Thou Shalt Suffer for Thine Art

An interesting article in the UK's Guardian online equivalent of a composer suing a reviewer for libel. (Actually, it's about a higher court overturning an earlier decision by a lower court that said the reviewer was libel.) It seems that Keith Burstein's opera, Manifest Destiny, presented in 2005 at Edinburgh, was disparaged by reviewer Veronica Lee in The Guardian. Burstein was incensed enough by some of the things said to take her and The Guardian to court.

The opera is about a young Palestinian woman training to be a suicide bomber (How does one "train" to be a suicide bomber?) whose cell leader falls in love with her and, to save her, turns her over to the Americans. Ms. Lee did not care for the subject matter, saying that the opera was "trite," glorified suicide bombers, and had an anti-American tone to it. Mr. Burstein took this to mean that he was anti-American and sympathetic to suicide bombers and--in this day and age of don't-you-never-be-dissin'-on-America--brought suit. The lower court had allowed the suit to go to trial; the jury found for Mr. Burstein, and he was awarded 8,000 pounds. The higher court overturned the ruling, ordering Burstein to repay the 8,000 plus an additional 80,000 of the defendant's legal costs. The judge said that, though the opera did have an anti-American tone, it was a matter of opinion (apparently, a brief one at that) and, as such, was protected by freedom of speech.

It would be interesting to posit whether here in America such a case would even go to trial. We have the First Amendment that pretty clearly keeps the press out of court, though it does happen. A recent example is the government suing the New York Times for an article leaking what was considered sensitive information. C'mon! How much more frivolous does the case in question seem compared to that?

Besides, composers have always been trying to push the public's buttons. That's the artist dream for ya! To push compositions (be they music or other media) to the cutting edge. To push the craft forward. Beethoven's later symphonies, particularly the Ninth, were much disparaged as being too far out. Stravinksy and Diaghilev caused a riot in Paris with Rite of Spring (but from all accounts they were ecstatic about the reaction). Imagine an almost-but-not-quite post-Victorian-era audience watching Strauss' Elektra and Salome. The Met had to close Salome after one night; Elektra's dissonances garnered cartoons of Strauss directing an orchestra of animals. (Some things don't change. For the record, when KO did Salome a few years back, I think there were more people on stage and in the pit than were in the audience.) Then there's my favorite, Charlie Ives, poor guy. He endured a lifetime of ridicule and was an old man before 20th century music "caught up" to things he'd written in the 1890s.

Don't think that we performers get off easy, either. We have to suffer for our art. While our non-music friends in college were partying on Cumberland Avenue and looking forward to six-figure offers on graduation, we were in dark, dank, dusty practice rooms or pouring over a crumbling score in a two-foot cubicle in the music library. Someday, perhaps, we would find a town that would allow us to eke out a living on a music-derived salary, or perhaps we have another career area we can survive on while plying our craft. "You sing opera?! Amazing! I didn't know Knoxville had an opera company?" could just as easily be "You juggle cats?! Amazing! I didn't know Knoxville had cat jugglers?"

Yet we composers, performers, painters, sculptors, what have you... We continue on unabated.

Take me for example: My senior year in high school I had an extra period open so I took freshman French and did fairly well in it. Upon graduation, I told my mom that I was going to go to UT and pursue a career in music, to which she replied, "But what about your French?" And it wasn't like she was ignorant. Her brother was a famous jazz and classical musician and college band director in Chattanooga! When I got out of school--both times--I could've been a band director or direct a church's music program, but I elected to ply my performance craft and find some kind of job to put food on the table: air conditioner salesman, clerk, word processor, ticket counter, data programmer. One day I had a revelation. What if I just kept on doing what I was doing? Working a regular, full-time, salaried-but-not-high-paying job by day and singing at night and on the weekends? Would my life change significantly? Well, yes. I'd be making enough money to get a car, rent an apartment, and have an occasional dinner at P.F. Chang's. Duh! As the Steve Miller Band opined, "Go on, take the money and run!"

And so it goes. Here I am, at another crossroads of my career, developing a different area of my talents in order to survive. But I don't intend to give up music! If that means working at Sears again, then so be it. You gotta do what you love and you gotta do what you have to. If those things aren't the same, well, then so be it. Oh sure, I've thought about "retiring" from singing--more and more as I get older and those easy high As aren't as easy as they used to be. But that's a ways off, if at all. They'll have to pry the photocopy of the choruses in La Boheme from my cold... dead... hand!

Suffer on.