Open are the double doors of the horizon; unlocked are its bolts
Akhnaten, Act 1 Prelude
My parents, like so many lower middle-class parents of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, worked quite diligently from my birth to secure class mobility for their children, as routed through a college degree. Two of the more prominent encouragements (forgive them, Lord, they knew not what they did) were a love of reading and exposure to classical music. I’m grateful for it, but this approach means that, as for so many from my background, acculturation was not simply something good on its own, but a means to an end — something inextricably tied up with material advancement.
My real connection with classical music grew only with exposure to that most potent water of higher education. An uncommonly large stable of college friends majoring or minoring in classical performance expanded my horizons. Graduate work in Boston granted me access to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s truly excellent College Card program, which facilitated the production of taste — wandering Massachusetts Ave. in tears after a “sound-unheard” performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony put the nail in the coffin for Baroque anything, for me. Almost as importantly, grad school provided the gear that connected music and reading through the magic of critique. Reading about Modernism unlocked the key to enjoying previously inaccessible works by Scriabin and Schoenberg; debates with a professor about Austrians versus Britons gave me Britten.
The ramifications of this cultural development were brought home recently as I was (futilely) working on a dissertation chapter. My soundtrack was Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten. With its libretto partially in ancient Egyptian and its score dominated by the composer’s characteristic repetition, I took a moment to ask who the fuck would actually like this.
I do, of course.
The exhaustive repetition, periodic out-of-place catharsis, and the countertenor title role are all useful for a meditative writing practice — but also create a work that, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, for better or worse, reveals its beauty more easily to a trained audience. A far cry from liking only the “loud parts” of Nutcracker, but that’s life.
Or, that’s aggressive acculturation. After years of concerted work — cultural, personal, intellectual — unimaginable vistas were open to me. Not bad for a boy from Fresno who liked to read and could sit through Beethoven without squirming too much.
There is, however, a cost, and one that I ignored for too long at my own peril. Alienation was the first sign, as it so often is. The training that opens up High Culture (and for that matter High Theory) to enjoyment, at least for those not born into creative or academic families, carries a nefarious side. While perhaps never outrightly stated, it is clear to someone wishing to be welcomed on the inside, but standing on the outside, that part of proper acculturation is a determined need to performatively like This and not That, coupled with a gnostic sense of enlightened-insiders-versus-barbarians-at-the-gate.
One disagreement with family over what movie to see escalated into a yelling fight pitched between “Why can’t you just enjoy things?!” and (I’m deeply ashamed to say) “Adorno says!” Is vocally hating Disney really worth ruining Christmas (or even good praxis, for that matter)?
That challenge was overcome by my eventually developing a more nuanced understanding of critique, but this isn’t the kind of solution that will work again and again. However, sitting here, staring down an academic career that will never develop, I am again forced to consider how to make things better. With no easy answer, the question remains: how do I continue enjoying the things that academia has given me without being in academia? How does the cellist continue playing when it’s clear nobody will pay them for it? The all too facile answer that Important Things matter qua themselves is not so easy for those of us whose class origins mean that money and culture are forever consciously linked. When the alienation is coming from both sides and the painstaking acquisition of culture was for naught, where do we go? Too late to hang up the minimalism, for better or worse.
Two first steps at least seem clear. Move to understand the false promises as false promises — elitism was and never will be salvation, personal or otherwise, and it’s necessary to look elsewhere now. At the same time, understand that the beauty the Guardians of Knowledge and Culture used to illustrate those promises is still beauty, and they can’t take it away from you. My dissertation may be the last time I write for academia, but giving up the “Hymn to Aten” would just be letting the bastards win on top of everything else.
