Foundations For Young Artists

You've probably heard it said, too: "Boy, this butter tastes better than margarine!" Some people have never tried the original, so they make judgements by the knock-offs. This is backward and, unfortunately, the way so many young artists in our culture base their opinions these days. It's true with every genre of art, and life in general.

Brenda led me to an interesting blog post recently, chronicling a meeting between author Ian Morgan Cron and the great composer/musician Rob Mathes in a Connecticut Starbucks. They were stunned when their attention was averted toward the background music coming from the overhead speakers:

“Do you hear that?” Rob said, his expression darkening. 

“Hear what?” I said. “Listen,” he said, glaring at the white speaker grilles above our heads. “Do you know that song?” 

I closed my eyes and strained to hear the music over the hiss and gurgle of milk being steamed for someone’s cappuccino. I shrugged. “Nope,” I said. “I can’t make it out."

Rob threw his hands up in the air. “That’s a cut off Miles Davis record Kind of Blue,” he said, his voice rising with indignation. 

“Alright,” I said. “Apparently this bothers you.”
“It’s Miles Davis!" he said, slapping the tabletop with his hand.

I’ve known Rob for 30 years. He’s talented. He’s smart. He’s not afraid to speak his mind.

“When brilliant compositions are used for background music it desensitizes people to their genius,” he continued.

I paused. “You mean familiarity breeds contempt?” I said.

“Precisely. If an amazing piece of music is constantly playing in the background your admiration for it doesn’t increase, it diminishes. It becomes no big deal,” Rob said, imitating someone trying to speak and yawn at the same time.

What we expose our children to, many times, is a weak (to say it mildly) version of the original. My objections to the classical education I was being fed in my first round of college became an epiphany when I started my second, more serious, round as a married 25-year-old. I saw that a classical education brought me back to the origins of great art, music and literature--with a proper historical context--to which all other great creative work is traced.

In a Fast Company website interview by Rick Tetzeli, director Martin Scorsese talks about how to lead a creative life and how to pass the torch to younger generations:

"At this point," says Scorsese, "I find that the excitement of a young student or filmmaker can get me excited again. I like showing them things and seeing how their minds open up, seeing the way their response then gets expressed in their own work."

"His biggest teaching project these days is his 12-year-old daughter, Francesca. He's trying to give her a cultural foundation that seems less readily available these days. "I'm concerned about a culture where everything is immediate and then discarded," he says. "I'm exposing her to stuff like musicals and Ray Harryhausen spectaculars, Frank Capra films. I just read her a children's version of The Iliad. I wanted her to know where it all comes from. Every story, I told her, every story is in here, The Iliad."

"Three months ago," he remembers, gesturing to the room around us, "I had a screening here for the family. Francesca had responded to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, so I decided to try It Happened One Night. I had kind of dismissed the film, which some critics love, of course, but then I realized I had only seen it on a small screen, on television. So I got a 35-millimeter print in here, and we screened it. And I discovered it was a masterpiece. The way Colbert and Gable move, their body language. It's really quite remarkable!"

We must take our children and students back to the originals, to study them and discover what makes them so great. That's why I like to see the look on a kid's face when he hears a stellar vintage guitar though a great tube amp, or a vocalist's performance through a classic microphone and preamp. We must teach the next generation that a promising artistic future springs from an understanding of the great work that came before them--to learn from the best and stop trying to imitate the cheap, margarine knock-offs.