Experience Matters

One of my great frustrations with working at the Vermont Arts Council is the number of times in a week or a month that I have to explain what I do for a living. It’s not the work itself.  It’s because the best way to get people to understand what we do at the Council is to show them, not tell them, and I can’t SHOW everybody!

Experiencing art (engaging it, confronting it, attending it, or simply being in its presence) is frequently the only way to understand its intuitive and powerful impact.  I can talk until I am blue in the face to anyone about certain works, certain performances or artists that have elicited a visceral response so powerful that words simply fail to do justice to the experience.  Talking about it doesn’t have anywhere near the impact of giving people an opportunity to experience it for themselves.

Back-to-back events last week provided a wealth of opportunities for folks in Vermont to experience for themselves the power of the arts, and for one of them, it might become a life-altering experience.

On Tuesday, March 12 Legislators returning from the Town Meeting Day break were greeted by a fabulous installation in the State House Card Room by Elizabeth Billings and Cora Vail Brooks.  Consisting of large sheets of brown parcel paper with stenciled words cut out, hung from the ceiling by clips and pins, the exhibit, “Almost,” was created to gently remind anyone who came into the Card Room, that the arts surround us, invite us in, cause us to have an unexpected(?) reaction, and leave us with a changed outlook.

Judging from the responses that we saw on peoples’ faces, and the comments they wrote on our feedback sheet, we touched a lot of people, mostly in a very positive way, and created a new appreciation for art and, yes, for the Card Room itself.  The Card Room itself was a place legislators used to adjourn to while waiting for, say, conference committees to finish their work.  To pass the time, they played cards with each other.  Today, the room is used for special interest groups to share information about their causes.  In the past, the Arts Council has had displays of grantees’ works, slide-shows of cultural facilities’ improvements that we have funded, held poetry readings, and in general shared information with folks in the building about our programs and services.

This year we gave them an experience they won’t soon forget.

On the very next day we celebrated the 8^th Annual Vermont Poetry Out Loud Competition in the Barre Opera House.

For eight years, Vermont high school students have labored to learn three poems well enough to recite them in front of their school-mates, and be selected to compete in a semifinal competition in Barre.  Finalists are selected from the 30-plus semifinalists, and the winner receives some scholarship money and the opportunity to do it all over again in Washington DC against the winners from the 52 other states and jurisdictions; and his/her school receives money to purchase books.  All very simple and straightforward, right?

Wrong.  This competition is extremely intense and yet it is among the most engaging and uplifting programs we undertake.  The mechanics are straightforward, but the results are anything but.  High schoolers of all ages and types have to not just learn a poem, but inhabit it, internalize it, and make it their own.  Then they must convey the poem's meaning and power with a minimum amount of theatrics and a maximum amount of passion and oratorical skill.  Props are occasionally used, but rarely to any great effect.  This year, the most powerful competitor (in my opinion, of course!) was the guy who barely moved, but held each of us in a steely gaze, and delivered up a stunning result—using just his voice.  He didn’t win.  Instead, that honor went to Christian DeKett of St. Johnsbury Academy and if he goes on to the Nationals and does as well as last year’s Vermont entry, Claude Mumbere, his life may be truly altered in profound and exciting ways.

The real point, however, is that more than 4000 students across the state participated in the competition.  They challenged themselves to do something far outside their normal comfort-zone.  It was far more than learning the words (which I gather is the easy part).  The students not only had to truly understand the poems, they then had to bring that awareness and understanding to the audience, especially the judges.  The judges, in turn, were looking at the difficulty of the poem, the student’s understanding, his/her ability to convey that understanding, his/her delivery, and the quality of the overall performance. 

So many critical skills come in to play for the participants.  In addition to the poem itself, the student has to consider the impact of the clothes they wear, how they approach the microphone, the tone and volume of the voice they use, the degree to which they can overcome their natural fear of being in the spotlight and being judged. 

Probably only a handful or two of those participating will go on to a career in the arts, and fewer still will become poets.  But I can absolutely guarantee that 10, 20, 50 years from now, when asked by a friend or family-member what do they remember most about high school, most will probably say, the experience that this competition gave them. 

Learning is no more about rote memorization than education is just about training.  There are times when rote memorization helps achieve a certain end and when training kicks in and enables us to respond automatically to a set of circumstances that might (as in a fist-fight) save our hides.  But learning and understanding require a deeper commitment that serves as a gateway to life-long learning.

This is what the arts can do.  This is why adding the A (Arts) to STEM instruction is so vitally important.  We can all be trained up in the specifics of science, technology, engineering, and math, but it is the Arts that enable us to learn and to live.

Using the Left Hand

It was said of Maestro Eugene Ormandy that his was the most expressive right hand in classical music.  As music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra he could pull more lush sound out of 110 players—particularly string players—with just his right hand than anyone else on the planet. 

A short man, accustomed to getting his way, he spoke softly, wielded a small stick and demanded perfection from every musician that worked under his direction.  His left hand, for the most part, hung by his side and only rarely made a small gesture to players to indicate their cue.  These, however, were nearly always invisible to the audience.

Only once, in four summers of singing with the Saratoga-Potsdam Chorus under his direction, did I see Maestro Ormandy use his left hand to dramatic effect.

We had rehearsed Verdi’s Requiem for weeks and there was a particular choral entrance he wanted emphasized.

“I’m going to wind up and give you the biggest cue you will ever see, and I don’t want just the basses to enter.  I want the tenors and altos to also come in on that note.  I want the audience to be knocked flat by this entrance.  So watch for it.  Don’t be late…”  So there we were, rehearsing again and again that five-second moment that would make or break the performance.

The night of the performance, Saratoga Performing Arts Center was sold out.  7500 in the shed and another 2500 on the lawn; a beautiful evening; the soloists sounded amazing.  Our big moment arrived and we geared up for the entrance.

A couple of measures before we were to sing, we all realized something was not quite right.  Having been drilled by our chorus preparer, the late great Brock McElheron, we kept the mantra “hearts on fire, brains on ice” close to our thoughts.  Sure enough, it happened.  Maestro Ormandy, with a look of intense concentration on his face, took a short step back and fired off perhaps the biggest cue he had ever given to the largest chorus he had ever worked with…

…a full measure early.

Not a single person came in.  Ormandy, leaning forward to brace himself against the expected wall of sound, almost fell into the second violins.  Then, with his cue fresh in our minds, all 300 of us, with the full brass, wind and percussion sections of the mighty Philadelphia Orchestra, entered in full voice. Maestro Ormandy, in the process of recovering from his near fall forwards, was now knocked backwards—nearly into the front row of the audience.  What saved him was the railing that stage management had thoughtfully built into the podium.

Reeling, Ormandy recovered his footing and, by now panicked, wildly looked around trying to fix what surely had been one of the greatest missed entrances of his career.  But as a few more seconds passed and those incredibly fine-tuned ears of his reasserted themselves, he realized that we had come in exactly on time, in exactly the manner he wanted us to, and that the only thing wrong was that he had given us our cue a measure early.  All was, astonishingly, well.

A few more bars passed, the chorus continued through the “Salva me…” section of the Requiem, and then it happened.

Up came the left hand.

In full view of the audience, and in the slowest and grandest of all gestures, Maestro Ormandy pointed his left index finger at his left temple, his thumb “cocked,” and pulled the trigger—all with the most beatific smile on his face. 

His full and very public acknowledgment of his mistake, while the orchestra was still playing and we were all singing, was one of the greatest moments of my life.  It left me reassured that any of us, no matter our aspirations, can find ourselves having to confront failure.  The lesson was not in avoiding the failure but in moving past it with grace, dignity, and greater wisdom.  In that sublime moment, Ormandy demonstrated his humanity and his greatness.

I wish all politicians, all public servants, could have lived through this experience and seen for themselves how Maestro Ormandy handled himself.

The quality of our political discourse, including the debates we are seeing from our Presidential candidates, is disheartening.  Even worse is the quality of discourse on the internet by people on all sides of the aisle who parse every action, every statement, and every fashion choice, and lob the most withering, incendiary comments that demean and denounce the candidates from the safety and privacy of their living rooms.

The chief executive of any enterprise, whether it is a small business, a symphony orchestra, or the President of the United States should be judged not just by what he (or she) knows or by his past actions, but by the qualities and capabilities of those with whom he surrounds himself, and the degree to which he is comfortable in taking responsibility for their actions.

I no longer believe we elect a President.  I believe we elect a Presidency.  We elect a point of view; a set of values; a change of scenery.  The President, while aspiring to be as communicative, as expressive, and as clear as possible with the right hand, must also know when to use the left hand.  And so, for the record, should all of us.

A President or CEO that has not learned yet the importance of his/her left hand is lacking some critical skills…

…and probably should attend the symphony more often.

An Open Letter to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback

May 25, 2011

The Honorable Sam Brownback

Governor of Kansas

Dear Governor Brownback,

I have been following with great interest your efforts to remove government support from the Kansas Arts Commission and to re-establish it as an independent, non-profit agency, with the expectation that doing so will relieve your administration of the responsibility of allocating taxpayer funds to match federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.  The budget now awaits your signature and there is a great deal of concern that you will use your line-item veto to effectively abolish the Commission which, I understand, a bipartisan coalition in the Kansas Senate representing a broad cross-section of Kansas citizens hopes you will not do.

It is neither my place nor my intention to engage in the political discourse of your state.  However, since our small agency has been frequently singled out by your administration as an example of a nonprofit state arts agency that is thriving without, as the media has reported it, the benefit of state investment I am compelled to weigh in and set the record straight on just three points.

First, in Vermont our nonprofit state arts agency is effective only BECAUSE there is significant state investment in our work.  Without a State appropriation of just over $500,000 we would be unable to provide the professional development services, educational outreach to underserved communities, accessibility services to hundreds of historic cultural venues that were built long before the passage of the ADA, and a host of other grants that support our creative sector.

Second, without State support we would be forced to raise more than half million dollars (to match our Federal grant from the National Endowment for the Arts) from the private sector—an activity that would put us in direct competition with the very cultural institutions that our mission requires us to support.  In addition, our largest grant program (Cultural Facilities), not only provides significant improvements to our historical and cultural institutions in the area of accessibility, the funds we award employ hundreds of carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, electricians and other blue-collar workers that are, along with artists and teachers, the life-blood of our communities.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, every State SHOULD invest in the arts sector simply because it makes good economic sense.  One of our most conservative policy analysts looked at state and local tax revenues that flowed to state and municipal coffers from our very narrowly-defined arts sector in Vermont.  Income taxes paid by artists, arts administrators and independent arts contractors, as well as the long-established IMPLAN economic modeling analysis on just the nonprofit arts institutions in the state, reveal a total return of $19.45 million on a combined investment of $2.5 million, which includes our $500k appropriation.  This annual ROI of 775%  is even more astonishing since virtually all of Vermont’s state tourism dollars promote skiing, outdoor recreation, fall foliage, maple syrup, and artisanal food preparation and service, NOT art and culture—a circumstance which, I am happy to say, is going to change starting this summer.

Our legislature is getting more and more comfortable with thinking of the work we do as expanding the revenue base of our state, not increasing the expenses that our citizen taxpayers must bear.  Our sector provides good jobs.  It adds enormous social and civic value to our communities.  It improves the relationship that young people have with their schools and communities.  And it serves as a powerful attraction to entrepreneurs seeking to locate their new businesses in a creative, vital community setting.  The “creative economy” is real and it is thriving here in Vermont.  I believe that all these arguments are relevant to making the case for keeping the Kansas Arts Commission on sound financial, PUBLIC footing.

With great respect for you and for the wonderful citizens of Kansas, I am

Sincerely yours,

Alexander L. Aldrich

Executive Director

Vermont Arts Council

www.vermontartscouncil.org

www.artsupportsme.org

"Inspiring a Creative State..."

Perspective Anyone?

I don't remember too many details from Fine Arts 13, my undergraduate survey course on the History and Appreciation of Western Classical Art. But I remember vividly the Venus of Willendorf, a squat fertility figure dating back many thousands of years, and I remember a lot of classical statuary, Roman architecture, and the Moorish influence in Spain in the late Middle Ages. But mostly I remember the profound feeling of relief that came over me when, as we started in on the Italian Renaissance in the early 15th Century, artists (Brunelleschi comes to mind) started to use perspective as a principle tool for organizing three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional canvas.

Ahhhh. Perspective. Something we all need. Something we rarely enjoy.

In art, of course, perspective is often something that professional artists love to play with. I have a couple of coffee-table books and many ties in my closet with images taken from the works of M. C. Escher. They provide hours of amusement for my children and me as we trace the passage of someone walking up the underside of a staircase and emerging through a door sideways. It's a little disconcerting but also a useful tool to explore how different points of view result in different outcomes.

Of late I have been reminded how a little more training in the use of perspective might have been useful during the past couple of months on the economic front. I've already raved about the ridiculousness of the US Senate getting all crazy about $50 million of the stimulus bill going to support efforts by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). $50 million, for those of you who missed my post, is about 63/10,000ths of 1% of the total $789 billion stimulus package. Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

But then I remembered something important. The Senate used to get all crazy over the NEA's $172 million budget back in the early 1990s. As a percentage of the Federal Budget, the NEA's budget was even smaller than its current portion of the stimulus package.

Fast forward a bit to this week. Perspective again becomes an important issue.

The general public is understandably outraged that AIG bosses received $160 million in retention (NOT performance) bonuses even as that sad-sack corporation was receiving $170 billion in tax-payer funds to--what's the phrase?--"cover its nut."

Now I don't have exact figures here, but it seems to me that, as justified as this outrage over bonuses is, it pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars that AIG is spending on, are you sitting down?, paying large international banking firms for having taken unconscionably bad investment positions in derivative swaps (or whatever they're called).

So, let's run a few numbers and get some new perspective on this AIG mess.

For ease of computation, I'm going to assume that AIG has paid out $50 billion to about a dozen banks all over the world to compensate them, dollar for dollar, the amount that they lost on derivative swappage.

What would have happened if, as frequently happens during a bankruptcy proceeding, AIG had said to these banks, "look, you're about to drive us out of business. But we're about to get some tax money. We'd like to offer you $0.90 on the dollar, since the alternative might just be for us to declare bankruptcy in which case you might get less than $0.10 on the dollar. Would $0.90 be okay?"

Assuming the banks said yes (and how could they refuse? THEY were the ones who made the bad investments to begin with!) tax payers could have saved $5 billion.

So here you have the poor schlubs who are busy "winding AIG down" getting retention bonuses (if they didn't, NO ONE would work for AIG), and getting beat up by the press, the Congress, and the American Public. Their collective bonuses represent just 3.2% of the money that could have been saved if only AIG had offered 90 cents on the dollar. But no one but me seems to be in a dither about it.

See what perspective does to you? It reveals a whole new side to a situation that makes you madder than you were before.

Perspective also reminds you that $160 million is frequently the cause of a lot of gnashing of teeth and flailing of limbs in political circles. We're in the Arts, after all, and we have that perspective down cold.

If this hasn't made you mad enough yet, then consider this.

The $50 million that caused such a furor in the Senate several weeks ago is exactly 1% of the $5 billion that might have been "saved" had AIG done the right thing.

Doesn't this make you want to pick up and head to Montpelier on Wednesday for Arts Achievement Day or to Washington DC next week for Arts Advocacy Day? At least there you'll be among people who share your perspective...

Art and Mass(ive) Consumerism

Seattle artist Chris Jordan was the featured speaker at our National Assembly of State Arts Agencies final plenary session last week in Chattanooga, TN. His work documents the monumental consumerism of our society in a way that forces each of us to consider our personal impact on earth’s environment. It is troubling work because he fools you into thinking what you’re seeing is beautiful, when really it is terrifying to behold.

For example, one work, titled simply “Plastic Cups,” is a silver, gray, and white image of a post-industrial Tree of Life made up a million plastic 6 oz. cups (stacked) which is equal to the number used by airlines every six hours. One can only wonder how many of those are recycled…

Another (my personal favorite) is called “Cans Seurat” and reproduces in exquisite detail the Seurat work “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” only instead of Seurat’s pointillist technique rendered in oil paint, Jordan has rendered it in aluminum cans—106,000 of them, representing the number consumed by Americans every 30 seconds.

In his lecture, Jordan was quick to point out how easy it is to become stupefied by such staggering statistics. 1.14 million is just a number. 1.14 million folded and stacked brown paper supermarket bags, however, presented to look like a primeval forest, barren of all life--now THAT makes an impression. Then consider that what you are looking at is what is consumed in just one hour in the United States.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that as soon as I could find a calculator I found out this means we “consume” nearly 10 billion paper bags a year, a depiction of which would have required Jordan to use a canvas as tall as the UN Building but nearly three times as wide.

What keeps humans from becoming numb; what enables humans ultimately, to process such staggering statistics, is art. Or as Jordan put it (and I paraphrase since I’m quoting from memory), “Art enables us to comprehend and come to terms with ideas that, intellectually, we are otherwise unable to process.”

Put in even more political terms, the saturating effect of these statistics on our brain simply numbs it. The more numb we become, the easier it is for us to accept things like a disappearing ice shelf or a 700 billion dollar Wall Street Bail-out. According to Jordan, we have never needed the arts more than now. The arts give us time and the internal resources to reflect on and, perchance, change our self-destructive behaviors.

* * * *

One who would probably never accept this line of thought is Geoffrey Norman, a writer and founder of Vermonttiger.com (a “non-partisan, nonprofit advocacy and media enterprise”) whose recent opinion piece in the Times Argus "Stop the music, already" (9/21/08) was little more than a fluff piece advocating paying for everything that eight years of Bush Administration policies have wrought by among other things, taking away funding from so-called non-essential services like the Vermont Symphony.

There are so many ways to kick this sad, tired argument in the teeth that one almost doesn’t know where to begin. So give me a couple of weeks to organize my response.

Stay tuned…