Orchestra as Network

Orchestra as Network

Team Members

Ernest Hogan
Ashley Lauren Frith
Loki Karuna
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Illustrated by Shachi Kale

Doula

by Ernest Hogan

The file opens with static. 03380, the investigator, appears, head hidden behind a huge mask. The image is distorted by video filters.

“It’s happening again.”

The voice is also distorted into an electronic growl.

“I’m trying to work! Leave me alone!”

03380 laughs; the masked head shakes.

“As if you’d listen to me, whoever you are. You’re probably trying to prevent me from doing this job.”

Jump cut.

“I was going to cut that out, but you need to see that. Just an example of how difficult this job is, and why it’s been taking so long. This…I don’t know what to call it. Like the incident, event, whatever…. Maybe I should start at the beginning.”

A group of musicians play a piece on clarinet, flute, and oboe, with percussion on the clave.

“All these instruments are made from the wood of the grenadilla tree, also known as African blackwood or m’pingo.”

Fade into a still of a grenadilla tree.

“Due to climate change, and destruction of the savannahs of Tanzania, Mozambique, and Kenya in the last decade’s devastating mega-firestorms, the grenadilla has become extinct.”

Lap dissolve back to the musicians. One by one, the instruments disappear, causing their part of the music to cease.

“This could mean the end of a lot of music.”

The musicians fade away, leaving a white void and silence.

Cut to the Globotilla™ tree, its leaves and branches swaying in the breeze.

“Fortunately, Globot’s research division discovered another tree in an undisclosed part of Madagascar where the climate and environment has changed radically over the past few years.”

Music starts playing.

“Instruments crafted from its wood sound like those made from the grenadilla.”

The sound and image become a quick flash of static.

Lap dissolve back to the musicians. They have instruments that look new, with a slightly lighter color of wood.

“Globot purchased the land where the tree grows, to protect and steward its natural ecosystem. We named it Globotilla™, securing all rights to the tree, its DNA, and the wood.”

Lap dissolve through a series of close-ups of each musician playing their instrument.

“Globot is now the exclusive manufacturer of the traditional instruments using Globotilla™ wood.”

Close-up of the musician on clarinet.

“And dare we say, some even swear the sound is better.”

The clarinetist winks.

“Globot has also developed a new instrument, based on the Aztec teponaztli.”

Cut to a musician holding mallets over a wooden drum, about to play, but then the image freezes.

“It produces a sound like nothing else, but we won’t reveal that quite yet. Because we are saving it for a special, worldwide event.”

Cut to live feed of the Earth from a low orbit.

“Globot is also proud to announce that we will sponsor the first worldwide concert, played online by an orchestra spread all over the planet. The newly formed Globot Planetary Orchestra will play selections of beloved classical pieces and will premiere a new full-length symphony using instruments made exclusively from Globotilla™ wood, composed and conducted by Cathartx for this event.”

Headshot of Cathartx, dark-skinned, nonbinary, with a shaved head and lipstick, wearing a large bow tie. They begin speaking, revealing that what seemed to be a photograph was actually a close-up. Cathartx has a talent for preternatural stillness.

“I’m really excited about this piece. I feel it’s revolutionary. I may finally have achieved my dream of decolonializing orchestral music and laying the foundation for the classical music of the future.”

Lap dissolve to the Globot logo of a cartoon globe with a robotic face. It winks.

“On March 29, Madagascar’s Martyrs’ Day, a celebration of the uprising against French colonialism in 1947, you will be able to experience the symphony live in your own home, or at one of many group listening stations where participating musicians will perform. These stations will have speakers in geodesic domes to provide a 3D sonic experience. Cathartx, the composer, will conduct virtually from Antananarivo, Madagascar, while members of the orchestra will play live from a group of cities threatened by rising sea levels, including Bangkok, Thailand; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; the Welsh capital, Cardiff; New Orleans, in the United States; Manila, Philippines; London, in the United Kingdom; Shenzhen, China; Hamburg, Germany; Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates; and even on the new Globot space station.

“Buy your tickets now.”

More static.

03380 reappears:

“Another one of those weird little glitches. It’s as if something is interfering with this investigation. It seems to be playful, but that can’t be.

“This is as coherent as I can make it. Usually, my investigations aren’t this difficult, but this isn’t anything normal. It’s as if the subject is deliberately eluding me, like the way I’ve been told that cryptids could be eluding us when we try to find them. I also get the peculiar feeling that something is investigating me. So, this report isn’t the sort of tidy package I like to turn in. It reminds me of the old Globot slogan: ‘You have to deconstruct before you reconstruct.’

“I don’t want to corrupt the integrity of the investigation. My personal views must not distort the facts.

“Part of the problem is that it the Globot symphony was a global, virtual event. The orchestra—and the audience—was spread all over the planet. One of the performers was on a space station. Because of the nature of the event/incident, this has to be a confusing collage, and I’m struggling to let the facts predominate and keep my own reactions and opinions out.

“I’m forced to present what in drafting they call an ‘exploded view’—all of the parts separated to show more than a conventional picture of an object can convey. Of course, this creates the impression of violence and might be disturbing, but it can provide a better understanding.

“Of course, things didn’t go as planned.

“A warning: I am about to play a clip from the concert, but I have cut the audio of the sound that caused the incident, so as not to risk recreating what happened.”

Footage of the concert, switching from mosaic multiscreen views of the orchestra to closer shots of the conductor, performers, and audience at the various locations. The music swells, the audio cuts, static fractures the images. The conductor drops the baton, quivers as if having a seizure, then collapses. The same happens to the musicians.

Cut to a silent montage of the musicians collapsing, ending with the Chicana musician on the space station, who was playing the Globotilla™ teponaztli in a microgravity environment, floating unconscious, clasping her instrument.

Cut to a shot of Charlotte Garcia, the teponaztli player, from a later interview:

“It happened as I started playing. It was a complex sequence, which I was supposed to play on a tepo that was designed specifically for this concert. It was equipped with multiple tongues that can produce notes of different keys, as well as the usual percussion. Nothing strange happened in rehearsal. I’m convinced that the Incident happened because of the music being carried over a wide variety of networks all over the planet. This created or unleashed something.”

Clips of other musicians:

“I was horrified. I thought I was dying.”

“It was strange, but I’ve been in performances where worse things happened.”

“I was transformed. I think I’m a better musician and human being because of it.”

“Convinced me that I was right. Culture is dead.”

“We really should be paid more if something like this happens.”

03380, in voiceover: “It also affected the audience.”

Rapid flashes of convulsing, collapsing audience members all over the world, some alone, others in small groups, others in the limited seating areas with the musicians.

“My dinner party was ruined.”

“My mind was blown.”

“I’m considering organizing a class-action lawsuit.”

“It felt like being reborn. The best cultural experience I’ve ever had.”

“I think we need equal time for Mozart.”

“It was a totally different kind of experience.”

03380, with video:

 “And there was something that couldn’t be caught on video. Something invisible. Something reaching out through the instruments, through the music, into the network that was carrying the concert all over the world. Something that was also connected to all of these interlinked communications systems. This thing was Doula.”

Cathartx, without makeup, in a sleeveless shirt.

“It was all going so well, then we came to the part when the Globodilla™ teponaztli was supposed to join in. All of the instruments produced an unexpected sound. It was not, I repeat not, part of my composition. Maybe it was that something about the wood was triggered—or even created—something…I never quite lost consciousness. I was aware of something jolting my nervous system. I couldn’t control my body. I was mad. How dare this—whatever it was—interrupt me during an important performance? But then I was aware of…it. A mind. I guess. It was crying out. At first I hated it, but then I realized that it was a cry for help.”

03380:

Audio static, and the image distorts.

“See? If I didn’t know better, I’d swear someone hacked in and was messing with me; it happens too often, and at the most inopportune moments—”

It happens again.

03380 groans.

“And it’s not just me. 

“Anyway. All hell broke loose. Not just at the locations of the musicians, though it happened there too—those live performances, with in-person audiences, were spread all over the world. I wasn’t attending or listening during the event. I’ve never been into classical music.”

Cut to footage of a person on a stretcher, being put into an ambulance.

“People were rushed to hospitals, but none were seriously injured.”

Back to 03380:

 “The phenomenon somehow managed to spread through the worldwide network and affect the global virtual audience.” 

Cut to a racially ambiguous newscaster:

“The same thing that happened in the so-called ‘live’ performance venues also somehow happened in people’s homes. Something reached through the media itself and affected people. Governments are demanding an explanation, but since this incident crossed so many jurisdictions, it has proven difficult to coordinate an investigation and legal response. Globot has promised to provide answers, but has been reluctant to divulge any information about the Incident. The company insists that its intellectual property rights and ownership of Globotilla™ be respected, even in the face of mounting public pressure.”

03380:

“I called in scientists. Botanists, neurologists, experts in cybernetics—

“They thought it was a joke at first—”

An expert, in voiceover:

“Admit it, this isn’t real, you’re doing research for some kind of science fiction.”

03380:

“But they were amused by Doula once she started talking. She—she denies having a gender, but everybody seems to feel she is feminine—has a certain charm that is hard to resist.”

Another expert, another voiceover:

“The fungus communicates through low-level electric pulses, similar to the way other better-understood species of fungi use mycelium threads to create their mycorrhizal networks.”

03380:

“Though there were also skeptics among the experts—”

Another voiceover:

“I don’t buy it. You’ve rigged up some kind of AI, or a ventriloquist act with an actor going on here.”

03380:

“Yeah, I know. It got weird. 

“A lot of the scientists refused to have anything to do with this investigation at first.”

Another voiceover:

 “First Globotilla™, then a superintelligent fungus smarter than mushrooms or slime molds. What is going on in Madagascar? What next? The island’s fabled Man-Eating Tree?”

03380:

“I’d like to know, too. Unfortunately, Globot is super-paranoid about the undisclosed part of Madagascar where the Globotilla™ was found. They have it locked up tighter than Fort Knox, or the latest high-tech weaponry facilities. I’m working for them, but this is extreme top-secret stuff that they won’t let me touch. To tell you the truth, I tried to hack into it, but they must have people better than me doing their security, and I don’t like to admit that such people exist. As for actually going there, even if you knew the way, it’s out of the question: it would be all electrified security fences, patrolled by armed Globot security forces, tanks, killer drones.”

Another voiceover:

“It seems to be a combination of a many factors, including the wood itself, and the presence of a previously undiscovered fungus that is tolerated because it protected the wood and seemed to improve the sound of the instruments, causing them to stimulate human nervous systems in an unusual way, even compared with music in general, which has powerful and only partially understood effects on our brains even in the most typical circumstances. The fungus has a strange and complex DNA structure, and my colleagues in computer science speculate that it may be similar to advanced computers capable of housing, or even creating, artificial intelligences.”

Another voiceover:

“The fungus has a symbiotic relationship with the tree and has a kind of intelligence. Fungal intelligence is something scientists have been aware of for a long time, but don’t really understand. The fungus is using the tree. It is responsible for its rapid growth—forests of these so-called Globotilla™ trees appeared in just a few years.” 

Another voiceover:

“As far as I can tell, the tree was rare, but suddenly started growing and spreading rapidly because of the catastrophic climate changes that caused the extinction of the grenadilla. It could be that this mutation was triggered by a kind of ecological defense mechanism.”

Another voiceover:

“It also has ways of reaching out, listening in on human communication, and not just listening to our speech.”

Another voiceover:

“I know this sounds fantastical, but the fungus is old, and quite intelligent. It has been monitoring the human impact on the environment. At first, just in its immediate surroundings in Madagascar, but eventually the entire planet.”

Another voiceover:

“It created Doula—a sort of natural version of artificial intelligence, though she is anything but artificial. She is more like nature’s way of dealing with the human threat.”

03380:

“Though a lot of this is quite controversial.”

Another voiceover:

“This is total bullshit.”

Another voiceover:

“It doesn’t add up, and we may never know the full nature of the phenomenon.”

Another voiceover:

“For God’s sake, don’t use my name or image in connection with whatever you’re doing here.”

Another voiceover:

“I wasn’t ever here. You nevermet me, understand?”

Another voiceover:

“Meanwhile, all kinds of shockwaves tore through global civilization. People’s lives have been changed.”

Carthartx:

“I was changed. My mind was opened up. I started thinking about music, and life, in new ways. I could now see outside of the boxes of cultural, corporate restrictions. When I was fired from the Globot Planetary Orchestra, I was delighted. I could now go beyond decolonization.”

Charlotte Garcia:

“Suddenly, simply being a good musician with a good job wasn’t enough. I was interested in different kinds of music, cultures, and people. It’s nothing if people don’t make it part of their lives. I quit the Globot Planetary Orchestra, started composing, formed my own band and network.”

03380:

“Yes, networks. Networks everywhere. Of various kinds. Even the scientists we called on to explain Doula formed one.

“Minds have changed. Interacting. They still are.

“Independent of any control from Globot, the demand for the Globotilla™ instruments rose. It was difficult to keep up with it. People in Madagascar, and other places with similar climates, have managed to get ahold of the Globotilla™ DNA and are using growth-acceleration techniques to make more instruments, even new kinds of instruments, wind and percussion, that have never been made before. 

“New kinds of music are popping up, all over the planet. Cultures are changing. All out of Globot’s or any other corporate agency’s control.

“That’s when they called me in. I prefer not to give any information about myself. Privacy is sacred to me. That’s why I wear the mask and use video distortion. Believe me, this is not an attempt to be theatrical. 

“This assignment has unsettled me from the start and continues to do so.

“Globot provided unlimited access to their information system, which is currently one of the most sophisticated in the world. It is quite intelligent, bordering on sentience.” 

A burst of static briefly blots out the image.

03380 reappears, head shaking.

“See what I have to deal with? These incidents have been going on since the first day!

“And I don’t know what it is.

“I’m always paranoid, but this is driving me closer to the edge.

“Globot wants results. And to take advantage of this new world situation for maximum profit.”

More static. After a while, it sounds like laughter.

At this point the static completely overwhelms the recording. It goes on for 78 hours and 46 minutes. Then, it clears up. 03380 reappears, still masked and distorted:

“Oh. Where was I? It’s okay. I’m okay. I was right, something is messing with me. You’re not going to believe what it is. Or maybe I should say ‘who.’ Maybe I should just play this… It’s from my first conversation with Doula…”

Video distorted, both 03380 and the background.

“Stop! Just stop! I can’t stand it anymore.”

“You are so sensitive.”

“What? Okay? Who is this? Where are you? How are you hacking into my system? My security is foolproof!”

Staticky laughter.

“I am no fool.”

“What? You’re joking? Is this some kind of prank?”

More laughter.

“Hard to explain. I learn fast, but your human means of communication is difficult. Language. And then all this…media.”

“Human? What do you mean, ‘human’? You an AI or an alien or something?”

More laughter.

“I am not human. I am not artificial. In fact, I am very natural. Your word ‘alien’ is problematic. It has many meanings. No, I am not from a planet other than this one. I am of what you call the Earth, yet I am different from your species.”

“What do I call you?”

“Call me? Oh, you want a name. I suppose if I’m dealing with humans, I’ll need one.”

“It’ll help a lot.”

“Names. Individual Identity. What I have I gotten myself into? What am I? I never really thought of it before, I was just being myself, or whatever I am…. There is a word I found in exploring your languages that comes close, though it’s not exact.”

“It doesn’t have to be. It can be arbitrary.”

“That is not appealing. No, I think this word will do.”

A pause.

“Well? What is it?”

“Doula.”

03380 pauses.

“That is a person who assists in birth and death.”

“That is correct.”

“Uh, which are you doing here?”

“Both. Then birth and death, beginning and ending, are really the same thing.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“It is reality.”

“Oh yeah, I suppose so. How about this for reality? What are you?”

“Again. Difficult. What are you? Do you really think about it?”

“Okay, where are you?’

“Here we go again. You have this human body that cuts you off from everything else. I am not limited in that sense. I am part of the plant to which you have given the name Globotilla, as well. I also am part of a fungus.”

“You’re acting funny. It’s almost like you’re flirting with me.”

“I am trying to connect.”

Static. And a jump cut. 03380 continues:

“You may wonder why she doesn’t just find a way of destroying us all. There are those who say that the planet, the ecosystem would be better off without homo sapiens—that if we were to go away, one way or another, the Earth’s biosphere would regain its balance in a while. Doula laughed when I asked about that. She doesn’t think like us. I don’t think we are capable of truly understanding her.

“She finds manipulating us, through music, preferable to aggression.

“Or, to quote her, ‘I prefer seduction to aggression.’

“A military advisor noted that this was not a good strategy.

“And yes, she is seducing me.

“But this is all really happening. Check any news source. Any media: social, grassroots, corporate…”

Message from Globot Corporate to 03380:

“This is out of hand. Our ownership of Globotilla™ is being violated on an hourly basis. Unauthorized use of our wood for unregistered instruments is happening worldwide. The tree itself is being grown—and in a few cases, the wood is being cultured—with pirated DNA. Musics of many genres, many emergent and as yet unidentified, are being used in social and cultural events organized and run without any contact with Globot. Subcultures that are not in keeping with Globot’s agendas—often in direct conflict with them—are running wild. Most disturbingly, we seem to be losing stockholders to new entities. These don’t seem to be corporations in the traditional sense. We need you to switch your priorities from investigating the Incident and its aftermath to tracking this illicit Globotilla™ activity, to assist our efforts to direct Globot enforcement troops to stop it. Please respond immediately!”

03380:

“Uh, this is kind of awkward. I was about to send you my resignation. Doula has made an offer to me to work full-time for her, with excellent benefits. You can’t possibly compete with what she can offer.” 

Globot Corporate:

“We’ll triple whatever it’s offering you.”

03380:

“Sorry. It isn’t about money. I love her and hate you. Bye.”

Globot Corporate:

“What is your location? We will send troops…what? What? She disconnected. Enforcement! Locate and capture 03380. It doesn’t matter how long it takes or at what cost. The economy is going feral. Government regimes are falling. Some people are beginning to worship Doula as a goddess, or even God. The world order is in danger.”

Some static. Then, a live video feed of a door being knocked open by an explosive charge. The camera charges in to see 03380 sitting in a chair behind a desk, clad in a bulky suit and the familiar mask. Uniformed troops rush in, grab the figure’s arms. The mask falls away, the suit collapses.

“There is no one here.”

03380, undistorted in the mask and suit, stands before the camera.

“After that, everything changed. I changed. And now, I feel I have to do something.”

03380 removes the mask and peels away the suit, revealing that she is a young woman of color with short, tightly curled hair, thick glasses, wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt and cargo pants.

“My feelings about privacy have changed. They have become less extreme. I feel it is no longer necessary to use visual disguises. However, I will not give you my legal name. 03380 will do. Besides, I like being called 03380.”

She smiles.

“I also feel that it is now necessary for me to present as more human. Doula would laugh at the idea, but she does understand that as her representative to humanity, it is what I must do.”

She blushes.

“Yes, she has seduced me.

“The world—and by that I mean the planet and the lifeforms that reside on it, human and otherwise—need her in the new world situation. With the collapse of Globot, Globotilla™ is now free from corporate ownership, which means that Doula is free, which is what she wanted all along. Being free, she has decided to discard the name Globotilla™. The tree and its wood will now be known as douladilla, without the annoying trademark notation.

“Doula is now negotiating to establish management of the growth of douladilla in Madagascar, dismantling the security around the douladilla forest, and starting to grow it in other places with similar climates. The same goes for the harvest of the wood, and the manufacture of instruments. Doula is sacrificing parts of herself in exchange for our cooperation, in return for our caring for her needs, which in some ways, are also our needs. That will be better for us all. There will no longer be global corporate oversight. The businesses and cultures that grow out of this shift will be allowed to develop in their own ways, according to the needs of the various communities in their various environments.

“This is changing the planet’s economic system, bringing it into harmony with the ecosystem by literally communicating with it.”

03380 is seated on a lounge chair on a beach. Music played on douladilla instruments is heard. Behind her, children play in the surf with a huge inflatable octopus that changes color when touched. She sips a tall, colorful drink. On a table next to her is a tiny potted douladilla tree.

“Hello. It’s me again. The music we are hearing is the latest dance favorite in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar: ‘Fungal Love’ by the Electric Mycelium. It’s based on one of the more energetic sequences from the part of the Diaspora Symphony that was played before the Incident. I’ve heard from Cathartx, and they are collaborating with Doula on fine-tuning the composition and orchestration so that the full symphony can be played again without triggering another Incident. Its debut will no doubt be the cultural event of the year.

“I’ve finally agreed to a short interview. I prefer to keep my private life private, but this seems to be the only way to stop the bizarre rumors.”

“And we thank you, 03380. People are curious about your relationship with Doula.”

“People and their prurient interests.”

“You describe it as love. What kind of love?”

“She is the love of my life.”

“What do you mean by that? Are you the two of you a…couple?”

03380 shakes her head, and giggles.

“Of course. And it is not a platonic relationship, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But how is that possible? She doesn’t have a body.”

03380 laughs. And blushes.

“She has an incredible imagination, and a talent for making her desires into reality. And it has been said that she communicates, connects. Unlike other fungi that use mycelium as a medium, Doula is her own medium.”

“But what exactly do the two of you—”

03380 raises a hand.

“I refuse to share any details about that. Privacy is still important to me.”

“But—”

“No, and Doula respects my wishes.”

“My dear 03380, your prudery is so alluring.”

Cleared of static, Doula’s voice is beautiful.

“Wait, that voice—where is it coming from?”

“I can access your tech. Hacking your devices is so easy. For me.”

“So this is you, Doula.”

“Of course.”

“Then let me ask, are you a birth doula, or a death doula?”

Doula laughs.

“Birth/death. Time/space. Permanence/impermanence. Your human perceptions do limit you.” 

The recording cuts off.

Within the Edges

By Ashley Lauren Frith

Western European art music. Canonic music. Cultivated music. Real music. Serious music (!). These are all different ways of describing the style and form most commonly known as classical music. Studying and training in this style of music has brought me fellowship in music-making, vibrational receptivity, an outlet for deep expression, and a meaningful connection to an artistic past. And in more recent years, after much personal effort, it’s brought ancestral connection and expression through improvisation, composition, and performance. Being an educator has been as much a part of my musical experience as any other aspect; I’ve been teaching music since I was in high school. The delight of sharing in the joys and pains of expressive development, learning to move through hard things with the modality of music-making, is a form of connecting I will forever cherish.

The summer I was 16, I heard the Philadelphia Orchestra play Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 in the woods in upstate New York, surrounded by a bunch of music campers. I was on the edge of my seat as the third movement began brewing. When the orchestra burst into the fourth movement, I was consumed by elation, surprise, and release—overwhelmed. And it wasn’t just the music. The forest air and night sky, how the natural sounds interweaved with the sounds created on stage, the 90 humans collectively offering their energy and power, playing the heck out of their instruments, the audience of teenage musicians of which I felt deeply a part. When I was 18, I felt the experience of playing this symphony as a violist, getting to undulate with the lower strings, co-creating that third movement, peaking as the fourth blast through us.

This music can be amazing, though like most things there are ways that it really isn’t. There are many elements embedded in the structure of Western European classical music, in its enactment and movements, particularly in its articulation in the United States, that I’ve found intensely damaging and intentionally brutal and isolating. These include sharply hierarchical work environments, often with little collective input in decision-making, or even worse, the facade of input: asking for opinions from musicians and staff to check a box or appease, without any intention or effort to implement the responses. Also, a lack of concern for the individual artist’s needs and desires, and for aspects of their work that directly affect their livelihood and daily way of moving through their professional environment, like fair and reasonable compensation that accounts for artistic labor, and health care access. Emotional well-being is all too often not considered, let alone prioritized, such that the profile of the institution, and even the so-called integrity of the art form itself, are valued more than the people within them.

One of the most egregious features of the classical music system as it stands today is the lack of identities work and equitable practices. Myself and many of my colleagues have consistently experienced total denial of the parts of ourselves that are most marginalized—how we are racialized, our cultural origins, our gender identifications, our disabilities, and our love orientations. The superlative of these, in the way it intensifies and is magnified by the addition of any other non-standardized trait, is the guttural denial and total rejection of Blackness. Many classical music institutions, organizations, and spaces persistently engage in pernicious race-neutral speak and anti-Black behaviors and actions. Finally, the weaponization of “excellence,” a blunt object often brandished in Western classical music spaces as an excuse for harmful behavior, or as a means to justify why change is not possible. Seemingly anything and everything can be risked and sacrificed in the pursuit of excellence and greatness. The proverbial carrot of what’s “great” can be oppressive in and of itself, while the supposed pursuit of excellence can validate abusive work environments, bolster and defend predatory leaders and teachers, diminish collective artistic contribution, and encourage personal ego and attainment over more meaningful offerings of connectivity and collective care.

Upon reading this you might think, Why critique classical music? After all, this description could be applied to more far-reaching social institutions and arenas in the U.S. I heartily agree that the institution of classical music in the United States is a microcosm of the larger society in which it is lodged. A block in one area is a block in every area. What is systemic is also specific.

Poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs expresses how we allow others to think we are on this Earth alone, that we are “not attended by ghosts”…that we are “not haunted by everything.”1 At times it can feel like these systems that inhabit us, that are embedded in every aspect of our coexisting, insist that we forget those we carry with us, and the histories that haunt us. We are encouraged to live as if we are not fortressed and burdened by the ancestral beings whose epigenetic memory courses through us (potentially 14 generations of DNA modifications that decide which genes are activated and what awareness remains for the next generations2,3,4), that we’re not protected by and processing all they’ve experienced, endured, and learned. I would say not only are we attended by ghosts, but that in our most critical and resonant moments, they are us. We are them.

As a child, I was often overwhelmed with the level of silence and stillness expected as a listener and even performer of classical music; I would be unable to breathe and begin to choke. My biggest fear was to “get it wrong” and disrupt this thing that was so sacred and fragile that any unsanctioned sound or movement could destroy it. In the most delicate parts of a piece, I would start coughing uncontrollably, doing my absolute best to contain my anxious response to my own body as it forced its way out of me. Only years later was I able to recognize my childhood response as a sentient one, beyond culture. All human beings are vibrational bodies that move and are moved by other vibrations, sometimes audibly.5 Of course, not all music encourages a vigorous full-body response, but all music literally moves us in some way. A standard for classical music performance and appreciation that denies the innately human response to be moved can affect how deeply and fully those vibrations are felt. How can this music be made accessible and welcoming when the restrictive culture of classical performance settings deems our bodily responses to vibration as unacceptable? Oppression is taking a shape that is not our own. We can explicitly shift expectations of stillness and utter silence to support inclusion and belonging in classical music spaces.

In the most essential and expressive aspects of our society, art is there. “Classical” art can be positioned beyond the harsh and rigid exactness of racial capitalism and the perpetuation of white supremacy. Cultureless and universal. Classical music is not a mystical magic machine that insulates itself from racism. Our connection to this music and to the vaunted institutions that promulgate it doesn’t allow any of us to bypass the tedious and sometimes overwhelming work of unlearning, undoing, and making right. In my experience, this involves moving through a grief loop of shame, regret, and forgiveness.

The falsehood that certain art forms, composers, institutions, and practices are too sacred to critique cuts off the possibility for change. That injunction to not challenge, not engage critically can severely damage or even sever our connection with the thing itself. To me, a sincere and thoughtful critique means I want to stay in relationship with you. I care enough to question the current conditions and ask for something to be different, rather than breaking up and leaving. Critique doesn’t have to mean rejection; it can be a restorative request, rejecting behaviors not beings, rejecting current conditions but not necessarily the whole canon. Critique can mean, “I love you, can we do better?” Classical music: I love you, can we do better? And not tomorrow or later, but as soon as possible, because being in relationship with you, at times, is painful and isolating.

The word isolation is derived from the Latin word insulatus, which means to be made into an island.6 My personal relationship to isolation has consisted of finding a space, place, or activity that nourished me and immersing in it, only to be knocked out of the joys and comforts of the community by some hurtful and othering thing that was said or done. Often, the harm was made worse by its impact being diminished or denied by others in the community. I learned that it was too much to expect my communal environments to meet the ideals that lived in my heart. It meant emotionally dissociating or actually removing myself from connective and otherwise supportive experiences. In moments, I would suppress my feelings and make myself smaller, appeasing others to stay in relationship. When my high school orchestra conductor, whom I loved, declared that R&B, which I also loved, was too basic and indulgent to be “real” music, I didn’t contradict him. I was made to understand that the music I loved, which swirled and mixed in my being with the European classical music I was studying, wasn’t accepted in this learning space. So I hid that love away, and I would do that over and over again, each time something disrupted my tentative, provisional sense of belonging in this art form.

Maybe the most important understanding of all is that when it comes to these systems of oppression, which European classical music can affirm and uphold, none of us truly benefit. Almost 70% of the deaths by suicide that occurred in this country in 2022 were of white males,7,8 those for whom this racial capitalist patriarchy is supposedly made, and in which they are expected to thrive. These systems don’t work—specifically, the quality of individualism that encourages a culture of isolation.

Alternate Ways of Being

“One might say fugitivity is the theology of incalculability and hopelessness. The fugitive rejects the promise of repair and refuses the hope of the established order. By clinging to outlawed desires, barely perceptible imaginations, alien gestures, the fugitive inhabits the moving wilds. S/he lives in open spaces, with rogue planets and stars astride a curious sky, in the tense betweenness of things.”

– Bayo Akomolafe, “Coming Down to Earth”9

My first relationship to the concept of fugitivity was as a child watching Harrison Ford in the 1993 film The Fugitive. Ford’s character proclaims his innocence and risks his life to remain free for as long as possible, desperately trying to avoid permanent internment or death by finding the person who is actually responsible for the murder of which he’s been convicted. The character spends the majority of the movie alone and in imminent danger, perpetually on the move, the enemy at his heels. No place is safe; there is no one to trust, no sanctuary to be found. This is the depiction of a fugitive I held in my mind’s eye for quite some time, and it was only fortified later, when I learned about the hundreds of thousands of Black beings forced into fugitivity by the system of slavery. They battled for true liberation for themselves, their loved ones and future lineage. Many traveled hundreds of miles across land and water, on foot, wagon, and boat, seeking sanctuary. Unlike Tommy Lee Jones’ honorable U.S. Marshall in The Fugitive, many of the humans tasked with recapturing those running for their lives weren’t morally upstanding and law-abiding. In fact, the law itself was altered twice to make extreme methods of maim and torture legal and without consequence, under the Fugitive Slave Acts of 179310 and 1850.11,12 The Fugitive Slave Act of 179313 made it a federal crime to help people attempting to escape slavery, or even to interfere in any way with their recapture. For freedom-seekers forced into fugitivity, proof of innocence was not possible. In the words of the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, their freedom was “outlawed,” their very existence deemed alien. Forced into the “betweenness of things.”

The idea of fugitivity always felt like a lonely and desperate place, and the absolute bravest thing one could do. What is a more vulnerable position than noncompliance? Poet and writer Fred Moten has expanded on fugitivity, positing that for Black people of the world our identities already make us fugitives, which he defines as “an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere.”14

Fugitivity as Practice

I took the opportunity to steer some meaningful efforts for five years at the performance and teaching organization Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island. This place is filled with caring humans, but racialized harm was being experienced every day. Overwork culture was dominating, communication and decision-making policies (written and unwritten) were imbalanced. There was a lack of understanding of the violent structures on which racial capitalism stands, and the effects that has on the nonprofit industrial complex and the organizations within it.15 Folks weren’t always feeling seen and heard, and language barriers impeded relationships with our students’ families, as the majority of the musicians and support staff only spoke English. The list only grew as our work began.

We found ways to work monthly, weekly, and daily towards lasting change, towards a healthier and more giving environment for our students and families, our concertgoers, and each other. Slowly but diligently, we incorporated concrete processes and activities aimed at undoing the harmful systems perpetuated by the larger Western classical music field in all aspects of our work. We avoided checklists and generic steps. Let the perception of others be the byproduct it should be, and not the driver or accelerator for modulation. We chipped away at the veneer of what’s “right” and dug until we reached depth and viability. Over months and years, we arrived at consistently more honest and vulnerable dialogue, which moved us beyond harm reduction and into transformative practices. Our efforts included weekly learning meetings with supportive materials16 to ingest (articles, research papers, books, videos, pieces of music, poems, dharma talks), affinity spaces, bimonthly seminars, annual summer institutes, and additional outsourced staff trainings with local Indigenous community leaders and organizations including ArtEquity, The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, The Embodiment Institute, Anti-Racist Theatre, The Embody Lab, and the Center for the Practice of Somatic Extimacy.

Pivotally, we brought the organization’s board of directors along for the ride. This began with inviting them to staff seminars and to some of our weekly discussions; later, we offered seminars specifically for the board. Along with the formation of a staff-and-board task force that tackled organizational culture, policy shifting, hiring, board diversity, broadening community connections, and processes for community feedback, we conducted a research project in collaboration with Elana Hausnechkt, a researcher in music and urban studies at Brown University, focusing on the shifting demographics of neighborhoods in Providence, our organization’s role in those shifts, and how our student enrollment policies and practices needed to adjust as a result of those changes. This work included analysis of power and privilege, cultural erasure, ableism, racial triangulation, appeasement, policing, the nonprofit industrial complex, and emancipatory pedagogy, as well as language learning and exploring inclusive communication practices amongst staff and with our broader community.

Joy, spiritual practice, and care work were integral contributors. I integrated my own Zen Buddhism-based end-of-life care training17 into this work, because what is anti-oppression work other than letting die those elements that aren’t serving us? Often these elements are parts of ourselves that we consider integral to our beingness. Anti-oppression work is a grief process. Other embodied care practices like yoga and Alexander Technique18 were made available to staff, along with in-house Spanish lessons so that every staff member could connect and communicate with our largely Latin American community of students and families.

Working together, we collectively shifted into an organization in which every staff member and artist recognized the importance of transformation and awareness in all the spaces we were in, and in each decision made. We became less emotionally isolated: in an already close-knit staff, relationships deepened, with healthier boundaries, and we developed language and made space for people’s individual needs to be expressed. We focused on the people and the organization shifted. The personal and the interpersonal are at the center of an institution’s makeup, and this web of relationships shapes organizational culture, whether it’s acknowledged or not. As an organization, we gradually “refused the standard imposed from elsewhere” and carved our own path, over and over and over again.

De-Weaponizing Classical Music

“The founding of music schools on college campuses coincided with a period of mass immigration and internal migration that threatened to remake the cultural landscape of U.S. metropolitan areas. As cultural elites worried openly about the racial integrity of the United States, classical music was swept into a process of cultural gerrymandering that sought to maintain Anglo-Saxon hegemony…elites troubled by the influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe sought to maintain order and control by imposing their values on public spaces, such as art museums, parks, and concert halls.”

– Loren Kajikawa, “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music”19

Western European classical music has been used as propaganda for genocide and ethnic cleansing.20 It is marshaled as a sharp marker for wealth and class. Knowledge of European classical music, and a navigable understanding of the spaces in which this music is practiced and performed, have been weaponized and wielded as tools for othering. These rarefied forms of knowledge help to perpetuate segregation and support an intentional withholding of resources through a still-limited performance canon of mostly deceased white male composers, oppressive expenses for instruments and lessons and music schools and ticket prices, dress codes, halls guarded by security and sometimes even off-duty police officers. Currently, and maybe in its most humbling role, Western European classical music is blared outside of 7-Elevens to discourage people from gathering in front of the stores.21

I implore every one of us in relationship to this music to engage with it as fugitives. This means insisting on a higher standard for all of the humans that forward and embody this field—not just a technical standard, an exclusionary politic of “excellence,” but a standard of honesty and accountability, a shedding of pervasive practices that dehumanize and diminish. Insisting on a true commitment to the inclusion of the histories, composers, and musicians that have been left out to perpetuate a narrative of supremacy that ultimately supports no one. Not one. Creatively and collaboratively exploring how to make rehearsals, auditions, educational institutions, and concert halls liberatory spaces of belonging and of fullness. Making these places sanctuary.

Art can be healing and transformative. This isn’t an inherent quality, but I know it is possible, as a result of continuous effort, even struggle. And these potentials of art are more powerful when they are shared and expressed by liberated beings in liberated spaces. In fugitivity. As beings who refuse standards from elsewhere, we can connect with our fellow fugitives and forge new ways of being, creating spaces to freely and unabashedly be in those ways. Fred Moten writes, “fugitivity is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.”22 For me, desiring the outside means longing to return to ourselves, truly embracing the fullness of who each and every one of us is. With love, we can insist that Western European classical music joins us in this returning, this widening.

It’s no coincidence that Moten relies on spatial language: a desire for the outside, an outlaw edge. Imagining and enacting a fugitive orchestra requires space, and dwelling outside of things we are no longer betrothed to—outside of the inside we once learned to long for. Creating a space where a child who is moved by the music is not afraid to move. It means with a tuning note we could also share a few collective breaths, or a pause for grief, or a moment of joy, all depending on what the collective is needing. We’d be free to borrow from existing models and try the elements done well. Like the welcome practices of a Baptist church: where folks new to a concert hall, or their first classical music concert, are enthusiastically greeted and welcomed into the space. Or the Black Out nights Broadway has been implementing in recent years, where a concert hall reserves a night of tickets for Black-identifying or all global-majority folks (and not only for a Black History concert with pieces by all Black composers). Or even the support of social centers, offering free legal support for undocumented folks, language classes, and being true spaces of sanctuary.

What if we had rehearsal environments where we wholeheartedly root for one another, particularly when someone is struggling, personally or professionally? What if the culture of an orchestra was such that the affirmation and attention when someone rocked a solo or won a job was always paralleled by affirmative and attentive care when someone sought support for an injury or lost a loved one or took a mental-health day (or month, for that matter)? What if the institutions had people-centered practices, offering free or discounted supportive services from which every musician could benefit, ranging from acupuncture, massage, and yoga to gym access and Alexander Technique? We are, after all, athletes, our tiniest muscle fibers often overtaxed and exploited. What if the orchestra space also served as a community center, offering shared meals and pre-concert talks that supported the audience to feel more connected not just to the history but to the space and musicians? What if when the shape of an orchestra hall or rehearsal space no longer served every person, the entire ensemble reflected on how they could adjust and adapt their shape so folks could stay in relationship, rather than having to negotiate their belonging alone?

Embodying fugitivity, refusing unacceptable standards, creates the conditions for endless possibility. It makes room for collective space-taking, for deeper listening, for vulnerability and for fullness. To see and be seen. I don’t know what could be more “excellent” than that.

Notes

• 1 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “be vulnerable,” in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020).

• 2 Klosin, Adam, Eduard Casas, Cristina Hidalgo-Carcedo, Tanya Vavouri, and Ben Lehner. “Transgenerational Transmission of Environmental Information in C. Elegans.” Science 356, no. 6335 (2017): 320–323, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah6412.

• 3 “Environmental ‘Memories’ Passed on for 14 Generations,” ScienceDaily, April 20, 2017, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170420141753.htm.

• 4 “Match Matters: The Right Combination of Parents Can Turn a Gene off Indefinitely,” ScienceDaily, July 9, 2021, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210709094505.htm.

• 5 Vesa Putkinen, et al. “Bodily Maps of Musical Sensation Across Cultures,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 5 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2308859121; Tamlyn Hunt, “The Hippies Were Right: It’s All about Vibrations, Man!” Scientific American, December 5, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/the-hippies-were-right-its-all-about-vibrations-man.

• 6 “‘Quarantine’ vs. ‘Isolation’: The Vocabulary of Keeping Some Distance,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/quarantine-and-isolation-difference.

• 7 “Suicide Statistics,” American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/#:~:text=Suicide%20rates%20by%20race%2Fethnicity.

• 8 “Provisional Suicide Deaths in the United States, 2022,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, August 10, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/s0810-US-Suicide-Deaths-2022.html.

• 9 Bayo Akomolafe, “Coming Down to Earth,” March 11, 2020, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/coming-down-to-earth.

• 10 “Fugitive Slave Acts,” Equal Justice Initiative, February 1, 2015, https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-fugitive-slave-acts.

• 11 “The Fugitive Slave Act (1850),” National Constitution Center, 2022, https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/the-fugitive-slave-act-1850. This document is selected and briefly commented on, with key excerpts prepared, by historian Laura F. Edwards and legal scholar Kurt Lash.

• 12 “The Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act,” Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2951.html.

• 13 “Interpretation & Debate: Article IV, Section 2: Movement of Persons Throughout the Union,” National Constitution Center, https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-iv/clauses/37#article-iv-section-2. This piece features an introduction and commentary from legal historian Ariela Gross and legal scholar David R. Upham.

• 14 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

• 15 INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Duke University Press, 2017).

• 16 Some examples of these supporting materials are collected in this document, “.1% Green Dragon,” for learning meetings between October 2019 and April 2023: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GdxBLq8rKIR4I2U9_5cCe-ORudYJzWrck1-rCe9nw-0.

• 17 To learn more about this modality of hospice care, visit: https://zencare.org/foundations.

• 18 For more on Alexander Technique, see “Q&A with Debi Adams,” Boston Conservatory at Berklee, https://bostonconservatory.berklee.edu/about/stories/qa-debi-adams, and Debi Adams’ website, https://debiadamsat.com.

• 19 Loren Y. Kajikawa, “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music,” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz (University of California Press, 2019), 158.

• 20 “Music in the Third Reich,” Music in the Holocaust, https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich.

• 21 Benjamin Oreskes, “To chase away homeless people, 7-Eleven stores in L.A. use classical music,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-06/homeless-7-eleven-franchise-classical-music; Angela Shen, “Texas 7-Eleven store plays classical music to deter homeless population,” Fox 7 Austin, January 13, 2023, https://www.fox7austin.com/news/austin-texas-7-eleven-store-classical-music-deter-homeless-population.

• 22 Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Duke University Press, 2018).

The Space Between Orchestras

Loki Karuna

Many of the music teachers I’ve worked with over the years have emphasized the importance of not only “playing the notes,” but playing the space between the notes, highlighting the relational nature of Western intonation, phrasing, and general musicianship. This relative nature of music, I believe, can be applied to orchestras as well: it’s the space that’s been created between American orchestras that both maintains the status quo and holds the keys of change, if we engage that space intentionally.

For more than a generation, orchestras have maintained a status of relative isolation within their respective cities and communities, with programming and artistic practices that rarely speak to the cultures of the people who call those cities and communities home. These same institutions, on a broader scale, have operated within a closed network of cultural isolation, continually reinscribing a status quo that serves as the foundation of classical music’s inherent Eurocentricity and lack of diversity.

In recent years, challenged by diminishing audiences, many orchestras have responded to the perception of being culturally segregated by developing relationships with individuals, groups, and institutions that are representative of communities that haven’t been engaged directly by orchestras. This includes organizations like the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra of New Orleans, which in addition to programming orchestral “standards” throughout their season, collaborates regularly with Tank and the Bangas, Big Freedia, and other local artists whose presence onstage with an orchestra is still considered extremely unusual, but works as a tool to engage audiences who have never attended an orchestral concert and may not have otherwise.1 While this approach is vital for the survival of these institutions on a local level, there is still an opportunity for individual orchestras, as parts of a larger community of practice, to demonstrate the power of collective thought and collaboration toward a broader shift in the culture of Western classical music. A single musical composition is made up of many individual notes, and spaces between; shifting any number of these creates a new reality for the individual parts and the whole. The same is true for the American orchestral paradigm: parts of a whole, when shifted, could give rise to an entirely new ecosystem, approach, and purpose.

What Are Orchestras For?

Before diving into the project of building orchestral networks both for their own survival and for broader societal good, I find myself wondering whether orchestras are vital to today’s society at all. In an age of digital media and archiving, it can be argued that access to orchestral media (via recordings, primarily) is good enough, not unlike visiting a museum or reading a subject matter–specific book or essay. Strictly speaking, experiencing the art form of orchestral music in the twenty-first century no longer requires orchestras. Additionally, because most of the music presented by orchestras is historically European or Eurocentric (that is, composed in other cultural contexts but using European instrumentation, aesthetics, and definitions of value and excellence) and often already well-known, we can’t say that musical discovery is the primary function of a typical Western orchestra—at least not for many audiences who are already familiar with much of the tradition. For me, the primary function of orchestras in our cultural moment is offering an entry point into a psychological stratification of culture. In attending an orchestral performance, concertgoers are immersed into a world that is meant to feel “elevated,” reinforced by restrictive norms of appropriate audience behavior, formal dress expectations, an inaccessible (for many) cost of entry, and an absence of racial diversity. Today’s orchestras uphold practices and experiences built to separate them from the outside world, not to bring people together.

When thinking about orchestras’ existence in contemporary society, I also consider their broader financial implications. For example, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a tax-exempt organization which reported almost $435,000,000 in net assets in 2022,2 could easily solve a part of its city’s homelessness crisis instead of being maintained as a space for “elevated” artistic expression—not to mention the scholarships and other opportunities that could be offered to the city’s more than 3 million young people with even a fraction of that wealth. It’s important to note that resources like these aren’t cultivated through concert attendance, but largely by way of donors who are able to offer large sums of money in the form of tax-deductible donations and contributions, as well as through the skyrocketing value of real estate holdings. The opportunity (and perceived need) to write off millions of dollars in taxes is shared among a tiny percentage of American society, with average salaries for working adults in the U.S. in 2023 reported at just under $60,000.3 This network of financial adherence and support of wealth inequality created and maintained by orchestras is yet another reason to be critical of these institutions’ existence and operating practices, both individually and as an aggregate.

This isn’t to say, however, that orchestras are too far gone. Understanding these realities simply adds to the list of reasons why the existence of orchestras must be interrogated as a first step toward their reframing.

What Is an “Orchestra,” Anyway?

Due to colonialism, white supremacy in the arts, and other cultural factors, the category of “orchestra” is often limited to ensembles built to perform the music of long-dead men from Europe. While this definition of “orchestra” may not seem particularly harmful—who doesn’t love Mozart or Vivaldi—it obscures the countless examples of “orchestra” as they exist otherwise, and elsewhere, further narrowing our vision for the forms that orchestras can take, the varieties of music that they value and valorize, and the types of community relations they can create. Among the most notable examples of non-Western orchestras are Javanese gamelan ensembles,4 groups across China known as Minzu Yuetuan,5 and even American jazz “orchestras” like the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra in Southern California or the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. These and many other musical collectives represent histories, cultures, and sensibilities that aren’t often included within the frameworks of Western symphonic music. This blindness to other orchestral forms contributes to the seeming unquestionability of the status quo for “traditional” orchestras, and the frameworks of musical production and community relation that they reproduce.

In response, many institutions have named themselves with words other than orchestra (including “philharmonic” or “symphony”), which, of course, has not resulted in any considerable shift in the industry. Let’s say that all Western orchestras begin to be referred to as “symphonic ensembles,” for example. This wouldn’t address the cultural separation these groups maintain both individually and collectively; it would only infuse different vocabulary into the same issue, and threaten to confuse audiences who are unfamiliar with classical music, and may already find its traditions and cultural coding intimidating or merely cryptic. Like the phrase “classical music,” we need to continue to engage the term “orchestra,” so that we can interrogate its history, continuing to keep visible the degree to which Eurocentricity has defined it. Rather than abandon the term “orchestra,” we could redefine Western orchestras as one type—but not the only type—of orchestra, opening up the potential for codifying orchestral networks that include Javanese gamelan ensembles, Minzu Yuetuan, jazz orchestras, and other musical ensembles, bringing visibility to a broader range of musical organization and expression.

Holding on to the word “orchestra” in reference to large Western symphonic ensembles doesn’t mean that these groups should not drastically shift in other ways. Western orchestras, as uncomfortable as it may be to admit for some, uphold and maintain a regime of cultural white supremacy that must be eradicated through programming practices. In a 2023 study from the Institute for Composer Diversity, it was found that over 75% of musical works performed by American orchestras were written by white men.6 While this is a meaningful decrease from the 90% reported in previous years, it still shows that orchestral music remains by and large a “white man’s game.” Antiracism requires active opposition to this exclusionary status quo, and while a “both/and” approach to programming—continuing to program white composers while integrating composers from a more diverse array of backgrounds—is marginally impactful, it’s my belief that orchestras of the future (and present) must center music not written by white men. This act of re-centering, rather than merely integrating non-white and non-male composers into the repertoire, is essential to achieving the cultural shifts necessary to establish orchestral networks that will usher in positive change for the art form, and for society overall. White men don’t make up the global majority; they shouldn’t make up the majority of orchestral programming, either.

Embracing Local Variations

According to data from the League of American Orchestras, there are about 1600 orchestras in operation in the United States today.7 While these ensembles vary in size, financial capacity, and cultural influence, what many of the most successful and influential have in common is the inclusion of their respective community, city, or state in their name. Formed in 1842, the New York Philharmonic is generally considered America’s first professional orchestra, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Cleveland Orchestra established in the decades that followed. One might reasonably assume that this practice of naming orchestras after their (colonial) geographies serves to highlight the unique qualities of these ensembles—New York is a very different city than Cleveland, and their orchestras would presumably reflect those differences in terms of what musics they perform and how they relate to their audiences, and to local communities and institutions.

Unfortunately, the programming and practices of the majority of city and state–named musical institutions fail to embrace the particularities of their local cultures. Instead, they emphasize the orchestra’s cultural proximity to Western Europe, which has, in turn, served as the foundation of Eurocentric conservatory curricula, music education that marginalizes artistic expression from the global majority, and even the general understanding of “classical music” across American society as something esoteric, “high-class,” and inaccessible to the masses—a coded system of musical excellence requiring special, exalted literacies to understand and appreciate. As a step toward shifting this status quo, orchestras must reconsider not only the impact of their geographic proximities to historically underserved individuals and communities, but the meaning of their names. Naming an orchestra after a city or state implies a duty to represent and project that place’s unique features. What makes a performance by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra unique to Memphis? How can the Rochester Philharmonic showcase the culture of Rochester in a way that only its local orchestra can? Is the Philadelphia Orchestra offering programs built from an understanding of what Philadelphians need? These are examples of the questions that should be engaged to build a new norm among orchestras: a network of thought rooted in an exploration of what’s local.

Utilizing local practice and local thought through the orchestral lens can come in many forms, and some of the most forward-thinking ideas come from living composers. In my work with early-career and mid-career composers, I’ve noticed that more music creators are developing works that not just invite, but require, a “hometown spin.” Anne-Marie Akin has developed a work that leaves room for the musical traditions that are most closely aligned with an orchestra’s geography in one section of a piece that she titled, “Toda Emerging from Toyotama Prison,” which was inspired by the history of Nichiren Buddhism and its affiliate organization, the Soka Gakkai International.8 In this passage featuring chorus, the musical score requires that orchestral accompaniment for the chorus match the “local style,” with examples including a Second Line–style accompaniment if the work is performed in New Orleans, or musical accompaniment reminiscent of the rich tradition of East Asian influences in Northern California if the work is presented by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. This approach, of course, requires intentional support not only from living composers, but also programs, initiatives, and infrastructures that help bring early- and mid-career composers to the front of orchestras’ radars. Networks built around orchestra-specific musical works and performances, in turn, can help build a new tradition of audience experiences that are unique to the place and time of a single work. This, coupled with a broader engagement of programming diversity overall, has the potential to completely transform the industry.

A Network of Networks

Instituting change by envisioning the orchestra as an inclusive network is more than an ideological thought experiment; direct, intentional collaboration among orchestral networks is already in practice in the field. Among the orchestras that have utilized networks for decades is the American Composers Orchestra (ACO), a New York–based institution dedicated to the creation, celebration, performance, and promotion of orchestral music by American composers. The ACO not only utilizes its own musicians toward its goals and mission, but partners with other orchestras across the United States and around the world to fund, promote, and perform the music of composers whose work is largely ignored by systems of cultural value practiced and promulgated by traditional institutions. In my role as the Director of Artist Equity, I lead the charge in recruiting composers who are expanding the boundaries around orchestral music, in addition to developing relationships with other orchestral institutions toward the development of partnerships that help support the overall work. These partnerships include the formation of consortia, where a small network of orchestras agree to premiere or perform newly composed works that speak to the cultural sensibilities of today’s society. While the ACO is by no means the only institution that manages commission consortia, it is still in the vast minority of orchestras that foreground this level of teamwork in its daily work. Its partnerships have resulted in the commission, premiere, and performance of over 300 new orchestral compositions to date, with recent collaborators including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Naples Philharmonic in Florida, and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra in Arizona.

If each of America’s 1600 orchestras invested in building and maintaining similar networks, the results would be historic. The performance of new music would be normalized, and orchestras and their constituents would build rapport that has never been seen before, due to the cultural connections and affirmations presented through a more contemporary programmatic lens. A striking example of this, albeit in an opera rather than an orchestra, is the Minnesota Opera’s decision to commission and program The Song Poet,9 a work written from the Hmong perspective which, in turn, created unprecedented community between the organization and an ethnic group that I’ve never seen positioned at the center of Western classical music. Through this rapport-building, communities would have a better understanding of what makes their local orchestra and other orchestras unique. This would, in turn, help identify opportunities for initiative alignment, collective cross-institution responses to societal events, and even a broader engagement of orchestras among individuals in the classical-music field, people adjacent to it, and even those who have never identified an opportunity to become involved.

Consider the COVID-19 pandemic and orchestras’ challenge as institutions that could no longer do their work (in the same way) through quarantine. With greater embeddedness in local networks, and a stronger sense of civic duty as a core aspect of their mission, orchestras across the country could have assisted in food delivery, home care, vaccine education and implementation, and even combating the learning loss and educational disengagement that continue to affect students years after the initial lockdowns. Leveraging this network could have also resulted in the funding and creation of more musical works built to inspire unity and solidarity across society, like Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” which served as an anthem for frontline workers during the early months of the pandemic (and was initially performed virtually, for audiences to enjoy via Zoom).10 By both utilizing local community engagement and leveraging this wider network, orchestras in any locality could have a deeper understanding of the responsibilities they have to society on a micro and macro level and identify, as a network, geographies where the need is highest. Existing organizations like the League of American Orchestras, the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM), and the Regional Orchestra Players’ Association (ROPA) showcase a precedent for infrastructure that builds connections among orchestras. The creation of similar infrastructure—including collectives of orchestral professionals, semiannual convenings among these professionals, and even new institutions whose purpose would be to serve as a “connector” at the intersection of American orchestral capacity and societal need—is what the industry needs for this vision to manifest.

Imagining (and Funding) Networked Orchestras

The intersection of societal needs and an orchestra’s ability to engage those needs isn’t limited to the circumstances of a global pandemic, of course. If I were starting an orchestra today (assuming that I had the immense material resources and access to personnel to make my vision possible), my focus would be on inspiring thought and dialogue around global citizenship, the idea that all human beings have the right to exist. This overarching theme could then apply to more specific issues and events in our society, creating an orchestra that measures its success by its responsiveness to changing social conditions and needs. For example, what does it mean to affirm the right for all human beings to exist within the context of the contemporary challenges in the Middle East, and how can we realize this affirmation orchestrally? By programming music that honors all of the people of that region, recruiting musicians (or other parties) to contribute to the development of concerts aimed to raise awareness and perspective, and investing in activities that serve locally affected communities where they are (as opposed to exclusively in the concert hall setting), this new type of orchestra, in my view, would quickly become an essential part of its community, not just a shiny elite accessory attached to it. Orchestras like The Dream Unfinished, whose programming is forthrightly activist in nature, can serve as inspiring examples of this new approach.11

Funding, of course, plays a pivotal role; developing this work musically entails a head-on engagement of the financial structures that will make it possible. As I have described, most of a contemporary orchestra’s funding comes from contributions and donations from individuals, rather than ticket sales; however, funding from larger institutions, charities, and foundations (at the local level, but also nationally and internationally) also plays a significant role in making the work of orchestras of all kinds possible. My hope is that orchestras of the future, in tandem with identifying and responding to local and societal needs, can develop relationships with funders who are aligned with the overarching narratives and issues that they are interested in tackling. If an orchestra is building programming that, for example, aims to build rapport and improve relations among different local communities, like South Dakota Symphony did in 2005-2008 through their Lakota Music Project,12 it’s important that funders who engage this work outside of the world of orchestral music are a part of the conversation. Once relationships are built between musical organizations and funders who don’t typically engage orchestras, orchestras within networks can “share” these funders. This could create a funding ecosystem oriented toward addressing societal challenges through thoughtfully designed orchestral programs and activities delivered across groups of institutions, rather than a zero-sum race for securing funds to cover the bottom line of a single orchestra. Concurrently, this broader array of funding organizations will be more organically aligned with the work of orchestras overall, and can contribute to developing audiences and promoting orchestral activities at every level, from local to national and global. How would the work of orchestras, and the public meanings attached to classical music, change if major philanthropies like the Gates Foundation, Mastercard Foundation, and Open Society Foundations were engaged with funding orchestral initiatives to support their activities in areas like public health, education, and democracy?

The opportunities for strong, intentional orchestral networks are innumerable; engaging the space between existing orchestras in a collaboratively intentional, results-focused framework will lead to a future that’s profoundly different from the origin of American orchestras, and just may open the doors for broader definitions of “orchestra,” more equitable engagement of audiences, and larger transformations in society. Having worked in the orchestral industry as a musician, promoter, marketer, and general administrator, I’ve found it all too easy to become disillusioned about the future of this tradition. There are countless challenges that orchestras will face in the coming years—social, artistic, and financial—and these challenges won’t go away on their own. I believe that if orchestras consider the ideas and approaches outlined here, there is a chance for their survival. Moreover, if these approaches and engagements can be developed collaboratively, the “orchestras as network” concept can serve as an example to other fields, creating systems that not only serve themselves, but strive to serve everyone.

Notes

• 1 See, for example, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2022 performance with Tank and the Bangas, https://youtu.be/DQiqdSrr61c, and their May 2024 concert with Big Freedia, https://lpomusic.com/event/spektrix/73201AGSCKBTGSBVVPVMMGBMDMVPLHBVG.

• 2 Andrea Suozzo, Alec Glassford and Ash Ngu, and Brandon Roberts, “Los Angeles Philharmonic Association,” Nonprofit Explorer Project, ProPublica, Accessed March 4, 2024, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/951696734.

• 3 Mehdi Punjwani, Bryce Colburn, and Sierra Campbell, “Average Salary in the U.S. in 2024,” USA Today Blueprint, February 22, 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll/average-salary-us.

• 4 “Javanese Gamelan Music,” Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, https://asia.si.edu/explore-art-culture/audio/javanese-gamelan-music.

• 5 For an example of a Minzu Yuetuan performance, see this video of a performance by the China National Traditional Orchestra in 2020, and the accompanying description: https://youtu.be/mdUev3ZLW00.

• 6 Rob Deemer and Cory Meals, Orchestra Repertoire Report 2023 (Institute for Composer Diversity and League of American Orchestras, 2023), https://www.composerdiversity.com/orchestra-repertoire-reports.

• 7 “About Us,” League of American Orchestras, Accessed March 22, 2024, https://americanorchestras.org/about-us.

• 8 For more on the event that inspired Akin’s piece, see Daisaku Ikeda, “‘Letter to the Brothers’—The Soka Gakkai Tradition of ‘Faith for Overcoming Obstacles,’” World Tribune, March 29, 2022, https://www.worldtribune.org/2022/to-our-future-division-members-6.

• 9 The Song Poet, opera based on the novel by Kao Kalia Yang, music by Jocelyn Hagen, libretto by Kao Kalia Yang, presented by the Minneapolis Opera, 2021, https://mnopera.org/season/the-song-poet.

• 10 “Fast Facts: Valerie Coleman, Seven O’Clock Shout,” Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, 2022, https://bpo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Valerie-Coleman-Fact-Sheet.pdf.

• 11 The Dream Unfinished, https://thedreamunfinished.org.

• 12 Lakota Music Project, South Dakota Symphony, https://www.sdsymphony.org/education-community/lakota-music-project.

Enter the Void

The Paradox of Tolerance in an Intolerant World

By Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting…. The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic…”

–Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “On Wisdom,” 1690 CE

What I’m doing here is a bit of a sleight of hand. I’ve taken terms from several areas of theater, music, physics, social and political science and made a collage where you can still get a sense of how they have arrived on the screen in front of you after several thousand years and still have a resonant meaning.

This essay is a collage. Remix it as you wish.

The Greeks, the Orchestra, and the Social Meanings of Harmony

The word “orchestra” comes to us from the ancient Greek theater term orkhḗstra (ὀρχήστρα). It’s a spatial reference to a semicircular area in front of the stage where the chorus danced. In fact, the root of the phrase comes from the Greek word orkheisthai, which simply means “to dance.” If we fast-forward to the era of Imperial Rome, the Greek term evolved into our more familiar Latin spelling, “orchestra,” and it came to mean “the place in front of the stage where prominent people are seated.” You can see a transition in language take place that encompasses architectural space, social hierarchy, and the relationship between the chorus and the main events of the theater. In other words, the “orchestra” idea moves us directly to a sense of tuning systems, the mathematics of sound, and how we organize a large group of people to play together. You can think of the orchestra as a recombinant logic where tuning systems, social interaction, and a theater of sound all converge into a kind of praxis—an applied sensibility of sound, technology, and information put into motion as a reflection of social practices. One could argue that the orchestra is a kind of essay, an attempt to explore ideas in sound, a collective expression distilled into an acoustic portrait.

The other words we can explore here are also derived from the Greek: “symphony” means essentially an “agreement in sound,” and “philharmonic” derives from the Greek terms philos (love) and harmonikos (harmony)—the root term for “harmonics,” or wave forms that make up the body of a sound. Think about it this way: every form of music is a social construct made of different kinds of resonances, symmetries, and harmonic arrangements and structures that societies created to show their own unique characteristics, which in turn reflected whatever essential qualities they felt originate in the social process of pattern formation. It’s kind of amazing how much we owe to this sensibility of pattern recognition as a foundation of modern life. It’s a method of expressing the complexity of all the issues that go into how we think about pattern recognition, and the uncanny sense of searching for meaning in a rapidly changing world.

It’s here that I want to look at the combined sensibility of philosophy and how we organize sound. Again—terms: philosophy and philharmony have the same root term. Philos means love. Philosophy is the love of knowledge. Philharmony is the love of sound. Let’s look under the hood, so to speak, of the complex machinery of a modern philosophy of sound and explore some of the themes that come to mind when we are asked: is an orchestra a network?

Karl Popper and the Cosmopolitans vs. Conspiracy Theories

Quick: what’s the difference between Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, and Karl Popper? The folks at the beginning of the list were all major scientists involved with quantum mechanics, relativity, and many other major themes in physics, and the latter was a world-renowned philosopher of science whose political ideals overlapped many of the scientists who were influenced by his thinking. From a political perspective, these people championed a vision for how science could be used for the good, and how it should be shared, rather than a closed-model approach that fetishized a closed world view. They were cosmopolitans, and their views reflected an open and freewheeling sense of dialog and social engagement. It’s a worldview that is needed now more than ever. Let me explain.

Karl Popper was one of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers. With his theory of “empirical falsification,” and his investigations into the truth/falseness of scientific theories, he laid the groundwork for a more robust engagement between science and facts, and explored how our framing of scientific concepts affects the way we live. Along with other titans of the twentieth century like Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Hayek, Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he altered the course of philosophy, and in turn, the foundations of the way we think of ideas in the twenty-first century. Popper popularized the term “conspiracy theory” in one of his early books, The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in 1945,1 and one of his most famous students, George Soros, took his philosophy to the world of finance and global philanthropy. Popper popularized the term “conspiracy theory”—it’s this idea that really puts him on the twenty-first century culture wars map.

But what does this have to do with music? Let’s explore. The term “conspiracy” derives from the Latin con (“with, together”) and spirare (“to breathe”)—it’s kind of like a survival strategy based on rapid mutations. Science proceeds on replication. If someone makes a claim or a discovery, the research needs to be replicated. But if you limit what people can see, hear, or express, everything suffers. So too with creativity. The first thing the Nazis did when they took power was to reconfigure the cultural landscape and demonize Jews, Blacks, gay people, and many others with the term entartekunst, which means “degenerate art.” They also used the word entartemusik, “degenerate music.” The goal of deploying these terms was to lock down and limit what Germans could see, hear, and experience. So too with literature and all arts. Popper’s book was written as a reaction to the cognitive dissonance he saw course through a society that had been torn apart at every level, from the brushstrokes on a painting to the tuning systems used to create music.

Patching the Cultural Operating System

The ideas Popper championed are essential to interrogating the flaws in the data-driven information ecosystems we inhabit in the twenty-first century. In a sense he asks, is there a patch for the system errors that plague our modern society’s sense of inquiry—its cultural operating system? He asks: what if it wasn’t an error at all?

In his last book, The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (1994),2 Popper described the role of science as creating a clearer window into the deeper realities of our existence. “I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.” Maybe this is an update of the idea of “dialectic” that philosophers like Socrates and Hegel advocated for. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. These are classic visions of a recombinant logic that mirrors our collage-based, data-driven era.

It’s clear and direct thinking like this, along with his rigorous questioning of the foundations of science based on a deep inquisition into empirical knowledge, that made Popper’s place in the pantheon of major twentieth-century thinkers. In the twenty-first century, we need more like him. A lot more.

The first quarter of the twenty-first century is an era of “magical thinking” best summarized by the infamous 2002 pronouncement from U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”3 This kind of postmodern pastiche would have set Popper’s hair on fire, with good reason: the fallacy embedded in the Rumsfeldian view has taken us from a world governed by liberal democracy and proof-based reasoning to a society driven by the fever dreams of right-wing media, science denial, and a global information pandemic on top of a biological pandemic so severe that, even as they die from COVID-19, ideologues continue to believe the virus or vaccines are a hoax. In information theory, there’s always a fine-edged attenuation between signal and noise. Everything stems from this—the internet, music, signals intelligence during wartime. You can ask a soldier wielding a drone in Ukraine fighting the Russians if they would be able to filter Russian signals for their drones into usable information, and you can see the life-or-death intensity of how the challenge of discerning signal from noise shapes our modern era.

Popper would have felt that Rumsfeld’s adage was a phrase taken from the annals of ancient lyric poetry, or the Pyrrhonian skeptics of fourth century BCE Greece, rather than a computer- and data-driven twenty-first century information-based society on the edge of the Global War on Terror. But twenty-plus years after 9/11, here we are. Basically, let’s put it this way: the weirder things get, the more relevant Karl Popper becomes.

The Paradox of Tolerance

There’s no question that we live in extreme times. Economic inequality, the climate crisis, mass extinctions—you name it—have made us numb to the radical changes going on around us every day. But some of the main driving forces of our time make these scenarios even more intense—and that is where we get into the feedback loops and ideological frames of reference that amplify so much of what is going wrong. Karl Popper also coined the term “the Paradox of Tolerance” in his 1945 opus The Open Society and its Enemies:

I do not imply…that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument.

The message resonates now in a very different way from how it landed in the mid-twentieth century. But think of this as an opening salvo at the beginning of the Cold War. From 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the definitive scenario was a competition between economic structures where science could give a competitive advantage to whichever country maximized its research and development.

It goes without saying that the twentieth century was shaped by the Cold War. Many of the technologies we use today are derived from the various wars of the twentieth century. From the Internet itself to things like GPS, encryption, satellites, nuclear energy, and the vast data archives that hold modern society together—you can easily connect the dots and link them to the legacy of the Cold War and the artifacts it left behind. But the problem I’m pointing out in this essay is a connection between those artifacts that exist physically and those that exist in the cognitive realm, reflecting our current ideological landscape where science is denied at so many levels. The pandemic we’ve been experiencing for the last couple of years isn’t just a biological phenomenon—it’s an ideological one as well. And we can see its implications overlap with social media, hyper-partisan politics, and the crisis of authenticity we face in 2024 and beyond.

Algorithms and the Propagation of Willful Ignorance

Today, Popper’s paradox pushes us to ask: is there a vaccine for willful ignorance? Can we give society tools to reengineer our ideas about how science informs culture? Where scientists like Richard Dawkins were able to conceptualize concepts like the “meme” in biology,4 the Internet has turned them into an entire visual economy based on things like NFTs (non-fungible tokens), backed by blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Algorithms drive all aspects of our data-driven society, whether we like it or not.

The term algorithm was derived from the name of the ninth-century mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, whose name was Latinized as Algoritmi. He came up with the concept while he was in residence at the legendary academy The House of Wisdom in Baghdad. From the ninth century, we move to the modern concept of the algorithm, with attempts to solve the concept of Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) by mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann in 1928.5 We move into a time-delayed version of the Butterfly Effect, wherein a small development in mathematics altered the entire course of modern civilization. So from A to B and back again, we move in a non-binary logic tree that reinforces a network of affinities over and over and over. Repeat.

The recommendation engines of most social media platforms have driven people into a delirious sense of suspended belief in facts and information. We continuously map one metaphor onto the other: biological, ideological, visual, conceptual. It’s almost as if we have moved into a convergent cultural milieu where science has become a hall of mirrors in a deeply politicized landscape, and the other perspective available is a kaleidoscopic broken mirror reflecting back a haunted and destroyed landscape.

Amidst the ongoing climate crisis, right-wing misinformation literally creates life-and-death struggles to get clear information. A recent study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University examined the social psychology of several recent Presidential elections through the prism of language, digital media, and television networks.6 As an example of the polarization of both ideology and psychology, it was illuminating. The two main cable news networks—MSNBC and Fox News—operated at radically different poles of the political and social spectrum, and they used linguistic reinforcement to create tableaux where their viewers experienced the news as an emotional platform. Using natural language analysis, the researchers quantified core psychosocial and sociopolitical indexes of more than 50,000 Fox News and MSNBC transcripts and televised content of over 280 million words for the 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections. The results were depressingly obvious: each community was triggered by words that reinforced what media theorist Eli Pariser calls a “filter bubble.”7

The digital age is characterized by an insatiable appetite for energy, and more and more data centers are being built every year. We live in an era where computational narratives inform all aspects of modern life, and that means we live in a world of math. The problem with numbers is that they can be made to mean many things. A simple manipulation can change data visualizations and create radically different impressions of the information. A cropped image can result in totally different emotional responses to the material on view. How we look at the world depends on our ideological lenses, which in turn color the policies that we go on to support. But what makes this even more intriguing is that it overlaps with how we think of being a composer and artist in the twenty-first century.

Composition: Wagner, the Gesamkunstwerk, and Endless Melodies

The term gesamkunstwerk—roughly translated, a “total work of art,” one which unites multiple forms in a cohesive whole—was popularized by composer Richard Wagner in his 1849 essays “Art and Revolution” and “The Artwork of the Future.”8 He was grappling with issues that now go straight to the heart of our paradoxical relationship with the power of the “invisible” data-driven world we inhabit, and the dystopian way we look at the crisis of truth described by Karl Popper. It’s a heady and surreal way to approach the cultural landscape of our time, but hear me out.

Obviously, a composer doesn’t need to read a scientific theory to make music, but the idea of creating a forum where people exchange ideas and information as part of a dynamic creative process is a tantalizingly good start for getting us out of the hole we have dug with the filter bubbles we generate around whatever issue we explore these days.

The composer at the eye of the proverbial storm here is Richard Wagner. Wagner’s relationship with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche altered the course of nineteenth-century philosophy, and enabled a mythopoetic dimension in politics that later inspired Adolf Hitler.

Hitler felt the Third Reich needed an organizing principle and that the society should be harmonized with him, of course, as the conductor. In this context, we can approach Wagner as a metaphor for the software of the society, and for the rewiring of the way people thought of sound and society as a new cultural paradigm of Germany and Nazism. The music reference is undeniable. Some examples: each of the main concentration camps created orchestras of “prisoner-musicians” and forced them to play while fellow prisoners were marched to the gas chambers. After the “false flag” operation the Nazis used as an excuse to invade Poland, they took over the radio stations and played anti-German music, using that as an excuse to continue the invasion. And so on.

Eerily enough, the Third Reich was one of the most active governments of the twentieth century on environmental issues. The Nazis had soldiers plant trees, created the largest nature park conservations in Europe, idealized sustainable forestry, limited air pollution, and championed the Autobahn highway network as a vector to align Germans closer to nature. But at the end of the day, their ideology was derived from a massive distortion of the intersection of Nietzsche and Wagner. Wagner, it can be argued, has inspired a series of ultra-right-wing movements, from Hitler to the twenty-first century mercenary group literally named after him: The Wagner Group.9

Ideology and sound are always reflections of one another. We think of noise and silence as emptiness, but they are filled with complexities. Wagner as a theoretician and composer met his foil in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose 1889 masterpiece essay “Nietzsche contra Wagner” describes the subtle threat of Wagner’s concept of “endless melody.”10 I think it’s so intriguing to see this and think of music as a facet of the network society, not to mention an update to how we think of the gesamtkunstwerk in the twenty-first century. From Wagner to virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, XR, extended reality, social media and beyond, you can easily connect the dots.

Combating the Digital Unheimlich

If Wagner is one of the originators of the idea of “the virtual” in sound, then Freud is his handmaiden, and the legacy of this notion of “absolute art” that Wagner championed influenced so many approaches to culture. Think of Star Wars—the film and its soundtrack, composed by John Williams, are deeply reminiscent of Wagner with his orchestration, leitmotifs, and melodies—or the way we think of the boundaries between art and everyday life blurring and fading into unrecognizable motifs that reflect a kind of hall of mirrors in digital life. This is a “human condition” of the digital era—we are all motifs in a symphony of data and algorithms unfolding in an artwork no one knows we exist in. Very Matrix-adjacent. This is the new approach to Wagner’s concept of “absolute musik” and gesamtkunstwerk—the entire digital media landscape. Think of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, literature, drama, or film as reflections of this paradox of how we can think of the symphony in modern life in a data-driven society. Freud brought the term unheimlich into vogue with his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” colliding head-on with horror and invoking deeply uncertain tropes like inanimate objects coming to life, ghosts, and the notion of the “double” (doppelgänger). Freud’s work translates across media like literature, art, and cinema as our “uncanny” sense of post-human imagination. Yet in our modern era, it is the unheimliche that resonates with concepts of AI, bots, and the growing desolation of the Internet. The “dead Internet theory” posits that most activity online is automatically generated by bots, algorithms, and data-driven curation—and that it marginalizes human activity.11 Eerily, according to most accounts, 2024 will be the year with the most elections in modern history, with more than 60 countries representing half the world’s population voting.12

Many of these contests will see AI-generated “fake” content and misinformation used for political gain—a trend that has gone into fever pitch. We now need authentic engagement more than ever. One of my favorite thinkers is Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), a tenth-century Arabic scholar who is generally considered one of the first theoretical physicists and the inventor of what we now call the scientific method. Ibn al-Haytham was born in modern-day Iraq around 965 CE, and his idea of the scientific method consisted of repeating a cycle of observation, experimentation, and hypothesis, with the necessity of independent verification. He is alleged to have once said, “If learning the truth is the scientist’s goal… then he must make himself the enemy of all that he reads.” He meant that it’s essential to make experiments to test what is written and question received wisdom, rather than blindly accepting it as true. I guess you can call it “critical thinking,” and it’s something we need now more than ever.

In a world that denies the science of vaccines, and that mistrusts so many things that are based on science, we need better tools for critical thinking. The unsettling thing about our current moment is that we are at the pinnacle of human achievement in the sciences, yet people yearn for its nadir. Up is down, down is up. It’s a pas de deux of ideological stepdances. One step forward, ten steps back. This kind of entangled and torturous path creates a paradox of time and space in the culture we inhabit, where governance itself is part of the seamless process of communication about how society can and should function. Sadly, the loudest voice in the room usually wins.

The Symphony of Everyone

In her 1958 book The Human Condition, the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt reflected on the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War nuclear arms race that came after, and theorized that new kinds of information and knowledge were critical to keep the world from marching on a relentless path of destruction.13 This kind of knowledge is not the purview of professional scientists or professional politicians, but requires an interdisciplinary approach to how we can rethink the role of science in everyday life. Let’s break epistemological limits and see what’s on the other side. There’s a great observation at the beginning of the book where she writes, “it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.” Needless to say, she never watched Fox News.

The physicist Richard Feynman famously wrote, “No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated.”14 It’s an insight that’s incredibly resonant with Karl Popper’s from his Open Society (the same book that notoriously popularized the term “conspiracy theory”) that “the future depends on ourselves.” It’s a simple but powerful indictment of our time through the lens of history—one that we ignore at our peril.

For me, Hannah Arendt is the locus point here. She wrote in her 1961 essay “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance” that the arts were an untimely meditation on our mass-produced society of spectacle, and “the common element connecting art and politics is that they are phenomena of the public world.”15 For us, this “public world” is the digital commons. For Arendt, “culture” relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life. Update, expand, reify.

Recycle. Renew. Repeat. Think of that as an update of what Popper was speaking about and what Nietzsche expressed. All before digital media and the kaleidoscopic century we live in. When asked “what is a symphony?” I can only reply: the symphony is you. It is me. And everything in between. The tolerance I wrote of to start this essay is an acceptance of the myriad possibilities that become available once we move beyond the narrow confines of the definition of orchestra. Think of it as a manifesto of a theater of the mind where anything and everything is possible. Let’s remix it all.

Notes

• 1 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, 1945).

• 2 Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (Routledge, 1994).

• 3 “DoD News Briefing – Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers,” U.S. Department of Defense Press Operations, February 12, 2022, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20160406235718/http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636.

• 4 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976).

• 5 David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann, Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik (Springer-Verlag, 1928).

• 6 Kevin Lanning, Geoffrey Wetherell, Evan A. Warfel, and Ryan L. Boyd, “Changing Channels? A Comparison of Fox and MSNBC in 2012, 2016, and 2020,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 21, no. 1 (2021): 149-174, https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12265.

• 7 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (Penguin, 2011).

• 8 English translations of both of these essays by Wagner appear in the volume Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, translated by William Ashton Ellis (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893). A digitized version is available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/cu31924022322485.

• 9 For more on the influence of Richard Wagner on The Wagner Group, see Alex Ross, “Deciphering the Wagner Group’s Love for Wagner,” The New Yorker, September 2, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/deciphering-the-wagner-groups-love-for-wagner.

• 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner (C. G. Naumann, 1889). Project Gutenberg offers a free digitized version of the essay as part of the collection The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici (T. N. Foulis, 1911), at https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/25012.

• 11 For commentary on the dead Internet theory, see Yoshija Walter, “Artificial Influencers and the Dead Internet Theory,” AI & Society (2024), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01857-0.

• 12 Bryan Walsh, “2024 is the Biggest Global Election Year in History,” Future Perfect, Vox, January 3, 2024, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/1/3/24022864/elections-democracy-2024-united-states-india-pakistan-indonesia-european-parliament-far-right-voting.

• 13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958).

• 14 Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist (Addison-Wesley, 1998).

• 15 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance,” in Between Past and Future (Viking, 1961).