In my late twenties I came to the conclusion that composers of art music are museum pieces. What we do — write chamber and orchestral music — is an anachronism, an activity whose meaning was defined in another time and reality. Since our work provides no one with power and generates no wealth, it has no application in the modern world. I often said aloud back then that I should have been born a hundred years earlier. While my career as a composer probably would have been a busier, more consistent one a hundred years ago, less filled with “secondary” activities (such as earning a living in the business world), I feel differently now. At least, a little differently.

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We live in an age when human beings seem to be returning to the medieval concept of plundering the next village as a means of gaining wealth — or, having been plundered, exacting revenge. The United States has traditionally been regarded as a land where all hard-working people have an equal chance at prosperity, and where we enjoy the constitutionally-guaranteed power to choose our own government. But now we find ourselves with a government that makes policy in the interests of the ethereally wealthy to the near total exclusion of the greater good, while the remaining not-so-wealthy of us are beginning to realize (if there was ever any doubt) that even simple prosperity is not a right. The current generation of young middle-class adults is probably the first in our country’s history that will have a lower standard of living than its parents’ generation had.

Our village has been plundered. Is there revenge to be had? Before the 2000 election the answer would have been yes: at the voting booth. But as we discovered in that election, our Supreme Court can overrule our decision and deliver to us a government of its own choosing.* In the face of all this, I think it’s inevitable that we’ll start shifting our cultural priorities toward preserving what we have, toward survival. To the extent that our culture needs the Arts to survive as well, things look bad.

It’s often argued that the Arts are always susceptible to economics, we’re in a dire situation now, but the pendulum will eventually swing back. That is, of course, unless someone stops the clock altogether. Consider that last year, here in New Jersey, Governor James McGreevey openly declared war on the Arts when he proposed permanently shutting down the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and completely eliminating funding of the Arts in general. His own spokesperson said in a prepared statement, “It's hard to justify hanging a picture on the wall when you can't put food on the table.” When influential liberal Democrats start uttering the same kind of vulgar prevarications we hear on a regular basis from the far right, the Arts are in very deep trouble, indeed.

An even more grim development for the future is that music and art continue to disappear from the public school curriculum in spite of being declared a core subject by the “No Child Left Behind” education reform bill signed into law by President Bush two years ago [click here to see a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article on the subject]. This comes as no shock, of course, to those of us who wondered how schools were supposed to realize these reforms without supplementary funding. In spite of solid evidence that a strong Arts curriculum improves test scores in other subjects, what money there is goes to those other subjects first. Arts programs have always been a last-hired-and-first-fired affair in our public schools, so their reinstatement in those schools where they’ve been eliminated is unlikely any time soon. Consequently these children are growing up with no reference points from which they might later choose to support or participate in the Arts.

So, in spite of lip-service to the contrary, the Arts are being indisputably and deliberately plundered. What’s a museum piece to do? What will our revenge look like? Should we run through the streets calling out “Composers of the world, unite?” It might be fun, but almost certainly fruitless. I believe there is only one thing we can do that truly makes a difference.

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In an article I wrote at the request of the MacDowell Colony [see Remaining Disarmed] I said that we, as composers at the start of the twenty-first century, need to turn to our gut more often in our work, to our brains less often, and make an effort to look our audience in the eye from time to time. As the artist, you are the true target of your audience’s interest, after all, and the work you create is the invitation to come closer, to look deeper, to ask what you mean, what your purpose is. When your work motivates listeners to do those things, you have successfully communicated with them. Even if they don’t connect to you in the end, you’ve still accomplished your task.

How do we do this as artists who live in a time when we are faced almost on a daily basis with our own irrelevance? I know that not everyone feels the same as I do on this point, and those who do not will be encouraged to know that I no longer wish I’d been born a hundred years earlier. I’ve since decided that my role as a museum piece very much matters in the here and now. I believe we have to continue being museum pieces, and with a vengeance: wonderful, powerful museum pieces who face down our cultural irrelevance by engaging in the Creative Act anyway and yelling about it at the top of our lungs. Still, it’s very easy to become discouraged.

When things become difficult for me and I start doubting my power and purpose as an artist, there is a personal gospel I return to: The Creative Act is a joyous imperative and its own reward. It is a belief I formulated over several years, originally as a hedge against the sense of being a museum piece. But I’ve since come to realize that it stands on its own pretty well as a description of being an “Artist” in the purest sense. Especially in this day and age, why else would I continue doing what I do if it were not an imperative, something unavoidable, irresistible? And when I look at the Creative Act as an ongoing and permanent process — rather than a single activity that produces a work that either succeeds or fails — I realize that the Act lives at my core and enlightens me, and at that moment, for at least a moment, I am very happy to be an artist, regardless of what becomes of me and my work.

So, with apologies to George Herbert: The Creative Act is the best revenge. It is our own kind of civil disobedience. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back the other way, eventually. As difficult as things seem at the moment, it’s worth keeping another George Herbert quote in mind: “Every mile is two in winter.”