Here is what I'm talking about, music as a social catalyst. This is Kaelin, sitting in with the Owen Sound City Band at  Harrison Park this evening, set in a woodwind chair like anyone else, set like he belongs because he does.  I've played with a peck of bands in my day, I've worked with a stack of famous and semi-famous star composers, but really, when it comes down to it, which of them would actually give a 9 year old a chart he can play, and then let him sit in and play it?

What's this kid going to think of this experience 10, 20, 30 years hence? Squaresville? Or the day people treated him as a human being, as a full and valuable participant. He could be 9 or 90, he could be anyone; if he has the chops, if he's been given the chops, there is a chair, a camaraderie, an essential part to play, an inter-cooperative involvement, a belonging. This isn't cutsie kids in mock-culture get-ups dancing a pageant for a sequestered room of paying parents, this is the Real Thing, out there playing the living soundtrack for the evening parkland, same way we did it back in '23.  Same way we'll do it 86 years from now.

All around us is disconnected humanity, lost to the side.  McLuhan proposed that violence stemmed from a loss of identity, a dis-enfranchisement that turns to Sour Grapes that turns to goth grunge yeah well I wouldn't join you even if you asked facade they call 'being cool', cool like stones, cool and cold like dead things.  It's how we've left them, outside to chill. War orphans running in the streets.

How do we re-engage the marginalized?  R-E-S-P-E-C-T.  Not the faux tacit unconditional Al Franken MouseClub because we love you to buy our stuff stuff, but the real respect earned through all those hours of watching, listening, learning, practicing practice practicing, a respect the cultural apprentice truly believes they have earned:  A place at the table, a seat in the woodwinds, a chair in the band.  As simple as a blue cap.  This isn't about playing their music their way and handing them the baton or forcing them to do what they want; this is about arrangement and discipline, about rewarding participation by working together as equals to make something necessary and beautiful. 

The beauty of the work is it's own reward.

This is how it starts, people. This is music as the agent of the Eternal Golden Braid that grows that sense of belonging, of whole community engagement as a totally normal thing. This is the awakening. This is an antidote to our being the only species without full employment.

This is music as socio-economic medicine.

Why does everyone go running around looking for a 'business plan'?  Why squander collective resources on box-office hungry national arts clique 'culture' and then slash investments in school music and art programs, community orchestras, sports clubs and the precious community infrastructure of halls, festivals and virtually all other humanly necessary opportunities for social engagement? 

There is no 'business plan' because the dividends are completely off the money-scale.  Great-Grandpa's factory had a band!  His Foundary Band was a time-honoured tradition from ancient antiquity, empirically evolved and honed, a normal and necessary part of the social fabric of Building The Team.  The factory across town had another band, the town itself another still.  We'll send executives to play Laser Quest or a Hopi Spirit Retreat, yet all our museums scream at us over and over and over again how our great and amazing human progress, up to just recently, up to just about the point where it all started to fall apart, was wrought from company bands, city bands, community orchestras, company baseball teams, cricket clubs, rowing teams ... the tradition had its share of great heroes, but none of this was really about personal glory.

Where did we get the crazy notion we could replace Beethoven with Laser Quest?  Since when did we empirically prove gourmet coffee bars and roaming masseurs were the ultimate impetus and golden strategy to Working Together As A Team? Here's a tip: bonuses didn't work either. 

Neurocognitive fact: Pleasure perks breed corruption. We encourage the wrong sort of reward system in the brain, the one that seeks reward and then starts to connive optimizing that reward, we activate the shrewd region neurologists affectionately call The Las Vegas Centre, and surprise surprise, it pits the Mark against the House, it provokes an adversarial relationship of employee-employer, a contractually constrained gimme-gimme fistfight scenario.  By contract, the social self-reward motivation may be less easy for Accounting to tally, but it strikes deep into the creature proviking a sense of 'harambe'  of working together, living life together, growing stronger, safer and more involved, together.  Its the spirit you see on any unfunded cultural arts project, everyone pitching in where ever needed, whatever it takes, however it has to be to get to the goal of that Really Good Time Together.

Gimme-gimme may have sounded great in theory, but clearly it is the road to adversaries in every direction.  Government vs business, arts vs funding, unions vs factories, everyone reflexively opting to optimize their personal reward at the expense of others, the most toys wins, oblivious to the simple biological fact that every time a parasite sucks too much life from the host, they both die. 

We arrive inevitably at a statis, a deadlock, a stalemate.

As the Japanese say, "Where a house is filled with rights, there is no room for gifts."

And we are right back at Robert Putnam, and the great flowering of the Tower Societies. We arrive at the need for social symbiosis. We look around and we see those who are prospering are those who simply come together and work together for the work as its own reward, supporting each other through a culture of common ground and mutual support. We come face to face with Open Source and the gift economy of free software and free culture.

Here is my prediction: This will all be re-discovered. This will get picked up by FastCompany and Oprah Winfrey, and the notion will be catapulted to the forebrains of the mass-media as someone's really good original groundbreaking novel new idea to save us from the current socio-economic collapse. 

The contageon will spread rapidly as corporations, factories, contractors, schools and governments everywhere seize on this Very Good Idea, location after location they will take full credit for their brilliant insight and invest that small bit of needed time-is-money into the el Systeme 68% ROI equation and they miraculously side-step the impeding black-hole event-horizon with great thundering joyeous bursts of badly-played Strauss waltzes and nearly-forgotten passages from half-remembered high-school musicals.  They will pound on rusting out-of-tune pianos in halls with no heat and sing Daisy, Daisy because its the only song they all still know. 

And they will Survive.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »