[thejazz] thoughts on being a jazz composer and pianist

Art and Collective Cultural Knowledge

Reading is one of the things that I have the luxury of doing much more of during the summer months when I'm not teaching. (EDIT: we just had a baby girl last week, so that statement should be put on hold ) Often you'll hear that summer is the time for academics to get more research done; write more music, etc. However, I strongly believe that in order to write relevant music I need to be able to relate to the rest of the world, and have a pretty good pulse on what is happening outside of my strangely quaint, little artistic bubble. After all, how many people do what I do and actually get paid for it? Not very many. And so I try to catch up on my reading. As the poet (and my uncle) Timothy Young says, everything that goes into the hopper becomes fodder for later. Of course, if there's nothing in the hopper, there's no fodder for later.

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is a great read and just might convince you to buy some organic food. However, running through the text are a few great undercurrents that have a lot to do with what I do. The cultural knowledge of food is an important one. As each of the different societies in this world have developed over the ages, they have passed down food knowledge through the generations. The most basic examples of this are what foods are safe to eat, and what foods are poisons or toxins to our bodies. As Pollan shows us, most animals don't even need to worry about what foods they eat - they are hard coded to eat a select few things. Along with a few number of fellow species, humans (and it turns out, rats) don't have hard-coded instinctual food choices. Instead, we need to use our brains and our senses to make a determination each time about what is good to eat, and what is not. One theory of why we have such high-functioning brains compared to most other species is that our brains evolved to be able to negotiate this food-choice dilemma. This is what is coined "the Omnivore's Dilemma."

Our cultures have developed bodies of knowledge about which foods are safe, nutritious, and satisfying to eat. Hence, each time we eat food that we know is ok to eat (apples), we are drawing on our, or our culture's, past experiences with that food. If we come across a food in the grocery store that we have never eaten before, we rely on society's knowledge that the food presented for us to eat is safe. Nowadays, many constructs are put into place to make sure this assumption is valid; in the United States, the FDA regulates food safety; grocery store owners have a vested interest in the continued trust in their food; your friends have a vested interest in making sure their recommendations don't make you sick. All of these and more add up to the cultural knowledge of food.

Why does our society not have similar constructs for art? Certainly something like this exists for popular types of art, such as hip hop or alt rock - music critics, iTunes Genius, or certain elements of Pandora's Music Genome Project. But I'm not talking about American Idol. On American Idol, nothing creative is actually happening. I guess Simon Cowell would beg to differ, but everyone on the show sings other people's music. There undoubtedly are people with talent on the show, but talent for others' art is not the same as art, in the same way that craft is not the same as creativity. Most people would not consider someone with a great talent for framing houses as being artistic. They may posses a high level of craftsmanship, but not artistry. The architect, however, possesses a creative bent for design that the framer implements. I am definitely not trying to claim that a framer does not use creativity during his or her work. I would, however, posture that most people would agree that there is a divide between someone who creates and  someone who implements others' creations.

For the actual creative side of culture, {Western} society has not developed (or if it has, it has not maintained on a broad scale) an expansive artistic cultural knowledge that is passed down to almost everyone. There are certainly small pockets of the population for which an extensive cultural knowledge exists and is a significant portion of their day. But for most, that's not the case. Part of the fault is in the schools. Music, art, drama, and other types of creative programs are being cut in record numbers from the public schools. But this is not a diatribe against the shortsightedness of voters. Rather, parents and the people that surround children do not, in general, pass down cultural knowledge of great art. How many people were exposed as youngsters to the great classical composers with more than a passing gesture? How about jazz, or dance, or abstract art?

Of course, this gets into the philosophy of why we should have an artistic cultural knowledge in the first place. That will need to be explored at a later date, but I take for granted that art is one thing that a society needs to have to make it. The eminent scientist and well-known author Jarod Diamond argues in his Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed that environmental factors, and societies who choose to ignore impending environmental disasters associated with those factors, end up "choosing" to collapse rather than choosing to succeed. He has been criticized for his environmental determinism [see, for example, Andrew Sluyter's scholarly article in Antipode]. I am not well-versed enough in the literature to join that debate, but Diamond's work won a pulitzer prize and he is certainly thought of as a credible scientist. At any rate, I think that relying on environmental determinism as a sole factor for the success or failure of societies is a bit narrow-minded. There are certainly other factors necessary in the survival of society, and culture is one of them. Art is a significantly large part of culture, and I strongly believe that in order to keep our society strong, we need to develop (or re-develop), and subsequently maintain, a cultural knowledge of art that resides on a grand scale.

One way to do that is to create art that showcases society's need for art. In other words, to use art as a critical commentary on why art is such a crucial factor in maintaining a strong society, i.e. "Meta Art." Another way is to be an advocate for art and for society's need for a strong cultural knowledge of art. Share with your kids. Read about it. Take art beyond the concert hall and beyond the walls of the museums to the world; beyond the 4th-6th grade classrooms. Many philosophies of teaching in talk extensively about integrating subjects: using word problems in math, writing skills in scientific reports, etc. If we as a society can integrate using art to examine issues with the same intensity that we use science, we will go a long way toward strengthening our culture for the long run.