Sequenza21

Last Thursday, the NEA funding increases survived three hostile amendments in the House and ultimately made it through to approval unscathed.  The most hostile of the amendments, offered by Doub Lamborn (R-CO), would have eliminated funding for the NEA, and was defeated 97-335.  Of those 97 yes votes, 3 were Democrats: Gene Taylor of Mississippi, Ike Skelton of Missouri, and Jim Matheson of Utah.  The Republicans were split roughly 50/50, with 94 ayes and 104 nays.  The closest vote was for the Bishop amendment to move $31.6 Million from the NEA to the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, National Parks, and the Forest Service.  The 156-270 defeat was a 114 vote margin (i.e. 57 people changing their vote from nay to aye would have resulted in a tie.).

Interestingly, the Bishop amendment was the first offered.  The Brown-Waite amendment to remove the NEA increase outright was offered and defeated by a wider margin (137-285) the following day.  The Lamborn amendment was the second-to-last amendment offered, at a point when one imagines that Lamborn knew it had no chance of passage, which leads me to suspect that it was simple posturing rather than a serious threat.  NEA support seems strong, overall, and I am encouraged for the bill’s prospects in the Senate.  Furthermore, this increase has gotten relatively little media coverage, which probably means that the media doesn’t consider it a controversial or otherwise interesting issue.  Given the extent to which the NEA has historically served as a proxy for conservative frustrations with the government, that the nation seems to see this funding increase as routine and unremarkable is probably a good sign for those of us who support a robust NEA.

One of my dearest friends and a neighbor of many years died this afternoon.  He was a lifelong bachelor who had lost most of the hearing in both ears when an anti-tank gun fired while he was crawling under it in France during World War II when he was 19.  He went on to become a respected man of science, a cancer researcher, and a well-known skeptic of alternative medicine.  He had no tolerance for miracle cures and especially hated those who sold hope to the hopeless with their promises of blood transfers and shark skin enemas and other exotic cures.  He was not warm and cuddly and he didn’t have a lot of friends and I was one of them.  I saw him today about a half hour before he died but the last time we connected was on Thursday, just before he went into that final morpheus cloud.  I was talking to him when he suddenly opened his eyes–for the first time in several days–and squeezed my hand.  His eyes said:  “Don’t be afraid.  It’s not that big a deal.  It’s just science.”  

Peter Maxwell Davies let loose some fightin’ words a few months ago at the annual meeting of Britain’s Incorporated Society of Musicians. Music education has been unavailable in schools for two generations; the hegemony of commercial music is unchecked; and students now graduate high school with vocabularies insufficient to express the complexity of experience. Surprised? It’s all the same trend. Let’s start teaching kids to notate music, sing Palestrina, and go to new music concerts. (So Max.)

A related personal anecdote: Around the same time Davies was giving this speech, I asked the faculty of the Harvard Music Department if the declining standards of musical literacy were affecting their tasks as music educators. They didn’t seem to think so.