Robert Shaw interview

Thank you for being here, ladies and gentlemen. It's a genuine pleasure to welcome you and to anticipate this hour with you together. If we were to start now and talk fast, we wouldn't be able to say all of the things that could and should be said about our guest today. On the time that he started the Robert Shaw Corral in 1949, that organization has become a household word in the world, and he has done so many things in music internationally, brought the Atlantis Symphony to a position of eminence in the orchestral world. And I'm not going to try and go on and on with this. I could. And it would be nice to hear again. One interesting aspect of his residency with us so far and the delight we have in that as it unfolds is his athleticism.

And I was taken with that to say I was in the back of the hall and Dr. Shaw was surrounded by stands at the end of a rehearsal and couldn't get off the stage very easily. So Dr. Bowton was down on the floor of the auditorium here and Mr. Shaw's turn and just took Bud's hand, stepped down onto a stool and hop down onto the floor and walked away. He did that. It was no problem at all, but Bowton almost fainted. We know him for his musical expertise primarily, an interesting and rewarding aspect of his background and training was brought to our attention last time he was with us in 1977 when he gave a memorable presentation on the poetry of the war Requiem, the work that we had on

the preparation that he conducted with us in that occasion. And his background in literature and philosophy, in religion and those areas qualify him eminently to speak to us on a variety of things. Today he is going to address some comments to worship and music religion in the arts. So it's a great pleasure to welcome and present to you Mr. Robert Shaw. Dr. Mathis, members of the faculty of the College of Fine Arts and the School of Music and Members of the Orchestra and choruses of these weeks rehearsals and performance and ladies and gentlemen, fellow students, good morning.

The Secretary of the Conductor Laureate of the Atlanta Symphony for years has had a fired a warning shot across the bow of any institution foolish enough to request his public discourse. Mr. Shaw, she says, only opens his mouth to change his socks. There have been, of course, years of obligatory speeches before volunteer organizations of symphony supporters, but one has the uneasy feeling in such instances that these smiling earnest absolutely essential people are pursuing culture in groups because it's too dangerous to meet it alone. Let me say flat out that in somewhat more than half a century of working with musical organizations and what by now surely must be reckoned as a majority of this country's major universities, I never have been in an educational community so apparently free of personal rivalries, jealousies and antagonisms. So unselfishly committed to

the beauties and lightenments of the music itself and so graciously respectful and supportive of one's musical collaborators, students and or faculty. It is not merely that the preparation of the instrumental and vocal forces have been of the highest technical quality. It is that these disciplines, handsomely schooled and chewed by doctors, bout and glassmen, techer and polins, have been also a family of performers who encourage one another and seek by an uncommon community to probe those areas of music's communications which lie beyond musical analysis, technical competence and words. Our program Saturday night is made up of two 20th-century symphonic choral works, both of which have religious texts. One is the Latin Mass for the Dead which has four centuries has been central to liturgical Christianity and two, a setting of fragments of the Hebrew

Psalms which ultimately of course found their way into the Christian scriptures. We undertake this musical and therefore inescapably religious quest in a specifically secular environment, as though in spite of the constitutionally prescriptions of the separation of church and state. And it seems to me right that we should do so, for at the same time all of us, in some sense or another, are religious persons. Perhaps most of all, those of us who find themselves uncomfortable inside contemporary religious institutions, there must scarcely be one of us who could not feel at home with the prayer of the American Indian of the great plains. A man from the earth am I have mercy on me, thou whoever from above, the great unknown. It occurs to me that my entire life has been a shifting, shuffling, overlapping and re-evaluating

of what used to be in my youth well-formed areas and well-fenced areas called sacred and secular. For instance, I feel that human relationships like those resident in this study and performance of great works of musical art have acquired somehow a kind of holiness. And on the other hand, I find that the aesthetic and philosophical effluence which flushes out of the TV tube on Sunday mornings is a frightening, here-religious obscenity. I am horrified that children in the courses of the public schools in the state of California are denied the priceless intellectual and aesthetic stimulation of singing an ovos omnis by Tomas Luis de Vittoria, because it has a text from this music from the period of Renaissance, which Paul Hindemann declared in his Harvard Norton lectures to be the greatest musical achievement of Western civilization. Will you then forgive me

if I undertake this morning to consider some of the relationships between the arts and religions? Be sure that I do not claim any ministerial authorities. I wouldn't touch your personal theology, but I do have a concern which surely most of us share for the meanings of human life and for those activities and pursuits which give life meaning. I suppose there's not a person in this room who does not have a favorite cartoon. Mine of the moment in my pictorial text in the day is one by Doug Marlette, recently of the Atlanta editorial pages, but public money was with the Charlotte Observer. It shows a man dressed in a hunter's coat and cap, holding a smoking rifle, standing on a ladder at the edge of a snow-covered roof. By the chimney a day is drained airing in an open sack, gathered presents, and the lifeless form of sata claws across the ridge pole. Hot dam is now the hunter's claws to a woman looking out a second story window. Hot dam,

I got me another speculative humanist. To be these humanist hunters really are man-haters who forget to humanize a minute's beginnings with intimately linked with the adjective Christian, precisely because it's due to your Christian heritage, propose the concern for the sanctity and potential of human personality. And the sad fact is that it is mostly contemporary religious institutions, principle among them the electronic church, which not only have managed to debase the term humanism, but humanity along with it. For the arts and human creativity never have been more important. They are not simply skills. Their concern is the intellectual, ethical, and spiritual maturity of human life. And in the time when popular religious and political institutions may have lost their sense of the visions of human dignity or even propriety, they are the custodians of those values

which most worthy define humanity, which most sensitively divine divinity, and in fact may prove to be the only workable program of conservation for the human race on this planet. What is it in the arts that can hold these gifts in store for men and women willing to seek their understandings and undertake their disciplines? I find four factors. In the first place, the arts are the most persistent and powerful affirmation of the life force in the man thing. Then sex, their genetic reaches longer by centuries and by oceans. I descend into one of the limestone caves near our farmhouse in France to examine by 20th century electric light the drawings of bulls and bison horses and deer sketched by one of my forebears 25,000 years before Christ sketched in what degrees of darkness with what kinds of tools for whom

the view that drawings snare no rabbits, arpoon no fish, grub no roots. I am told that these early artists did not even live in this cave, but that it was a primitive temple and their drawings were offerings of thanks, sacred to their sources of food and life. I note that a few of the animals are clearly male and wounded by arrows and spears, but most are female and pregnant. And I ask myself if the mysteries of life and death were less or more mysterious than they are two hundred and seventy centuries later. At a museum in Milan, I pause at a piece of a trusskin ceramic sculpture, a miniature human skull a size of my fist with two fingers groping out through the eye holes. This is roughly only twenty five hundred years old, but I can't recall any painting sculpture a poem of the last

seventy five years, nine months, and twenty days, which so disturbingly evoked to me the human hunger for knowledge. I recall the voices of my father and my grandfather announcing from their pulpits on Christmas mornings that the word was made flesh, and the reciprocal truth strikes me that it is possible for matter to become spirit, that the arts are the flesh become word, and for me that is no less empirical and no less divine. Second, facing the infinite variety and complexity of earth's materials and the human sensory systems, the arts testify to the ability of the human brain to select and to reject, to relate and to combine, and finally to achieve order and beauty. Are there a billion, billion ways to organize the words of the English language, but there was a Shakespeare. Are there a trillion, trillion ways to organize simultaneous and sequential pitches, but there was a Mozart. How many miles of zeros

would it take to number all of the earth's building materials and the forms in which they might conceivably be combined, but there was a Leonardo, and out of the infinity of substances and sensations, out of confusion and chaos, emerge in perfect sequence symmetry and breathtaking recognizability. King Lear, a G minor symphony, a cathedral at sharp, the Lord is my shepherd. When I consider the heavens the wonders though has created what is man that thou art mindful of him, well not all together bad. Third, the earth provides for the exchange of ideas and values otherwise uncommunicable by alphabets or numbers or equations or fronts. The reason that I'll reaction to a Beethoven quartet or El Greco's Toledo cannot be described is that the arts are not superfluous. They exist to convey that which cannot otherwise be conveyed. I don't know nothing

about art, but I know what I like is the cliche attributed in derision to the presumed unwashed, almost always by those still damp behind the ears, and it's a cheap shot. Offstage in an Anchorage High School auditorium, a well-weathered woman of uncertain years waits for the students' programs to be signed. This is at a time when Alaska has more light air planes than automobiles and more miles of unpaved landing strips than a paved road, and she's just listened to the first Alaskan performance of Mozart's last piece, the Requiem. This is the only Mozart I've ever heard, she says, and I don't speak no Latin, but I had a child who died last winter. Thank you very much. The truth is that it does not require a graduate degree in musicology or art history to what they call appreciate great art. What it does require is equal parts of modesty and vulnerability, and a preference for the small truth over the big lie. The arts will come all the way to us

if we but give them a chance. And fourth, the cross boundaries of time and space, the arts are an open hand instead of a closed fist. That painter in his cave at Lusco had sharpened his arrows and his spears for food, not for piercing the infidel. His eyes spotted from the spoke of his pitch torches, not from the burnings of heretics or books. His message is very clear. The days of the hunter are numbered, but the years of the artist stretch on and on as long as the mysteries of life and death. Good luck. One has the taste to draw even the smallest cloud across the celebrations and euphoria of a desert victory, but do we deceive ourselves if we reckon the cost in human life only in our own casualties? Somewhere they're counting the lives in the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

Somewhere there are brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers with whom we still have to learn to live. The arts may indeed be the last best hope for human life on this planet. Well then what about religion and the arts? We obviously have to address two questions. First, what should be the contributions and the responsibilities of the arts to public worship? And second, what are the responsibilities of religious institutions, the church, to the arts? For the sake of practicality, let us agree that by public worship, we mean the mainstream of religious services as we find them in American churches of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the 20th century, knowing full well that we are emitting as many private and personal ways of worship as there are people and deities. And moreover, let us grant at the outset that the Christian Church, whatever its failings, has been the inspiration and custodian of the arts

throughout most of the history of Western civilization. One might ask the not altogether impertinent question whether in the next century it might not be the function of the arts to return that favor to help restore the church to human dignity and divine purpose. And therefore, first, what are the responsibilities of the arts to worship? Number one, it seems to me that we have to agree that only the best is good enough. One does not sharpen his sensibilities to infinite goodness by stuffing his ears with mediocrity. One does not gain strength for the terrifying stresses of virtue by gorging his muscles on anxious fraud. A god of truth, goodness and mercy is not honored by laying Saturday nights Disco's top 20 on Sunday's altar. God is not worshiped. He is only mocked. That raises a few questions on what grounds and upon whose authority are we to judge what is worthy and what is worthless

for worship. May not one man who sacred-headed be another's old rugged cross. I suggest you that this dilemma is more apparent than real, and that it can be solved by common sense, good manners, and a healthy combination of humility and industry, which are at least upon no in the obligation to matriculate at a school of the arts. Consider four criteria which could help dis-evaluation. The first is that of motivation. Let's admit that purity of purpose dignifies. Not every continent's straddling evangelist is in Elmer Gantry. And similarly, 10,000, how great the artists are not irreprovably doomed for chanting softly and tenderly in Madison's screw garden. I can recall returning to my father's little yellow brick church when San Diego was still half navy and half wet-back. After my second exposure to the Bach passions in Contales, to hear my mother and grandmother sing in parallel thirds and sixth, there were 99 that

safely lay in the shelter of the fold. And tears started. With how much greater an experience it might have been had we been able to study and perform just halfway, competently together, Bach's passion according to St. Matthew. Purity of purpose dignifies, but not all tears attest to equally deep springs of sorrow. But try to escape that cancerous explosion whose purpose is not so pure. I quote Sunday headlines from Atlanta, positive pop puts Christian radio in the mainstream. It's one of the fastest growing formats in radio and reflects bigger budgets than a move to top professionalism, countering the sincere amateurism that marked the early years. And these lines that lay it right on Madison Avenue, there would have been a market 10 years ago if there had been a product. To cross over into the marketplace you got to take the cross over. And he looked around and said to his disciples, how hard it will be for those who have

riches to enter the kingdom of heaven. And making a whip out of cord, he drove them all with a sheep in the oxen and out of the temple. And he poured out the coins of the money changers and he overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, you shall not make my father's house, a house of trade. A second criterion must be craftsmanship. Music is a craft and it has rules and standards, but with uncomfortable limits these are knowable. We do not ask that every anthem or hymn be an unassailable masterpiece, but it ought at least to have the mortar, brick foundations, and girders specified in the contract. Great text and great music simply do not meet in Las Vegas or the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue. The contemporary plague of how great thou art and its prototype, the Lord's Prayer, cannot for long obscure the fact that they sound better on broadways than in Bethlehem. There must be little in our national life so frightening, as the Sunday Spectacular's of bigotry and contempt for men's minds so proudly exhibited by

televangelism. Christianity pre-packaged and pre-digested in a succession of monologues and commercials, starring that grinning lovable photogenic cradle boss everybody knows and big daddy in the skies. These have to be a flat out burlesque of Jesus' compassion for the sufferings of men. In the third place art and music worthy of worship will have an historical perspective. They will have origins which may in time even lead to originality. This criterion is very close to what we mean by style and it adds the motivation and craftsmanship, the increments of heritage and tradition. This does not preclude but embraces the rich legacy of full hymns, carols, and spirituals. Their tunes and texts lovingly turned and polished by generations of unintentional composers, nameless amateurs who love their God and sought to praise him. But then once in a very great while

we may come across a sculpture of building or a piece of music which is indeed a revelation. Evidence not only of the creator's capacity to order his experience but even more importantly to have had his experience. And of course that is the fourth and final criterion, the creative miracle of revelations, a cathedral at Shart or Coventry, St. Mary's in San Francisco, Bach's mass in B minor Stravinsky symphony of Psalms, Britain's war Requiem, perhaps in some respects Duraflay's Requiem and Bernstein's Psalms. For of course the revelations themselves set the standards. We do not set the standards. Exposure becomes acquaintance and acquaintance becomes communion and finally we begin to understand what an active worship really is and what it acts of us, asks of us. Well when it is right worship is a heart wrenching soul

searing mind stretching and generally exhausting experience one should not be asked to check his mind at the door should someone accidentally get him to the church in time. Which of the commandments is the first one of all? And he answered the Lord, our God is one and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. And he did not say all of your heart most of your soul and let's see about half of your mind. What finally shall we say then is the religion or church's responsibility to the arts. It seems to me that any institution and churches run the same risks as symphony orchestras, banks, universities and governments, any institution runs the risk of becoming set in its ways, rigid in its policies and doctrine, hard in the arteries and soft in the head. And my guess is this that in a world growing denser in population and poorer in sources of energy,

we inevitably will have stricter political and economic organization in order to provide sufficient food, housing, and occasional comforts. And in this sort of world the creative arts will loom as the breath of life in a weary land. But even more importantly for me at least, the arts be provided the day by day confirmation of a creator's hand still at work in the lives and the affairs of men. If the Christian church can accept the doctrine of eternal life and most of it does, does it not follow that this life is somehow a part of that eternal one, eternity being indivisible and having no beginning and no end? And would not that mean that all life in the universal eternal sense of which ours may be a small part, all life must be a becoming. I'm not arguing Genesis vs. Evolution, what's a few million years to infinity? I'm simply suggesting that if there is a Judeo-Christian creator or a god of life and love,

he, she, or it, white, brown, or black, somehow, somewhere, some when, must be doing exactly that, living, loving, and creating. And however we may view creation, it strikes me as contrary to both reason and faith to attempt to argue that it is concluded. Surely it is short-sighted to raise up an eternal omnipotent creator and give him nothing to do since day six. Surely an everlasting creator must be somewhere lasting and creating. And if indeed humanity was made in that image after that likeness, male and female, not hetero-homoby, but both simultaneously, talk about it for rights, if indeed men and women were made in that image given a timeless, boundless creator, what a better place to see the creator at work than in those who were made in that likeness. And to me it follows that the church that wants to keep in touch with a creator

must provide a home for all that is and all who are creative, lest the church itself wither and drift into their relevance. Basic to the responsibility of the church and the Judeo-Christian tradition are the presentation and interpretation of ancient evidences of God's creative process. But is it not also equally important to recognize whenever and wherever they occur, the creator's continuing manifestations and celebrate the fruits of a holy spirit still at work in today's fleeting fraction of times continuum. Now some of you may have heard me say some of these things through the years, but let me add a somewhat more recent and cautionary coda. Seeking of vacation home away from home, a few years ago our family restored a couple of abandoned 18th-century farm buildings at the edge of a small town in a southwest of France. The village of Kuzu has about two dozen families and it is set on a somewhat arid plateau

dotted with oaks and pines and natural grasses which for centuries have been used for the grazing of sheep. It is not unlike some of the higher parts of Arizona or New Mexico, except that a morning's walk or a few minutes drive will get you to the Dodonia River whose flood plains have a rich fertility similar to those of the San Joaquin Valley of California. On a summer's day two years ago we journeyed a couple of hours south to the city of Aldi for a visit to its cathedral. The cathedral of Aldi dates from the 13th century, perhaps 300 years before Columbus discovery of America. It is set high on a bluff above the Tarn River which in width and surrounding is not unlike some stretches of the Missouri. Its size and its site makes the cathedral visible from miles away. Part of it's wonder is its material. It is built entirely of brick of a familiar color and a size that fits the hand.

But how do you pile brick this high wide handsome and thick 14 walls 14 feet thick of brick? And when you get as high as a modern 10 story building, how are you going to support a ceiling which would cover most of a soccer field with no interior pillars or scaffolding? Basically the architecture is Romanesque, rounded arches and unadorned surfaces. But inside the ceiling, braced by a gothic arches of enormous height, was minutely painted by Italian Renaissance artists in the 15th century. Using the vivid colors and geometric designs left by the Maurice invasion of Southern Europe in the 8th century, how is that for cross-pollination? And how did they get their painters up that high? When I was growing up in California, Will Rogers was America's favorite humanist. I went to school with some of his sons. Half Indian Oklahoma cowboy. He landed in the 30s on the stage of the

Ziegfeld Follies in New York on the movie lots and on the movie lots of Hollywood. And on the front page of nearly every size of an American newspaper, the most memorable of his lines included, politics has got so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to get beat. There's a lot of difference in pioneering for gold and pioneering for spinach. And his most famous by folks didn't come over on the Mayflower but they met the boat. Even as late as my high school years, Californians were conscious of being very near to the pioneers. The ruins of early gold mines were the scenes of our summer camps. The original war still stood in Monterey Bay. San Francisco, though clearly a peninsula, was a really city reached not by bridges but by ferry. The Spanish missions up and down the coast were hours to visit, but they were also a last part of the departed culture, not a continuing tradition.

And what occurred to me last spring after visiting the caves of Lesco and the Cathedral of Albany is that the pioneering spirit as fine as it gifts of big to our people and as invigorating as it has proved to be to the American soul has not been able to give us all those things which an older tradition and culture supply. The generations which Americans have allowed to influence them are their own plus possibly one and a half before it. There was a flowering of New England about which we've read. There's still a beautiful architectural blocks in Charleston and Savannah. There are even a few restored remnants of Spanish settlements in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California. And there's a wedding cake called Leon's Bird Virginia which conceivably is better than nothing. But what is missing now appears to me in my abysmally delayed adolescence? Archithedrals at Shart or Albany, a Roman bridge, an aqueduct, a

policy of a thousand miles and two thousand years from Rome and still functioning. A found of holy water at the entrance to a country church built on the site of a spring where co-manian man used to worship a water god. The same water? Holy water? Why in God's name not? Remnants of man's aspiration and behavior when our centuries were in their early teens. And the pop culture of Albany is just as loud as our pop culture and just as pervasive. But it takes place amid buildings whose beauty has reached across the centuries. The annual fair in Albany is not a greatly different in style from a new orlean muddy drop. There's enough wine to go around. McDonald's golden arches are just across the street. But the backdrop for all these fair is a timeless work of art. It is also the scene of tomorrow morning's

mass and it is very easy to separate the transient from the permanent. Moreover, this extraordinary structure was built not by a famous architect and a fabulous contractor in world record time. But built over the span of six generations by simple, absolutely nameless people who looked at today's plan and placed another brick and only a thin crust of them lived long enough to view it's near completion. For me this means two things. First it means that the arts are terribly important. Architecture, painting, sculpture, drama, music and literature are the human attempt to reach out across earth space and across generations and centuries. Somehow this gives the human cry a dignity and makes his own short life worth the while. And second it is important that the arts be understood as not being limited to especially talented few. Rather they belong in

the daily affairs and the experience of simple people like all of us here. As long as we can think beyond today's market price to the almost unimaginable joy of seeing have a good day to someone 200 years up the road. Malcolm Lugridge was the former editor of the English human magazine Punch and the TV commentator who managed to stir up an entire nation and a half of its neighboring continent. In a series of lectures shortly before his death he took on the international television industry charging that its tremendous influence was exerted quote irresponsibly arbitrarily and without reference to any ethical or intellectual guidelines whatsoever. That is dependence upon instant action precluded even the most fleeting moments of reflection and therefore a valuable judgment. And that it's hypnotic attraction and economic potential would inevitably turn the most selfless of souls to corruption. In a wonderful flight of fancy

he extended the New Testament temptations of Jesus to a fourth and final one. The first temptation you remember was to persuade Jesus to turn stones into bread and Jesus turns this down recognizing that to provide unlimited bread would lead men to think that they could live by bread alone. And the second temptation was to induce him to jump off the top of the temple without harm and Jesus argues that seeking celebrity will induce men to see themselves as gods and worship themselves. And the third attempt the third temptation was to accept the kingdom of earth from the devil and Jesus resist this on the premise that it would substitute Caesar for God and render his ministry meaningless and now comes the fourth temptation. Jesus is offered his own worldwide TV network. The Jesus age Christ broadcasting system with exclusive rights to the Dead Sea videotapes and everlasting life news with studios in Christorama Orange County and an inexhaustible

moral majority of listeners locked into computers in Lynch Haven, Virginia. And Jesus turns it flat down instead he entrusts his message to 12 non-descript, unknown, unevenly literate, impoverished, but committed, live listeners. And therefore as those slowly at first the most awesome explosion in communications in the history of mankind. The greatest artist dedicate their genius to its message because those in universities are built to enshrine it. Its sheer creativity extends every field of human expression and exploration from the outleaches of space to the tiniest particles of matter. They are the gentlemen of Wichita State College of the Fine Arts in the School of Music by whatever think or combination of circumstances nearly every person in this room stands as an observer or guide at the most sensitive critical crossroads of human development.

The intersection of religion and the arts on the human journey to truth, beauty, and the ever-expanding horizons of the unknown. To none of us is given the years to see the completion of the cathedral, but to each of us is given day after day the opportunity to shape the human mud, the mold and place a perfect brick somewhere in the foundation. And what other profession offers that chance and who could ask for anything more?