Susan M. Kane, “Rediscovering Living Art…” continued

But looking back on my time inside the university now, I can see that two things happened slowly and simultaneously over the decades, and I was like the famous frogs that finally get cooked in gradually warmer and warmer water.  First, the university, as I observed it, gradually became more and more concerned with non-academic values that trended towards a corporate model, slowly squeezing out what it considered to be non-essential or too expensive, like classical music study and opera along with the poetry center, the film festival, the prison project, and anything that seemed extra-curricular. Second, the deeper I was able to delve into my own topics of expertise, the more I realized how negative gender and racial codes ran throughout the repertoire and even the pedagogy I had been teaching for years. The effect was that the creative options for my non-curricular collaborative projects on reinventing classical music study were starved of funds, just as those same creative options were most needed in the musical field. The curriculum simply was not worthy of teaching without supplementation, change and adaptation. And yet the corporate university was no longer funding these necessary innovations. 

Inside: Towards a “Neoliberal” Model

In other words, I have experienced the university becoming gradually more and more neoliberal. By neoliberal, I mean driven by corporate rather than academic values. Since the recession of 2008, these corporate imperatives have sped up noticeably. They affected the daily lives of both faculty and students. Here are some examples:

·      Large and small concert halls were taken over by large non-music lecture classes, making them unavailable to the musicians who need to rehearse in the acoustics of their performance halls.

·      Costly opera productions shrunk more and more to fit smaller and smaller chamber production budgets, until the funding entirely dried up, cancelling this required experience for performance majors and, therefore, putting the entire vocal performance degree at jeopardy of being discontinued.

·      Less costly and more popular courses and programs, like commercial music and choir, were now being fully funded without explanation or oversight.

·      The neoliberal administration refused to invest in high-speed internet to adapt to online performance platforms that have become the norm during the pandemic but seemed radical before.

·      Courses were being cancelled every semester due to insufficient enrollment to make them viable, according to the random administration standards.

·      These neoliberal administrators began showing a preference for cheap, adjunct instruction over paying for full-time faculty, especially for studio work that requires one-on-one instruction and, therefore, is very expensive.

·      Graduation rates began trumping just about everything else, including ensuring a student is actually qualified to graduate. There became no path for failure. If a student failed a recital or exam, the administration’s playbook was to simply let another professor evaluate the student, whether or not that professor was qualified, and then to pass the student regardless of merit.

·      The administration began requiring regular harassment training, not to actually make a learning and teaching environment free from harassment but rather to protect the university from law suits. Thus, approaching any controversial topic on anything that might trigger a student to sue the university started to make many faculty members nervous, knowing this administration will not support the academic viability of those discussions should a student protest or file a claim. 

·      Deans and other administrators started to be permitted to be overbearing, unethical, and condescending to faculty, in order to implement procedures that would realize the overriding corporate value system.

·      Competition for limited university funds drove wedges between colleagues.

These are just some of the ways the corporate university negatively impacted my work inside the university. For me, the handwriting was on the wall. My position was too expensive. Three adjuncts took over my position when I left, and, together, they do not make as much in salary or benefits as I did. Where the university used to be the refuge of the working artist who was willing to teach, now the arts and humanities are being purged of artists, replaced with adjuncts, who may be artists but who are now hired to bundle knowledge into salable bite-sized bits for minimum wage without any job protections or time allowed for developing one’s art. 

Inside: Towards Self-Awakening

I had an awakening. During graduate school, I discovered that women had been systematically left out of classical music history and literature. I realized more slowly that my field of classical music is not only rife with sexist but also racist codes that needed to be acknowledged and unpacked, all within a field that is known to resist change and to cling to tradition. When I finally woke up to that fact, I was heartbroken. Then I felt stupid. Then I decided to start working more vehemently to learn as much as I could on the topic and to change my own way of teaching. Just getting colleagues and administrators to look at possibly changing their curriculum without being offended was risky.  It was a fight that I realized could not be won by me alone, and I could not find enough colleagues willing to take that risk with me.  Incorporating greater diversity in classical music, however, is a worthy and righteous fight. I now feel I can do better with many like-minded colleagues outside my university.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, and that made me decide to leave the university, was my research on the question: What can singers could do after graduation equipped only with foreign language art song, oratorio, and opera and thousands of dollars in debt given that there are not enough jobs? It seemed to me that we should have been teaching our students how to handle the new technology that would soon dominate our field, to find meaningful ways to be of value to their communities with their music. I also thought we should be considering with our students the question of how they might create ways to put food on the table while they created their fully-voiced art, a music that takes risks and expands the world for us all.

Transition and Decision

All of these topics proved to be too many fronts on which to fight within the university walls. There was no way to make lasting change. In my experience, I have found that the university structure had trouble accommodating any change, seeing all change as risk, and instead it embraced safer, more commercial values.

Rather than continue fighting losing battle after losing battle, I decided to leave the university. I did this so I could use my energies more positively to make and share my music in the world, and to support my students and colleagues in my field to do the same. To that end, I have started a business to house all my projects called Santosha Voice Group. Santosha is the Sanskrit word for contentment or happiness. After so many years of fighting, I am now able to offer music from a place of wholeness and wisdom without any desires for tenure, promotion, or acknowledgement. I wanted to stop asking permission to do what I know is right, good, healthy, challenging, and beneficial with music and with my teaching.

Spirit Flame

The following is a quote from Hafiz, a 14th century Persian poet, from a poem I really love, entitled, “These Candles, Our Bodies” (translated by Daniel Ladinsky):

One of the components of lasting art is a spirit flame within the created that can ignite inspiration and hope, and survive time’s ways.

It is precisely the “spirit flame” that moves me forward: makes me sing, teach, and listen. The flame ignited by music and poetry stays alive in the hearts of those who listen.

Zihyin

Here is a short story that illuminates my current value system, and what I feel is possible outside the university walls. The story is about Yu Boya and Zhong Ziqi, two real people who lived over 2000 years ago in what is now called Wuhan China. The tune that you can click on HERE is entitled “High Mountain Running Water” while reading this story. This is a composition by Yu Boya written 2000 years ago, and it is still played today.

Once upon a time, long, long ago in China, there were two friends, one who played the harp skillfully and one who listened just as skillfully. When the harpist played a song and sang about a mountain, the listening friend would say, “I can see the mountain before us.” When the harpist played a song about water, his listening friend would say: “Here is the running stream.” One day the listening friend fell ill and died. The harpist cut the strings on his instrument and never played again.[1]

This story exemplifies the Chinese ideal of friendship. The term Zhiyin (知音) means literally, "to know the tone"; it has come to describe a close and sympathetic friend. The values that motivate my work now since I left the university include searching for this “spirit flame,” as well as looking for Zhiyin—by making and encouraging music with dear souls, free of corporate concerns about money and austerity that hamper funding the arts now in college settings. This concept is full of meaning to me, and to all involved.

Searching for the “Spirit Flame” and Zhiyin

Of course, when one begins to look for something specific, one usually finds it everywhere, and so it has been for me. I am going to list some of the meaningful projects I’ve been involved in—not to ring my own bell, but to illustrate the use of what I understand to be my musician’s “poetics” to disrupt the university status quo: 1) by performing previously suppressed music; 2) by encouraging discussions that unpack the attachment to the hierarchical dominator model in classical music and the university; 3) by creating new works through collaborations with multiple artists exploring disruptive themes, such as the equality of shared trauma or combining multiple styles, sounds, and stories in disruptive “performative utterances.” These projects are inside, outside, and on the edges of the university.

Inside/Outside: Spirit Flame and Zhiyin in Student Projects

I have found the “spirit flame” in the mentoring and teaching of my dear students, who are making a go of it in the world right now. Ontario is a student of mine who recently was accepted into a Ph.D. program in ethnomusicology, along with a hefty scholarship and teaching assistantship package; Ontario is working on a project of performing anti-slavery songs from a book by Joshua Mc Simpson, written in 1852, and which was rediscovered by my colleague Lauri Scheyer. Marielle is another student, a classical soprano; she just finished a concert tribute to Joni Mitchell. Michael, yet another, is finishing his masters degree with a thesis topic on how and why Chicano people should listen to classical or “white” music. These students are all aflame with their missions. They light me up.

Inside/Outside: Spirit Flame and Zhiyin in Colleague’s Projects 

I have found the “spirit flame” in consulting for amazing colleagues at other universities and by participating in their innovative projects. I helped my colleagues at Vanderbilt University create L’enfent et les sortileges, an opera by Ravel, during the worst of the U.S. Covid19 epidemic. I helped the City of Riverside and University of California Riverside put on a classical concert for children ranging in age from six months to three years old, a piece called All About Bears. I had the privilege of igniting inspiration in a class of high school girls who want to be entrepreneurs in the arts by doing a workshop for them over Zoom.

Outside: Spirit Flame and Zhiyin in Audiences

I have found the “spirit flame” by performing for people who listen—I mean who really listen— like the skillful listener in the story above. These intimate performances will forever stay in my heart. The audiences were in a variety of non-traditional or unexpected places, like a homeless shelter, a prison, a student audience, a house concert, and an art exhibit by differently abled artists. 

Outside: Spirit Flame & Zhiyin in Collaborations

I have found the “spirit flame” by working on my own heart-felt projects with talented  collaborators, like the artists and scholars I am meeting during this colloquy. At the request of Laura Hinton (one of the colloquy organizers and editor of Chant de la Sirene), I am sharing short examples of my work. The first is from a project is called Her Pieces Live, A Revival of Art Songs by Women Composers. I am sharing our short video about an art song in German, “Laue Sommernacht,” written by the irrepressibly new woman of the 20thcentury, Alma Mahler. I am performing the soprano with an accompaniment track recorded by my collaborator and friend, Dr. Katharine Boyes. These pieces by women composers are not regularly taught inside the university and I am happy to share this video with you outside the university. I hope you enjoy it. 

“Nonetheless”—Another Collaboration

One of my former students from my time teaching at the California State Maximum Security Men’s Prison in Lancaster, California, is Daniel Whitlow. He is a formerly incarcerated husband, student, poet, and musician, who is dedicated to expressing himself, and also to helping others do the same. He has stayed in touch with me since having his life sentence commuted just over a year ago. We shared that “spirit flame” on a project we worked on together at the prison. We are sharing our poem with you about our belief that trauma is humanity’s shared story. Here is our collaborative piece, “Nonetheless,” co-written by Daniel and myself. 

How the Future Looks to Me from Outside the University Walls

Released from the corporate values and attitudes that poisoned and limited my work at the university, and with my eyes wide open to the work that must yet be done, I can now choose my projects and the colleagues with whom I work and create. I can now infuse each project and collaboration with positive energy, that “spirit flame,” understanding each other’s “tone” and working together towards “igniting inspiration and hope that can survive time’s ways.” The diversity and expanse of these projects I believe demonstrate how far I have gone—way outside my previous academic lane. In doing so, I now can belong to a wider community of poets, writers, musicians, artists, and academics, those who take powerful poetic steps to protect what is good, true, and right, both inside and outside the university.

[1] “Zen Bones Zen Flesh” by Paul Reps adapted by Jacky Sach in The Everything Zen. Everything Publisher, 2011.