ARTHUR BERGER
379
Of course, the most serious need is for the presence of performers
of professional caliber on the campus to play our music and that of
the students. While there was a time when I was apprehensive of the
professional school atmosphere that might result from undertaking
responsibility for student performance, I feel now that this too is
essential along with professional performance.
It
is an area in which
we can profit by emulating the conservatories, without turning into
conservatories ourselves. It is a way of shifting emphasis from the
accumulation of facts to the apprehension of qualities. Educational
policy committees that regard this sort of thing as manual training
should be made
to
understand its function as being comparable to
that of science laboratories. It is utopian, of course, to expect
anything as impractical as music to get the subsidy that laboratories
have, and there is no doubt that such performances on the campus
will need considerable subsidy. But it is not inconceivable, provided
that enough people were convinced that serious music is powerfully
threatened and is worth saving. Consider, for example, the Wood–
stock audience, and how dwarfed we are next to it. Also, reviews of
rock, jazz, and so on, arrogate space formerly consigned to longhair
music in the press. Go on from there to the so called "serious"
concert world with - according to Virgil Thomson-its "fifty
pieces" that are popular enough by now
to
qualify as mass culture.
Coppock:
How do you feel about Stravinsky's warning to young
composers
to
stay away from university teaching?
Berger:
Stravinsky objected to the conformity that academicism engen–
ders, and it shou ld be obvious that I object
to
this conformity as
much as he did. But I'm optimistic enough to believe that the
university can be made to understand that if it wants the fine arts,
there is an extent to which it must accept them on their own terms–
and conformity is not one of those terms. My impression is that
much energy is consumed by intradepartmental struggles to reach
agreement upon uniform requirements where flexibility is not only
more faithful
to
the subject matter, but more favorable to preparing
the student for the creative life ahead.
