A great revelation has been visited upon me due to Leonard Slatkin’s lecture on Monday January 25th. The main thing that he was trying to get across was that orchestras such as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are important cultural institutions that should be supported. According to him, the generation of our parents and grandparents have dropped the ball. They did not know how important it would be to us to have these orchestras. Now the parent and current generation must spring into action and make sure that all these hundreds of musicians that are graduating from our numerous educational institutions will have jobs. Their dreams of being musicians should not be crushed due to lack of the cultural support for orchestras. He also said that the private sector has the responsibility to care for the arts. He mentioned something about the orchestra being like a time machine that recreates the past. I wonder whose past he meant. The 95% white (mostly middle aged and older) audience and rest made up from the international students belonging to upwardly mobile asian and south-american families responded with enthusiasm.
“Change is a good thing, but in the arts, not so much”, said Leonard Slatkin. Thus we must hold on to the values passed down to us from the dead western european cultural establishment and accept them as the American culture and preserve them and propagate them through education and donations to the orchestra. Before this lecture, I did not know who the participants were in the American Culture. I think I have a better understanding now. Don’t worry, its not the immigrants. Most of them are upwardly mobile and can be uplifted through the education at schools to participate in the culture in power for at least one or two generations. But, it was interesting to hear about Mr.Slatkin’s hobnobbing with Bill Clinton and Alan Greenspan. Whether the Orchestra serves a vibrant and culturally relevant role in the modern American Society comprising of so many different cultures is a question whose answer we did not learn yesterday.
The major revelation came when Mr. Slatkin said,
” Public doesn’t like composers whose names it can’t pronounce.”
And apparently, he himself would rather be spared the difficulty of mumbling someone’s name at the orchestra rehearsal, because he could not be bothered to have to learn how to pronounce it. The audience chuckled complacently with his comments.
My dear friends, colleagues, professors and general public at large, I SEE THE LIGHT. I have been doing you a disservice. Art may be about individuality and creativity as Mr. Slatkin says, but it is not about having weird difficult foreign names. I feel sorry for all those eastern European, dutch, danish, scandanavians and others from asia that my new American name is going to put out of business. By the way if you are an African with a click in your name, you might as well take the boat back. Boy, I wish there was an ellis island like old-time situation for immigrants, so that they can be assigned popular American names, to guarantee success in the American Culture.
I have raked my brains all night yesterday to come up with a name that Mr.Slatkin and his culturally elevated public could pronounce. I almost went with O. I think people just about everywhere can pronounce it. But then how would the people at one place have the satisfaction of branding me as one of them, as distinct from the others.
But this is a hard task. What if the culture of power changes towards hispanic people in the near future. I am thinking of getting a different name for each culture that I encounter. I might also have to learn shape and skin shifting.
But, for now I think I will change it to John Washington. Its easy for Mr. Slatkin to pronounce and the public will come crashing in to hear the music. It might become un-American to not do so.
I look forward to plying the DSO with hundreds of scores in the near future.
Change is indeed a good thing as long as it toes the line.
THANK YOU LEONARD SLATKIN.
-Artist formerly known as Navjot Sandhu
