Dead Composers, Living Audiences: The Situation of Classical Musi ...

This book is not an easy read; it is a challenge to travel the thinking of an intellectual of Dr. Phillips’ stature, but one with large rewards for the intrepid reader. Especially in a journalistic environment populated by sound bites and platitudes, it is indeed a rare thing to be allowed a glimpse into an author’s mind.

The inarguable lesson of the book is this: we do not teach in the world in which we live. The lesson’s application is this: we must abandon—yes, even reject—our comfort zones to provide at least an equal place in our teaching, performance, and general culture for living artists. Although the canon of the Western classical tradition provides wonderful insights into the human condition, familiarity with it often breeds trivialization—if not contempt—and, for many, reduction into escapist distraction. Creativity all too often has been compromised by commodification, and our opera houses, orchestra halls, and, alas, teaching studios have become museums, repositories of a glorious past whose fundamental paradigm is dead, rather than vibrant exemplars of current culture. To continually teach from this canon is tantamount to the clichéd “yellowed lecture notes” of the ageing classroom professor. Do we need another go at teaching “Caro mio ben”? Must the catalog offer still another CD of Die schöne Müllerin? Will yet another mounting of La Bohème significantly advance our understanding, our culture? The Western tradition is not enough. We must learn from our heritage, but should not allow ourselves to live there; it becomes a matter of professional and cultural ethics.

Written from the perspective of a voice pedagogue, but with a vastly broader application, this book is a fascinating voyage of discovery. Science, philosophy, and music join the journey, creating interesting bed fellows along the way, such as Albert Einstein and Arnold Schoenberg, having obliterated boundaries of their respective disciplines, and Friedrich Nietzsche and Alban Berg, having rearticulated the past and sought new meaning from the art of their own time.

A particularly provocative leitmotif running through the text is the Eden metaphor: once having attained knowledge, we are evicted into a totally different world, having to develop new laws, orders, and paradigms that reflect that world.