Loss of San José Symphony is only a symptom of America’s failure to cherish the arts for their own sake.

San José, Calif., is a long way from Lincoln Center, but the demise of any orchestra, large or small, is cause for alarm among music lovers at Juilliard and around the world. Since this article appeared in the San José Mercury News on June 9, 2002, other American orchestras including the Pittsburgh Symphony have shown various signs of distress. We can no longer take for granted the future of our orchestras and other cultural institutions. Musicians themselves will have to save their future by becoming true activists in the cause of the preservation of the art of music.

When I learned last week that the San José Symphony had gone bankrupt and closed its doors, I thought immediately of my students at Juilliard. At a time when symphonies nationwide have been struggling, the death of this orchestra means my students have one fewer place to find work.

When a symphony dies, it is like having an artery torn from the heart of a community

But my sadness goes so much deeper. There is one fewer place for pianists to exhibit the glory of a Beethoven concerto and one fewer place for the country's young flutists and cellists to practice their art. Another cultural institution has passed away.

Another American town lacks the exquisite mechanism that is the symphony orchestra, surely one of the highest manifestations of Western culture.

The silencing of San José's symphony—whether it lasts only a year or two as hoped, or forever—should not have come as a shock. This orchestra, like many nationwide, has been sliding into financial trouble for years partly because it failed to sell enough tickets to pay the bills. There are always individual reasons why a particular symphony fails: everything from fiscal mismanagement to a too-small endowment. But the fundamental weakness in all cases is external, the result of our society's devaluing all types of classical culture, including serious music.

Our immersion in today's pop culture is to blame, but the reality is that Americans began to lose interest in classical culture decades ago, after the First World War ended and our country entered its long descent into a culture of mass production and consumerism, rather than creation and craftsmanship.

When a symphony dies, it is like having an artery torn from the heart of a community. Losing a symphony means losing jobs, losing first performances of compositions by living composers, and losing the communal warmth of hearing together the sheer tonal magnificence of such an ensemble. It means losing opportunities for a child to be struck by the timbre of a bassoon, oboe, or violin—and it means losing members of the orchestra who are out in their towns and cities teaching instruments to the young. The three B's—Bach, Beethoven and Brahms—no longer vibrate their spiritual energy to the community.

The shrinking commitment to the arts nationwide comes at a time when our country is in a war against terrorists who think nothing of killing thousands of people in one day. The barbarians are no longer at the gates, but, as we painfully know, they have entered our realm. And these barbarians hate Western civilization. In a very deep sense, they are warring against Shakespeare, Einstein, Freud, and Beethoven, against the vastness of Western achievement and enlightenment. And what are we doing to preserve our heritage? Nothing but quibbling over words. In our quest for equality in all possible ways, we have become terrified at anything that smacks of elitism, a word second only to "racism" in negative power. For many Americans, the arts are elitist, obsolete productions of white European males. (Isn't rap music equal to Bach?) The result of all this political correctness is that the "humane" arts have been almost marginalized out of existence. Some Europeans questioned America's commitment to the arts early in our history. It was said that America went from a state of barbarism to decadence without an intervening civilization.

What about our founding fathers? What a cultivated band of revolutionaries they were. Each of them sophisticated, and often elaborately educated. All were highly expressive writers. Benjamin Franklin not only pursued his "scientific bent," he also composed. Francis Hopkinson, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, proudly dedicated his beautiful songs to George Washington. Washington took the time to make certain his niece had the finest piano teacher in Philadelphia. And Thomas Jefferson delighted in practicing his violin.

Pursuing Happiness

I have always fancied that Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" meant pursuing the pleasures of the mind and heart: his violin playing, his designing his own home. I love what John Adams wrote: "I must study politics and War, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy... in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music."

Still, there was a nation to forge and cities to build. But if, during the first half of the 19th century there was little time for the arts, some good things were happening. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted how quickly pianos found their place in log cabins on the frontier. And by 1850, the New York Philharmonic had been founded.

After the Civil War, things cultural sped up considerably. At the 1867 Paris Exposition, everyone was enraptured with the piano made by the New York based Steinway & Sons. That same firm in 1872 brought to our shores the great Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein, who stormed the American continent with 215 concerts in 241 days, traveling from New York to the new opera house in the mining town of Central City, Colo.

Television, with its cynical view of the arts and its obsession with low entertainment, must also shoulder some blame for undermining the arts.

Other cities were not to be outdone by New York. The wealthy across America founded libraries, museums, and orchestras, laying the foundation for the fine arts to flourish. Everywhere there was a burst of civic pride-nothing pleased Andrew Carnegie more than bringing Tchaikovsky to New York to conduct the inaugural concert at his new music hall in 1891.

J.P. Morgan told his men to collect the valuable and beautiful. At the Pierpont Morgan Library on Madison Avenue in New York, one can see and study the autographed manuscripts of many musical masterpieces. If you want to see the manuscript of Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto or Liszt's Piano Sonata, it is there for you. Morgan didn't care if five or 500 people a decade would see the works; he preserved them for us. Isabella Gardner did much the same for those who love art. With the help of Bernard Berenson, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who became a great art historian, she bought masterpieces for her glorious museum In Boston.

'Finer Things in Life'

In the great wave of American immigration from the mid-1800s until the 1920s, the poor and tattered Europeans came to America in droves. Some of their dream was to give their children "the finer things in life," including a piano and piano lessons. Indeed, a house was not a home without its piano in the parlor.

It was in this soil that the great American cities were to be sustained until recently. Today the marketers tell us over and over that we must find ways to popularize the arts in order to bring in new audiences. The arts keep resisting such efforts.

We have been pounded into passivity. A consuming culture rather than a producing culture has relentlessly triumphed. I once asked a youngster if he ever read for pleasure. "Never," was his retort. "It's too boring and difficult. There is no thrill. I need to hear rock and rap blasting in my ears."

The truth is that listening to or playing classical music is a challenge, in much the same way that reading good literature is. You need the right vocabulary to truly understand and appreciate what the composer is saying. It takes dedicated work and some education of the sort historically provided by public schools, not to mention the thousands of piano and violin teachers who, generation after generation, taught the young. It also takes a concerted effort by society to support the performing arts.

Where are the true patrons of the arts today interested in the welfare of our young talents? Where are the people who contribute, with or without tax breaks? What do you think of the fact that the United States gives less money to the arts in a year than Austria gives to the Vienna State Opera in a season?

As early as 1906, "the march king" John Philip Sousa predicted that recorded music—what he called "canned music"—would destroy amateurism and produce a marked deterioration in musical taste. (If Sousa were here today, he would think himself in hell. Ask yourself if you've ever spent one day since King Elvis died without seeing his image or hearing his vapid tones.)

What Sousa was witnessing at the turn of the last century was our change, almost overnight, from a producer/work-ethic culture, where craftsmanship was valued according to its quality, to an impersonal world of commercial consumerism, where business and economics rule within a technological frame. As pianist and author Arthur Loesser later pointed out, "People acquire not what they might want for themselves, but what machines can most conveniently and profitably make in the largest amounts."

Fewer and Fewer Pianos

In 1910, in the United States alone, there were 370,000 pianos produced by more than 300 different manufacturers. By the middle of World War I, the phonograph had already overtaken the sales of pianos.

After the war, the emergence of radio, of Babe Ruth hitting his home runs (i.e. sports), and the effect of women leaving the home for jobs further depleted home music-making. By the Depression, only 33 piano firms remained. World War II took care of many of the rest. Even Steinway had to switch products for a time, making parts for airplanes.

Television, with its cynical view of the arts and its obsession with low entertainment, must also shoulder some blame for undermining the arts, starting with its 1948 boom in the United States. In our democratic society, all must tolerate sports scores and never-ending entertainment news. I would be laughed at if I went on a campaign to add to those shows art news, something that would tell us what is happening each night with our orchestras and ballet companies.

Role of Schools

Then there are our schools, many of which no longer provide any arts education.

Decades ago, many public schools had music-theory classes and symphony orchestras and marching bands for their football teams. My high school in Cleveland was one of those. It had a terrific orchestra, which played "the classics," and an excellent chorus, as well as courses in music appreciation and music theory and harmony.

I recall the dedication of the music teacher who failed anyone who could not instantly identify the sound of each instrument in the orchestra. In that class, I heard and experienced for the first time many masterpieces. In that school, I was also lucky to have an art teacher who encouraged me to paint.

I realized how much times had changed when I visited the school eight years ago. At that time, I was inducted into my school's Hall of Fame (a nice idea) for my work in classical music. I gave a speech to the student body, then was asked to perform. I remembered the school had excellent grand pianos. I was led, instead, to an electronic keyboard. The school no longer had a piano.

At too many schools, the situation is much worse. Public schools are often scary, violent, and sadistic places to spend most of childhood's waking hours. Such an environment is hardly conducive for the arts, let alone elementary literacy. To care for serious music or poetry, to like Brahms, or Keats and Shelley, is not cool. Youngsters who do care may find themselves jeered at, laughed at, or even beaten up.

The arts never had it easy, but once they were held in awe, or at the very least respected. The novelist Katherine Anne Porter put it well: "There was the unchallenged assumption that classic culture was our birthright; the belief that knowledge of great art and great thought was a good in itself not to be missed for anything."

As Americans, we will have to decide what will ultimately be important to us. Do we really care about saving our art museums, symphony orchestras, and dance companies?

We feel helpless. We are exhausted from thinking about an always-increasing list of problems. Worst of all, many problems-like terrorism aimed our way-don't seem solvable. So what is important about the fate of a symphony orchestra in San José?

America is at a crossroads in history. But this is for certain: We are living in a culturally precarious time. In the 1980s, Gore Vidal wrote: "Our century will be more noted for what we managed to lose along the way than for what we acquired. ... The century is ending not so much without art as without the idea of art."

In the new millennium, will we continue to produce vulgarity and uniformity and scientific "advances" offering ever more seductive promises? (Perhaps we could figure out a way to clone Michelangelo and Dante.) Or will we provide an environment that could produce great-and new-artists for the spiritual nourishment of the human race?