When I was a young boy, my mother kept a hymnal on our piano left open to “The Old Rugged Cross,” her father’s favorite hymn. My grandfather died when Mom was pregnant with me, so, I never met him. Whenever my mother played that hymn, I heard a ghost. My grandfather was gone; the hymn remained. 

From all accounts, my grandfather was a larger than life presence, irrepressibly optimistic and friendly to all. Most versions on record treat his favorite hymn like a funeral dirge, which might be why I’ve never liked “The Old Rugged Cross” that much. Alan Jackson’s “Cross,” for example, is slow and low, cut with overwrought production that makes it sound like background music for a Precious Moments outlet store.

Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard use “The Old Rugged Cross,” presumably, to play against type and showcase their profundity, and even Ella Fitzgerald bathes us in languor. Of the numerous versions that take this sad-sack approach, George Jones’ is the best (that guy can really sell a sad song).

There are performers who use “The Old Rugged Cross” to celebrate the gift of Jesus’ resurrection, as opposed to mourning his death, and they are refreshing.

Ernest Tubb, who recorded the hymn in 1949, plays “The Old Rugged Cross” as a Texas country waltz, and maintains his trademark phrasing and vocal timbre. His version transports you to a dance hall in Tennessee in the early days after World War II. By evoking the sensuality and humanity of a social dance, Tubb places Jesus squarely into the middle of our daily life. Thinking about Jesus is for all times, even at the Saturday night dance.

Mahalia Jackson uses a more overt, bouncy waltz tempo and combines it with a Black gospel feel. Her singing soars as she molds the melody into something that lets her climb high, instead of wallowing in her lower range. This “Old Rugged Cross” is, in a manner similar to Tubb’s, celebratory and cathartic.  

Tubbs and Jackson perform “The Old Rugged Cross” as I hope my grandfather would liked to have heard it, as a paean to hope. For me, they offer a chance to interpret the hymn not as a spectral reminder of the grandfather I never had, but as a bond between him and me that we never had in life.

“But even more shocking to me is there will be no American leading an American orchestra”–Marin Alsop, Washington Post, May 23, 2021

Back in May, in an article about her departure from the Baltimore Symphony as music director, Marin Alsop cast aside questions about the need for more women conductors–an issue she certainly takes seriously–to raise the alarm on the dearth of Americans helming of our own stateside bands.

She’s right to be concerned.

Earlier this month, the Houston Symphony announced that Slovakian Juraj Valčuha would be its next music director when Colombian Andrés Orozco-Estrada steps down next season. This leaves the top 13 orchestras in the US with a total of zero American music directors. Only one, the New York Philharmonic’s Jaap van Zweden, studied in the US.

The situation in so-called second-tier orchestras–second only in budget size; some of the most exciting orchestras fall in this category–in smaller markets is scarcely different. The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, for example, recently announced it was replacing Smugtown’s own Ward Stare with German Andreas Delfs. Large or small, orchestras in our country seem to have an aversion to hiring from within their own country.

From Bernstein on, the US has developed a string of great and distinctive conductors who have done remarkable things with orchestras large and small, leaders like Michael Tilson Thomas, JoAnn Falletta, Gerard Schwartz, Alan Gilbert, and, indeed, Alsop, to name only a few. It’s a shame that this tradition is not continuing today.

The news that America’s vaccine rollout has stumbled is horrible news, of course, for all of us and especially for our most vulnerable citizens. The effective distribution of the vaccine is essential to save lives and get our economy back to normal speed. It’s becoming more and more clear that within the culture industry, without the vaccine, we won’t be able to get things started at all.

Throughout the pandemic, research firm WolfBrown has been surveying audiences across the country and in Ontario, Canada, on their attitudes toward returning to cultural activities. In his most recent executive briefing, Principal Alan Brown points out that 42% of his December respondents said that they will resume only after they’ve been vaccinated, up from 35% in November. Another 16% will only go out when the rate of infection is near zero (only possible with a vaccine). In Los Angeles, 32% will wait to ensure the vaccine works, and 40% will wait to see how the vaccine affects infection rates.

Consultant Coleen Dilenschneider sees increased plans to attend cultural institutions in the new year as a sign that the news of the vaccine is giving people hope. According to her research, 59% interviewed in November plan on attending within the coming year, which is up from the 51% pre-pandemic number from November 2019. While it still means that we can expect a tough first quarter, Dilenschneider does believe her numbers reveal that people can see the end and are responding positively. Or, as Imax CEO Richard Gelfond put it, “No one had a time frame before. The announcement puts bookends on in (sic)” for his industry and the 30% of movie goers who say they won’t return without a vaccine. Of course, the slower the vaccine gets out there, the further away that final bookend gets.

Brown makes it clear that the culture industry needs to push the issue, now that the vaccine is available, and act as public health adjuncts, educating people and advocating for mass vaccinations of their cities’ populations. If not, according to Brown, “half of you (the arts executives who receive his reports) are going to be gone in a year or two.”

Many culture workers are already gone, left without work due to the coronavirus. In a recent New York Times article, Patricia Cohen cited National Endowment for the Arts data showing that 52% of our country’s actors, 55% of its dancers, and 27% of its musicians were all out of work. According to the Motion Picture Association, 125,000 movie theater workers and 170,000 movie cast members and crew are not working due to the coronavirus.

From a public-health standpoint, we should remember that the vaccine, on its own, won’t stop the virus in the short term. Cultural leaders are going to need to remind audiences of that as we start opening up, and they are going to have to work with venues to ensure everyone takes the proper precautions. That said, the key factor in getting the industry up and running is the vaccine; the industry should do all it can to move the vaccination drive forward, especially now that we are (yet again) moving more slowly than is optimal.

When I heard the news today that Donald Trump pardoned the four Blackwater contractors who murdered at least 14 people–including two children–outside the Green Zone in Baghdad in 2007, the first thing I thought of was the DeVos Institute.

Back in 2010, Michael Kaiser and the Kennedy Center secured major funding for their performing-arts consulting firm from the Dicky and Betsy DeVos Foundation, giving the family naming rights. It moved in 2014 from its Kennedy Center home to the University of Maryland, but it keeps offices in DC. According to its website, the DeVos Institute has provided consulting and training to over 1,000 organizations in over 80 countries.

None of that really has anything to do with Trump’s pardon, except a name: Betsy DeVos, who is the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, and the man who made all the murder possible. It’s funny how free association works, because after reading of the pardon, I thought of the DeVos Institute, and then I thought of those two young children who died in Baghdad in 2007 thanks to the employees of Betsy DeVos’s brother, those kids are gone, for good. Now, whenever I hear about DeVos Institute going forward, I’ll be thinking about the murder of little children.

You might say that this is going a little too far, but one of the reasons why it’s so easy for me to think of the pardon as something I’d associate with the DeVos Institute is that there’s a general haze of malfeasance and evil surrounding the name. There are the young people struggling with student loan debt who were harangued by one of DeVos’s companies, or her psychiatric hospitals that institutionalized people unnecessarily so that they could collect the Medicare and Medicaid, or the hospital she owned where an elderly man was stomped to death while in its care.

As secretary of education, she’s provided protections for those who commit sexual assault and misconduct on college campuses, done everything she could to defund public education, and emboldened loan holders. On her way out the door, she’s incited education department employees to disobey the incoming administration. She’s shown loyal support for a traitorous president and his cronies (well, she’s one those cronies, I guess), and has supported the far-right through the Michigan Freedom Fund, which helped organize and promote last summer’s protests in Michigan.

The people that give to organizations matter. What they do and how they conduct themselves becomes as much about you and your organization as it does about them. Their moral ineptitude is yours; their sins are yours. In the recent past, we’ve seen organizations, some under duress, push donors away due to their ties to nefarious or socially destructive activities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art refused money from the Sacklers, who are largely responsible for the opioid epidemic, and the Whitney Museum forced Warren Kanders to quit its board due to his company’s production of tear gas. Surely, Betsy DeVos has enough baggage that the Institute bearing her name should at least contemplate an alternative moniker. Until they do, I’ll be over here, thinking bout her brother, his (now former) company, and the havoc it unleashed back in Baghdad when these young men killed twelve people for no reason.

In a recent editorial, Washington Post theatre critic Peter Marks calls for the Joe Biden administration to create a secretary of arts and culture position (subscription may be required) as a way to give the field a “seat at the table” in federal decision making. Anyone who works in the legacy arts hears some version of this argument at least once a month, dropped into conversations about how hard it is to raise money or sell tickets. Most people don’t really contemplate what deep federal involvement would entail, so Marks should be commended for thinking through his case. Unfortunately, that case is ultimately unconvincing, and it becomes clear as you read Marks’s essay that a department of arts and culture is a horrible idea.

Marks shows us that arts and culture are “ailing” in the United States with a list of other countries that have national arts and culture departments. This litany is supposed to shame us into believing that by denying our country a federal overseer of culture we are starving the field, but a closer look shows us that the United States comes off pretty well. According to Marks, the arts and culture industry accounts for $877 billion of our economy, which is 4.5% of our GDP. By comparison, Canada’s culture industry is only 2.7% of GDP, and culture makes up only 3% of the global economy. Clearly, as an economic activitiy, our culture is outperforming.

The bulk of Marks’s essay is taken up by the words of notable personages within the arts used to make his case for him. Henry Timms, the head of Lincoln Center, links the arts to Bidens’s campaign, saying, “‘(if) you think of the three major promises the new administration has made … all cannot be made without the [input] of the arts.'” Those three promises, according to Timms, are to facilitate unity, generate respect around the world (for the US, presumably), and foster diversity. I don’t know what world Timms lives in–I do, actually: he’s the CEO of Lincoln Center–but everything I’ve seen over the last four years shows me that creating an entirely new federal department, with a cabinet-level secretary, simply to help a newly elected President demonstrate his ability to accomplish three very vague goals strikes me as a little authoritarian. If Trump had set up a secretary of culture to fulfill his promise to MAGA, most of us would have been rightly outraged.

I also don’t buy that a secretary of culture would help fulfill those promises anyway, as we haven’t seen arts and culture generating much unity or goodwill lately. Practically monthly we see another article, book, radio show, or Twitter hashtag decrying racism and classicism in legacy arts like opera and orchestral music, and for a number of years its been well known that women are woefully absent from positions of power within the commercial music industry. Leaving aside the behind-the-scenes stuff, how we practice and consume culture defines us, and differentiates us from others. The music we make and listen to and the art we hang on our walls, the shows we watch on TV and the books we read, even the cars we drive (if we have them) and the clothes we wear, they all place us in relation to some group or class, and that creates difference. We can bridge those gaps, but we can’t pretend that art is some magical balm to fill them in. In some cases, it just makes it worse.

Michael Kaiser is pulled into Marks’s argument to speculate that the lack of a federal cultural department could be due to the Puritans, “who thought music and dance were evil.” Whether that’s true or not (it’s not), a reason to keep the federal government from playing more of a role in our lives than it already does today is the First Amendment. The United States is predicated on the idea that the federal government stays out of our way when it comes to cultural expression, be it through religion, speech, the press, or public assembly. One could argue this is the central theme running through our national cultural life, despite the seemingly endless contradictions and conflicts that arise within it.

Do we really want a top-down, federal agency responsible to the President having undue influence on our freedoms? Individual states, counties, and municipalities do a fine job of this already. They provide support to their cultural economies by providing venues (such as the Los Angeles County’s Music Center), educational institutions (such as the North Carolina School of the Arts), and grants. Some also conduct research that helps us to better understand the cultural landscape around us, as can be seen by the work that the Los Angeles County’s Department of Arts and Culture has done over the past few years. That’s more than enough government involvement in culture we need.

We know that economic stability and educational attainment are the two consistent markers of cultural audiences, regardless of ethnicity or other characteristics, so if our federal government really wants to help us practice our culture, there is couple of things it can do. First, it can solve the problem of economic inequality in this country, and get money in people’s pockets (it’s hard to want to play guitar when you’re supine on the ground with a boot on your neck). Second, it can make it easier for people to educate themselves, as artists or otherwise. Doing both of these things mean taxing rich people, which most high-art non-profit leaders will not like, because those rich people give their organizations money, making them look like heroes. In the long run, though, increased investment in the the economy and education will pay dividends by creating future generations of confident, healthy, inquisitive Americans who will become active cultural participants and practitioners.

Last week, the LA Opera announced it would be going back into Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in September with a full season of shows. In the statement on its website, the LA Opera only briefly addressed the threat of COVID-19, confident that the creation and effective distribution of a vaccine would make such worries a thing of the past:

“And we’re confident thunderous applause will fill the walls of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion next September. Why? There’s promising news of viable vaccine options on multiple fronts (plus 2020 will be long gone).” 

It makes a certain amount of sense to assume that the virus will be well under control by September. Pfizer has applied to the FDC for emergency approval on its vaccine and the company Moderna also has a vaccine in the works. Anthony Fauci recently told the USA Today editorial board that front-line healthcare workers and vulnerable populations could get the vaccine as early as January, and the general public could start receiving it in April. Surely, by September, we’ll start seeing the positive effects of the vaccine and begin to return to normal. Right?

Not so fast! Having a vaccine and being able to properly distribute it are two different things. Getting the vaccine into people’s arms will require coordination between federal, state, and local governments, nonprofit organizations, and private companies. Nothing we’ve seen up to now should give us any confidence that these entities can work smoothly together. All of these entities also need money to do what they do, which is in short supply right now. And, of course, there are large groups of people who are either reluctant to get the vaccine without seeing how it works first, or who won’t get it at all, slowing up the entire process for everyone.

Health experts like Fauci also warn that we will need to continue to act like the virus is around after we’ve been vaccinated, continuing to wear masks in public, practice social distancing, and avoid large crowds of people (such as the relatively large crowds at operas, perhaps?). The vaccine may only mitigate the effects of the virus—think of how the flu shot makes you “less sick” than if you had never gotten it—or may not work at all in some people. It’s hard to know. Virologist David Ho expects that we will need to continue our prophylactic practices “for much of 2021.”

When you look at all the steps involved, all the roadblocks to overcome, in distributing the vaccine to the point where people can feel safe, returning safely and comfortably to an opera house by September is no sure thing. The LA Opera is certainly not the only organization who has blithely announced its return to full-scale, full-attendance productions in the fall: the Metropolitan Opera has done so, as has Los Angeles’s Center Theatre Group (which begins in late August). All of them should be aware of the risks of not being straight with patrons about what a fall 2021 event will look like, if it happens at all. They should inform their audiences now about procedures, such as mask wearing, they may need to follow and safety protocols that may need to be in place. Communicating realistically about what our future could be doesn’t make organizations look like buzzkills, it provides peace of mind for audience members by making a murky, uncertain future look as realistic and vivid as possible.

Last weekend, my wife and I watched Orchestrating Change, a documentary about the Me2/Orchestra, a Burlington, Vermont, group comprising people living with mental illness. I came across the Me2/Orchestra about a year ago, when I was looking into organizations that advocate for the mentally ill, so I knew what it does and whom it serves. What I got out of the documentary was an in-depth understanding of the Me2 members. Their individual stories were funny, touching, and harrowing, and the importance of the Me2/Orchestra is apparent throughout.

The Me2/Orchestra was founded in 2011 by Ronald Braunstein and his now-wife Caroline Whiddon, a year after he was fired as the head of the Vermont Youth Orchestra (Whidden was at the time the executive director of that group). No doubt, Braunstein’s bipolar disorder contributed to his dismissal, as it had in previous jobs since his diagnosis in 1985. In Orchestrating Change, Braunstein tells these stories with surprisingly good humor, but the hurt is there on the screen, and the viewer feels it. When Braunstein recalls how he received no support from his agent after disclosing his illness, you can sense the disappointment in his voice, decades later.

Helplessness in the face of others’ reactions is a theme that pops up again in the documentary when bassist Dylan tells us that it’s easier and less shameful to tell people he’s a drug addict than mentally ill. Later, Dylan gets arrested while in the midst of an episode, but his case is dismissed because he is deemed incompetent. The implication is clear: in the mind of the judge, someone with mental illness is incapable of making his own decisions; he is no better than a two-year-old.

There are lot of heartwarming stories too, reminding us that those with mental illness can rise above their conditions and people’s perceptions. We don’t hear about it until the credits, but violist Alana-Bethany has a full life that includes being a figure skater. Corey Sweeney, interviewed in a 2016 story on Me2, goes back graduate school for oboe performance toward the end of the documentary; today, she runs her own business making oboe reeds. Despite his problems with the law, Dylan returns for the concert that is the climax of the movie in a touching reunion with his bandmates. For Dylan, as for musicians like Alana-Bethany and Corey, the Me2/Orchestra is home base to which they can return at any time, no matter what has happened in the past, and judgement-free zone where they can recuperate and grow.

Of course, the formation and growth of the Me2/Orchestra is the most inspirational story told in Orchestrating Change. The final concert I mention above was a performance that brought together the original Vermont Me2/Orchestra with a satellite group from Boston. There are also orchestras in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Portland, Oregon, and plans to start a group in Portland, Maine. It appears that Braunstein’s dream, born of a desire to de-stigmatize mental illness, is a full-fledged phenomenon.