Archive for October, 2011
Music in the Meadow via Ustream
Last night was our first Music in the Meadow of the year. M in M is a juried recital, which means that the students audition to be a part of it. The fun part for me was that four of my students were selected to perform. They were great and really showed the work that they’ve been doing since school started six weeks ago. But the really fun part was our new UStream feature. Now for the first time we’re going to be live streaming concerts and other performances directly to the internet. Some of these will be archived so that they can be viewed at a later time by anyone with a computer and a good internet connection. Last night was a test, so the feed went out live with no real announcement. After, we liked what we did, so we shared on the Idyllwild Facebook page. Now about 15 hours later, it’s been seen over 300 times, more than three times the capacity of Stephens Recital Hall! Now, that does NOT mean if you live in Idyllwild we want you to stay home and watch our things on the computer! But if you’re not here, say, you’re parents that live in Omaha, or a third cousin that lives in Paris, please tune in! Share with your friends, help us create an online performance audience. More information will come in further tweets, facebook posts and centerstage emails. But for now, you can see last night’s performance by going here.
Also, here is the permanent link to our Ustream Channel for Music: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/music-performances
Visionaries and the Alphorn
From Sydney Cosselman
Krone Museum Director
Once again thank you to students who brought their parents by the Krone Museum during Family Weekend. As always, I enjoyed talking with them, and sharing our school’s history. There were many activities on campus this past weekend, and I am sure everyone had a wonderful time.
This year the Krone Museum is holding classes in our exhibit area. In preparation for this, I have recently begun a project that, when completed, will exhibit a visual timeline for our school. Through historical photograph displays, I will focus upon individuals who have made a difference during time spent at our school. Under the photographs there will be corresponding notebooks that include further information about these individuals for those who are interested. The photographs and notebooks will change periodically. In addition, I will be including more information to be presented on a monitor, and will introduce some of these individuals as well as objects in our collection each month in the museum blog. Please feel free to come into the museum when classes are not in session.
DID YOU KNOW?
The first object I would like to introduce is our Alp horn, and fittingly so because it was the first object to be donated to ISOMATA (Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts). The label reads “The first gift ISOMATA received was a Swiss Alphorn, a 12th century shepherd’s instrument that was a popular instrument until the 1880’s especially in the Swiss and Bavarian Alps. It was a gift from Mr.& Mrs. George Haight of Northwestern University who visited the Krones in Idyllwild and thought it a perfect place for an instrument that resounds through the mountains. On July 23, 1950, Meredith Willson premiered his song In Idyllwild in the Atwater Kent Bowl. It began with a distinctive four-note melody for alphorn, which became the traditional wake-up and lights-out signal at ISOMATA . Here are a few photos taken over the years…
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Does Art Make You a Better Person?
By Brian D. Cohen, President, Idyllwild Arts – reblogged from The Huffington Post
“If you want to be a better musician, become a better person.” — John Coltrane
Making art may seem pretty selfish. One fears the creative soul will withdraw from social interactions, into self-absorption, solipsism, and neglect of societal expectations and ordinary responsibilities. The often obsessive nature of art-making exacerbates our fears of these tendencies.
Maybe we’ve been taught to think that inwardly directed attention is a little bit shameful, egotistical, or self-indulgent, and the products of introspection are effete, impractical, or useless, at best. “You can’t eat beauty.” While you’re making art you’re not doing anything for anyone else, and you’re probably not helping out much around the house.
There may be more to it than that. The composer George Rochberg (I painted his garden furniture in 1978 while we argued whether Prokofiev or Shostakovich was the better composer; I had some nerve) stated: “The pursuit of art is much more than achieving technical mastery of means or even a personal style; it is a spiritual journey toward the transcendence of art and of the artist’s ego.” Art helps you get over yourself, beyond yourself.
The Greek philosopher Plotinus likened our lives to the creation of a work of art:
“How then can you see the sort of beauty a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then just as someone making a statue…must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright and never stop until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you…”
The French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault recalled that the ancient Greeks sought:
“to make their lives an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values” He had no fears that a self-aware individual would withdraw from outward social responsibilities, but would “be able to conduct himself properly in relation to others and for others.”
We tend to admire with less hesitation the discipline, direction, mastery, stamina, persistence, and the ability to live with ambiguity and uncertainty of artistic practice. Some schools have also figured out that while kids are making art, they’re staying out of worse kinds of trouble.
What about experiencing art? The concept of empathy began in 19th-century German psychology as a description of emotional and kinesthetic responses to works of art — engagement with works of art provokes empathic response. Empathy is how we know others’ minds and others’ experiences. It is a redefinition and expansion of oneself through recognition of the experience of another, resonance with another’s experience so immediate and complete it is experienced as one’s own response. Starting early in our lives, with children’s books, then music, movies, novels, poetry, and visual art, we discover through art worlds that belong to others, and they immediately become our own.
Recent studies in neuroscience have pointed to the role of mirror neurons in empathic response. Wikipedia tells us:
“a mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another…the neuron ‘mirrors’ the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.”
Is this the neurological basis for empathy? For understanding what other people are feeling? For moral behavior? Is this the basis for power of art to move and transform us?
The development of empathy in an individual from art mirrors the original derivation of the term; it is art that makes us empathic; art that models others’ inner lives for each of us; art that attunes us to experience and suffering beyond ourselves. It is imagination, the other signal attribute of creative thinking, that lets us see how the world can be changed to be better for ourselves and for others.
Grace
By Brian D. Cohen, President, Idyllwild Arts – reblogged from The Huffington Post
“I’ve been shooting in the dark too long/When something ain’t right it’s wrong…” — Bob Dylan
“This is what a picture should give us … a colored state of grace.” — Paul Cezanne
I don’t remember much of what was said to me in graduate school, now nearly thirty years ago. Most was dismissive, or condescending, or vague. (What most art schools fail to do is to examine their own premises. They so often are permeated by what style was current when their professors were trying and failing to make careers as gallery artists, or maybe by a dilute tertiary interpretation of what’s happening in Artforum, that they don’t question and don’t see the conformist pressures they unwittingly impose. These fish, they don’t know they swim in water.) I went my own way, quite alone, except for my friends, dead Modernists in art books.
But one thing was said to me, maybe the only thing I clearly remember, that stayed with me, and remains the highest praise I’ve ever received. It was from a visiting artist, the only woman ever to review graduate student work (all 19 tenured professors were male). She looked at my paintings for a long time and said they had grace. That was it — grace. She didn’t say anything else that I remember.
Why this stuck with me I don’t really know, but I thought, or hoped, I knew what she meant, and in fact the comment helped me realize that was what I wanted in my work. It has become what I’ve strived for ever since. Whether you can work for it, I don’t know either, as it usually comes unbidden, rarely when you want or need it the most. It won’t come without work, but it doesn’t come from work. (Salieri worked harder and was more devout than the petulant, irreverent, infantile Mozart, at least in the apocryphal movieAmadeus). It rarely comes at all, and never stays.
What is it — ineffable, resonant, untranslatable, immaterial (yet inarguably moving through the senses)?
The first and only time I heard the violinist Hilary Hahn in concert I saw her bow pass over the strings but I couldn’t sense where the sound was coming from. She made the sound, but it was no longer part of her, or a result of effort; it had left her for us.
Grace doesn’t belong to us, much as we may feel we’ve worked for it. It is not our own, but can reach others. What other reward of making art has this value: touched someone else with grace? Even this we rarely know. To be truly gifted is to be able to share this grace, and the gift of no use until shared.
This sense, feeling, state — that you’ve made something right and true, and necessary, something that must be in the world — is worth any amount of travail. Is this the only way we know we aren’t lying to ourselves? Nothing is right until you get there, and when you get there, you can rest. The rest is silence.
