Out of Print

Sing like there’s no tomorrow

February 20, 2011

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If you live in Southwest Kansas and you want to hear live opera, you’ll have to fill up the gas tank and drive four hours east to Wichita. Still you wouldn’t have known that over the past month, as high-pitched cries issued from the arts community when news filtered west from Topeka: the Kansas Arts Commission will be no more after June 30, 2011.

Newly installed Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback announced earlier this year that his proposed state budget would not be content to simply trim back on “unnecessary” expenses — it would erase some agencies, including the Kansas Arts Commission, altogether. Earlier this week, the House Appropriations Committee squashed a subcommittee attempt to reinstate the KAC.

“It’s not that we don’t like art,” one member said. “It’s just that we can’t afford it.”

I beg to differ.

For years, my household has politely passed on cable or satellite television. We rarely eat at restaurants, and we’ve learned to prefer interesting hand-me-down clothes to pricier, off-the-rack options. The money we save is used, instead, to pay for music lessons, instruments, and art supplies. Sometimes, when I contemplate the cost of a new set of cello strings, or the difference between cheap colored pencils and the pure-pigment Rembrandt Lyras I love, I can’t help but grimace. The arts cost money.

Yet I’ve never been able to convince myself that it makes more sense to hold onto the dollars at the expense of my children’s futures. It would be wrong to cheat them out of the chance to cultivate creativity, discipline and appreciation for the world around them, to prune away options that could grow and blossom into something that adds beauty and deep meaning to life itself.

History shows us there is never a time or place where the arts are unaffordable. Literature, visual art and music are as necessary a part of the human experience as food and shelter. In fact, when the physical basics are unavailable, it’s often these transcendent forces that enable a person to endure and triumph over hardship.

Take, for instance, the uniquely American music forms of blues and jazz. It’s the ultimate happy-and-sad music, swooping from brokenness to joy with an attitude no one can resist. Though the rhythms, chant structure and “blue note” harmonies can be traced to traditional African music, it wasn’t until the transplanted blacks in the South endured slavery that this new music was born. The songs did more than set a brisk work pace or mask groans. They enabled people to describe their circumstances, their heartache and their longings — and rise above the wrongness that comprised their everyday lives.

Low-income children today inhabit lives far superior to the lot of American slaves in former times. Still, they would benefit from some real music-making, in distinct contrast to the repetitive jangle of television noise and popular music that assaults us all, everywhere. Music, Plato observed 400 years before the birth of Christ, “is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” Liberal public school children are fortunate to receive vocal music instruction from elementary school onward; this is not an “extra” subject, separate from academics. It is a way for young minds to understand math, expression and discipline. It gives their souls a voice.

Jews who endured the Holocaust of World War II knew this. Removed from their homes, their professions and their families, prisoners assigned to work camps were sometimes ordered by their guards to chant and sing “cheerful” tunes as they labored. Often, they composed alternate words that heartened their companions by expressing subversive ideas and calling on Jehovah God to rescue them. Astonishingly, classical music, from instrumental solos to operatic productions, also flourished in some camps. The National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., documents the efforts of these remarkable musicians to create beauty amid unthinkable evil. The website’s online exhibit of concentration camp music, with recordings and photographs, is worth a visit: www.ushmm.org.

“For many victims of Nazi brutality,” the exhibit notes, “music was an important means of preserving and asserting their humanity.”

It also served as a historical record and a means of protest. Visual artists also employed their work as a way to speak out. This was long before the controversies more familiar to modern Americans, like debates about sacrilegious or pornographic art funded by public money. These painters took a stand for ideas like justice, peace and love. They were soundly vilified — sometimes killed — by the powers they opposed.

Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica,” which documents the bombing of a Basque city in Spain by Nazi planes in 1943, is considered the ultimate antiwar painting. Its creator was intimately familiar with the Nazi approach to the arts: use them for propaganda, or eliminate the dissenting voices. During the occupation of Paris, the Nazis ruthlessly identified and executed notable writers, artists and musicians. Picasso managed to walk the thin line between objection and collaboration, while some of his contemporaries, like painters Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti, managed to escape.

Later, Picasso was labeled a “degenerate Bolshevik,” as though socialist ideas explained his stubborn desire to express his response the world around him on canvas and paper. But socialists and communists were not friendly to art, either. During Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” in Communist China, musical instruments, paintings and literature were burned in public bonfires designed to intimidate and brainwash the populace. And in recent years, long-forgotten masterpieces have surfaced as the former U.S.S.R. reopens warehouses and facilities that were boarded up, forbidden by the Soviet regime, which feared freedom of thought, speech and artistic expression.

It’s clear that governments do not always make good friends for lovers of the arts, and it could be said that Kansas has reached a similar, if less dramatic place.

This does not mean an end to the arts. It means, however, that those of us who love them will be called upon to write, to paint, to sing and play, to dance and act. To prevail. If there’s no opera to attend in Wichita, let there be music in Liberal.

If slaves and Holocaust victims can make art, we have no excuse to give up when funds disappear.