A Provocation

I recently received an email survey from the Entrepreneurship Center for Music at the University of Colorado.  I took a class on music entrepreneurship through with their former director in 2007, and it certainly shaped my view of the arts and business borderland in many ways.  I did a feasibility study on starting a new music ensemble as a non-profit, thought about wind ensemble music publishing, and read a ton of material on the financial state of classical music.

One of the survey questions in this recent email provoked me strangely, and I'm hoping my post will provoke you too.  I don't write about politics very often on my blog (unlike my facebook wall).  The question was, "What is some advice you would give to young musicians?"  I immediately thought that they should become more politically involved in trying to sustain the arts.  Here is what I wrote (slightly altered and expanded):

"This is probably not the answer you are looking for, but I would say that they need to become more politically involved, if they are not already, and fight to sustain support of the arts and humanities (and education of these subjects) in the U.S.  There are elements at work in politics today that seek to sacrifice education of these "useless" subjects in favor of "useful" subjects such as hard sciences and mathematics. 

Even if you agree with this judgement upon their utility, it has been shown in numerous studies that music and art training improves faculties in other areas such as mathematics.  However, that is beside the point - the arts should be supported for their own sake. 

One principal reason for this is that culture, the product of the arts and humanities, is the refuge of outrageous, unlikely and uncomfortable ideas, ideas of what could and ought to be, even if they violate the norms and taboos of civilization as they currently stand.  Without constantly re-imagining the possibilities of life in our society, civilization could not progress.  This is the charge of the arts and humanities.  This is our moral responsibility to the future.

Young musicians should think of this when they see politicians slashing budgets for art in and outside of educational settings in favor of spending elsewhere.  Though I fully support our troops, and I would not like to see them ill equipped, I think the following statistic shows a severe mis-allocation of priorities, or at least a fundamental imbalance in our world: in 2011, the U.S. spent $985 million dollars on bullets alone, in just the Army.  This is approximately three times the combined budgets of the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities, which come to a total $332 million."

My statistics come from my favorite yearly info-graphic, Death and Taxes.  Its creator gets its statistics "directly from the President's official budget request and the comptroller of the Department of Defense."