up in such a household where music matters in such a tangible and personal way. And that sobering reality makes it all the more important for music to remain a part of our schools- and for groups like the RSO to continue their outreach efforts. Because otherwise, Mr. Sousa’s outrageous-sounding warning from 1906 just might come true.
pictured above: Kathy singing the national anthem. The performance at the first concert was tricky because the conductor evidently forgot that Kathy would be singing the anthem- and he just launched into it without any introduction or even preliminary drumroll – and at a breakneck pace to boot! But she managed to jump aboard and to keep up – and despite the fact that it was in a key best suited for Beverly Sills, she sang wonderfully. Nothing fazes my wife!