What do we owe to the past?
Part One of a new series, reflecting on what we are given and what we should do with it.
I thought I was going to do only one article on this topic, but the questions that I asked myself at the end of this first post were extremely fruitful, and it started to spin out, so I’m making it a series.
Recently, Sō Percussion performed on the concert series at the Yale School of Music. We are all alumni, and our group was formed out of the percussion program there, so it was a homecoming and also an opportunity for reassessment. We have always been focused on creating new work, so the question of legacies and lineages has not been foremost on our minds during these past twenty-plus years. We have been thoughtful about it, but at a certain age you start to feel more responsible for carrying them on (I am almost 44).
I am currently reading a book of popular history by Martin Puchner called “The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop.” Puchner makes the case through many different examples that culture is constantly being reassembled more than carried forward. Each new generation must make what it can of what was left to it, and something is always missing, misunderstood, or reimagined in the process. This thinking resembles Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence” theory, which emphasizes the “misreading” of older work that spurs new creativity, but Puchner’s take is a little lighter on the Oedipal struggle and a bit more willing to look at communities and groups of people, not only individual geniuses.
When you are very young, many of the icons and trends that influence you seem indestructible. You may want to rebel against them to make room for new ideas, and to make sense of your own context. That is productive, as many innovative new ideas come out of that energy — without this revising and revisiting energy, cultures stagnate and calcify. But after awhile, you begin to realize it is all quite fragile, possibly only one generation away from being forgotten. What do you attempt to keep, and where should your finite energy go?
Going back to Yale, we expected to feel like students again. What it actually felt like was that we constituted our own distinctive middle layer between two generations: Our teacher Robert Van Sice is about twenty years older than we are, and his students are twenty years younger. We have created new repertoire and had many unique experiences since we were with him. Our perspective is slightly different than his, but also inseparable from his influence, informed by our own place in our own chunk of time. But there are some through-lines that unite us in a common project.
I started to think more expansively about lineages and what we owe to the past — or even, what do we owe ourselves by way of encountering the past? I attempted to diagram out the branches of influence that have affected me as an artist. Some, like studying percussion at Yale and Oberlin, place me as a direct part of an artistic lineage. I cannot avoid considering my place in that ecosystem, even if I quit right now and left it all behind for the rest of my life.
Others are more peripheral, but they have an enormous influence on me. For about six years, I have been helping my wife Cristina to catalog and interpret the pedagogical legacy of her piano teacher, the Italian master Franco Scala. I consider myself a pianist, and I have done many piano and keyboard projects, but I have not studied in this path of piano which, through Scala, goes only a few generations directly back to Beethoven.
my first attempt at a musical lineage map, which I am not yet quite happy with. “Cleveland” is a weirdly important category in my musical lineage, but perhaps not the larger topic I want to use to organize things.
But, through this project, I feel invested in a legacy. As I considered each of these strains, I came up with a few questions to ask myself about each of them:
What responsibility do I have to carry this forward — or reassemble it?
Where may I want to reform, elaborate, or revolutionize?
What outside forces influence me to define myself and identify in particular ways as an artist? Am I able to keep a whole sense of myself separate from these specialized categories? (the issue of “can I say I am a pianist” haunts this question).
What standing do I perceive that I have in each area to speak for it? What initiations have I undergone and what community credit do I have?
Can I apply my strengths and be useful in areas that I do not perceive myself to have great authority (like piano)?
What is the appropriate contribution to make at my life stage?
How much time and energy should I devote to passing things on?
After addressing just the first question, I realized that this post was going to become a whole paper, so I’m splitting some of the topics up to consider in turn. It is an exercise for me to work through my values and commitments at this moment in my life.
A quote from my reading
I was curious to try reading Proust, and I have found it much more enjoyable and pleasant than its reputation suggested I would. I do about ten pages a day, and there is always some nugget that stays with me like a koan for the rest of my day. This one made me feel both seen and accused. It is worth reading a few times to see how perfectly he describes the mind games we play with ourselves:
Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitely to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intentions would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient for a few hours and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began again to stay up late, having no longer to oblige me to go to bed early one evening, the certain hope of seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I could recover my creative energy, a few days of relaxation, and the only time my grandmother ventured, in a gently and disillusioned tone, to frame the reproach: “Well, this famous work, don’t we even speak about it any more?” I resented her intrusion, convinced that in her inability to see that my decision was irrevocably made, she had further and perhaps for a long time postponed its execution by the shock which her denial of justice had administered to my nerves and under the impact of which I should be disinclined to begin my work.