While the long sweep of fine art music behind us towers impressively, our decision to institutionalize fine art has progressively homogenized expression even as playing standards have reached new heights. In many cases, fine art music has been co-opted by the creeping politicization of government funding, social movements, and a secular humanism that has tended towards nihilism and confusion over the last 100 years. This does not imply that all artists hold these beliefs or even want it to be this way. But these tendencies can be clearly seen. Music that mocks rather than serves audiences. Impenetrable works of intellectual display that defy explanation and simultaneously end without any perceptible comment on the human condition. Excellence expressed as beauty and truth is often in short supply. New music has to be bookended with old music so that people don’t walk out in disgust. Something important to humanity has been lost and needs to be restored.
There is a confused sound in the culture that needs to re-orient around a clear “North Star” of properly functioning fine art music. The fine arts are to be a shining beacon of human potential, illuminating what is possible, desirable, and good about the human condition. The rise of spirit we get when exposed to natural beauty or watching humans stretch their own limits at the Olympics is what we need to experience from the fine arts. When exposed to the fine arts, we should feel our humanity deeply and emerge refreshed, ready to try a little harder at the tasks in front of us. Surely, if the athlete or the artist can devote themselves to their highest expression of excellence, I can re-commit to my own role in humanity. When the aspirational fine arts orient toward timeless, transcendental values like faith, hope, and love, all other expressions find their natural place. If the fine arts are corrupted to lower aims, then the entire culture can no longer aspire to the highest peaks, but only to lower, lesser aims. If the fine artists abdicate their position, the whole culture loses sight of the possibility and hope they need to thrive.
Ultimately, the fine arts must aspire beyond human experience. Because the fine arts are about the highest and best ideals, the most refined expression, and the highest levels of technical achievement, we cannot set our sights low. We humans are all flawed - even the shiniest diamonds have small defects. So, some would say that self-expression should be the only goal, but this necessarily excludes the search for greatness and meaning the fine arts most need to deliver. My own life and most significant accomplishments are far too small and narrow to reflect the magnitude of human potential! If the fine arts are themselves aspirational, they must necessarily aspire to truths larger than any one of us, or all of us together. In this way, the fine arts provide a compass to our fellow travelers - we always point toward our best selves and highest efforts. Attending a fine art concert should provide a calibration and reminder to all who attend.
We and the music serve higher ideals that always feel tantalizingly just out of reach. The perfection our spirits understand eludes us, but still we yearn for more. The fine arts hold this tension and celebrate the struggle against complacency and our lower selves. A lifetime in the fine arts should display the results of a journey toward timeless ideals.
The results of this struggle are what attract others to the art. While technical mastery and virtuoso skills always impress, they don’t create meaning or change the culture. When someone has done years of quiet, unseen, disciplined work and emerges transformed, everyone notices. We want to experience it ourselves, even vicariously. When transformed through perseverance, reflection, and deep inner work, we can share a unique insight into the human condition; our fellow travelers are more than willing to listen. Advanced artists of every discipline carry a gravitas that attracts. The struggle to live out higher ideals changes the artist, and this changes the music, deepening it in ways that we feel and yet struggle to put into words. The fine arts dignify this struggle for meaning, purpose, and value, giving it shape, texture, and expression.
This is why it is not enough just to point out painful truths about the human condition in our art. It is true that we are all often confused. We do horrible things to each other in the name of love, religion, and truth. The last century has been full of devastating wars, famines, genocides, disasters, and more. We can all observe the trauma of mental breakdown or dysfunction without leaving our hometown. All of these conditions can be expressed musically, and have been - from internal angst to existential despair and nihilistic exhaustion. But consider, do people line up to hear someone spew only the darkest, vilest parts of human existence? Should they be exposed only to the pain? What about the highest truths? Don’t we prefer to listen to inspiring stories of change, growth, development, and overcoming? There is a reason movie plots unfold the way they do. We desperately need to know that the worst part isn’t the only part. We want to know that even though it has been bad, it can be better. We want help processing the unsaid, deep things, and to be restored to a path of hope and towards a brighter future.
This is the job of the fine arts. We are to process the deep hurts, to wrestle with the darkness, yes, but also to carry light and hope into those places. To say that despite all the vicissitudes of the human condition, we still see the possibility of a better ending. Having wrestled with the darkness and emerged triumphant, we can report to the rest of the tribe that good can once again triumph over evil. Beauty can be restored where damage and decay have reigned. The shared experience of fine art musical performance leaves an entire room unified for a few minutes. We set aside our differences and agendas for a transcendental moment where we enjoy being together around a shared experience of excellence, truth, beauty, and richly nuanced expression of what it means to be human.
This is why the fine arts matter. We need meaning and purpose to be healthy. We need encouragement to battle our inner demons, wounds, and weaknesses. We need to process the incomprehensible things that happen during disasters, wars, and strife into a resolve to rebuild, restore, and heal. Society needs aspirational leadership for the culture. We need people shining a light toward the best possible outcomes. Olympians and sports stars give us one expression of this cultural leadership. Poets, musicians, authors, and artists of all kinds can share their own version and expression of this light, making it available to all who want it and those who simply need it. The fine arts are not the entire culture. We need our entertainment; we need music to celebrate with, dance to, and even to underscore a quiet documentary about wild birds! The fine arts take nothing away from any of these other expressions. But if the fine arts abdicate their position of aspirational leadership and direction, something important has been lost, and an entire culture will struggle, unable to recognize or pursue its highest potential.
So we persist. We return to the practice room another day, and composers fill in the blank page with notes one more time. The search for meaning and significance matters. Becoming our best selves is at stake. And the fine arts must return to lead the way.