Henry Louis Mencken once quipped that we have lost more great art to constipation than to all the wars of the world combined. He was being a bit glib, facetious even, but his words had teeth. Nobody can create anything wonderful when one’s bowels are in a knot and one’s head is in a vise. One can add that Mencken knew whereof he spoke, given his status as one of America’s most supremely talented men of letters, a writer of astounding vigor and grace, an artist who made music with words, day after day.
I have another candidate for art-killer, one even more serious than biliousness. That’s our reprehensible habit of relegating artists to restricted incomes or even poverty, either of the genteel or the downright variety. We don’t pay our artists what they’re worth, not by a long shot. I’m not referring only to the mythical starving genius in the garrett. I’m also referring to the chap in the first violins of the Philadelphia Orchestra with a six-figure salary.
Players in a tip-top orchestra like the San Francisco Symphony average around $140K-ish. That sounds pretty good until you consider that $140K is chump change for doctors, many executives, financial types, a lot of lawyers (but nowhere as many as people think) and so forth. It is a reasonable salary for any qualified professional, on the low end for any number of fields, but on the whole a good respectable middle ground for the highly-trained, highly-educated professional class. But $140K is a very posh salary for a musician in modern-day America. Except for the few superstars amongst us, most musicians make far less. Far, far less.
Which is just plain wrong, because it means that many people of talent, brains, and ability aren’t going into music for the simple reason that they aren’t willing to sign the vow of poverty. And why should they? Brainy, ambitious, talented, energetic, capable people know that they can support themselves and raise a family in fine style in mainstream, non-arts fields; they can get well-paying jobs with far greater ease than aiming for that one-in-ten-thousand seat in a top-tier orchestra, membership in a fine opera company, or faculty position on a Conservatory-class faculty. (And those Conservatory-level faculty positions don’t pay particularly well.) I can’t see it as a viable choice for most people with children. I would be disgusted with myself if I couldn’t afford to send my kid to Town School or University High or the like, just because I insisted on being a musician. I can look back at my own life and realize that, had I been on the marriage-and-family track, I never would have considered music as a profession for a split second. Maybe as an avocation, but certainly not as a (lousy) way to make a living. I would have taken this solid musical talent and Mensa-level IQ of mine and put it to use where I could make the living that my family deserved.
In fact, I almost did just that at one point, as I became interested in computer programming and turned myself into a decent writer of music education software. I’m the type that companies like Apple would have jumped at in a minute: creative, educated in the arts, disciplined, but also smart and also already soaked in computer code. I could have jumped ship from music a good thirty years ago. I might have been a very rich man now. Maybe a very frustrated one as well. Or maybe not.
I’m digressing from the real point, which is that the sheer difficulty of a life in music, not to mention the lousy prospects for ever making a respectable income out of it, have lost us an awful lot of people who just might have blessed us with a lot of wonderful music. But we’ll never have it, because we made the field too unattractive, forbidding, and unremunerative.
If we want great art we have to be willing to pay for it. We never have opened our pocketbooks here in America, with the results plain as the nose on anybody’s face. 20th century American concert music is a wasteland. The pop world has been far more welcoming; there has been real money to be made there, even if the competition is, if anything, fiercer than it is for classical musicians. Thus the vast bulk of worthwhile American music since 1900 is written for stage, screen, radio, or records, and not the concert halls. Europe has fared a bit better, but not much. Here in America we got to play host to some European composers (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Bartók) thanks to the murderous regimes that flared up in Europe throughout the century. But those expatriate Europeans were never ours, nor did they ever write “American” music, and while they could live in America (an improvement on the situation in, say, Nazi Germany) they could not necessarily prosper. Schoenberg and Bartók eeked out pittances; Hindemith did little better. Only Stravinsky managed to amass a reasonable fortune, but that wasn’t due to any largess on America’s part.
We’ll never know just how much we have really lost. The only thing I’m certain about is that we most definitely did lose it. Or perhaps the verb is wrong: you can only lose something that you once possessed, and so instead of ‘lost’ music, it’s ‘never-was’ music. Cumbersome phrase that, despite being more precise. I think I’ll stick with lost, imprecision be damned. That lost music lives on in some Bardo of alternate possibilities, in a parallel universe in which a life in music was a pretty good way to make a living, thereby attractive to ambitious and energetic people.