Ecotopian Music, Dance, Other Arts PDF

ECOTOPIAN MUSIC, DANCE, OTHER ARTS San Francisco, June 10. Just as Ecotopians blur the difference between professional and amateur in science, there is almost no distinction between amateurs and professionals in the arts. People of all levels of skill and creativity put themselves forward unabashedl...

ECOTOPIAN MUSIC, DANCE, OTHER ARTS San Francisco, June 10. Just as Ecotopians blur the difference between professional and amateur in science, there is almost no distinction between amateurs and professionals in the arts. People of all levels of skill and creativity put themselves forward unabashedly. There is hardly a young person in the whole country who doesn't either play an instrument, dance, act, sing, write, sculpt, paint, make videofilms, or indulge in some original artistic activity. However, few of these gain the recognition---and sales---to sustain themselves entirely through their work. And competition is harsh in other ways too. Not only do audiences treat bad performances rudely, with whistling, booing, and taunts, but even successful artists cannot turn to foundations for the grants that are so desperately sought by our officially recognized artists. If they cannot make it with their art, young Ecotopian artists have only two alternatives: living on the minimum-guarantee level and continuing to strive for recognition, or taking a job and pursuing their art as a part-time activity. Oddly enough, the avidity with which almost all Ecotopians pursue some kind of art work actually adds to the difficulty of achieving success as an artist, because it seems to diminish the respect for "name" artists. Even in music, people collect records by groups they like, but they don't seem to go terribly far out of their way to hear a visiting group if one of their own is playing. They collect paintings and sculpture, but mix them in with works given to them by friends, or which they've done themselves. Although international traveling art exhibitions come to Ecotopian museums, they do not generate the intense excitement we have in New York. Ecotopians spread their appreciation thin; they have a near provincial disregard for the very highest achievements, a kind of ultrademocratic shrinking of the scale of creative excellence. Apparently, if art is something everybody does, a Picasso or a Van Gogh no longer seem quite so special. Nor do there seem to be big-name architects in Ecotopia. People themselves design and built structures for their living groups or enterprises with astonishing competence and imagination, often using modularized designs and standard materials that by now have taken on practically the quality of folk architecture. The community governments have design staffs for public buildings (and presumably to check plans before construction) but architecture is not at all the preserve of experts. Among all the arts, music seems the most important to Ecotopians. Every farm, factory, or extended family has some kind of musical group, and those with professional status usually began in such places. There are several styles of new music being composed. Black bands play a music with roots in the jazz and blues we know from Chicago and New York, and in Caribbean music. Bands from Spanish backgrounds play with an obvious Latin American influence. White bands tend to play music that sounds to me something like Balinese gamelan orchestras---an intricate, cerebral, yet driving jazz, with many homemade drums and gongs prominent in it. (This is said to be derived from earlier rock styles.) There are also groups using classical instrumentation---violins, clarinets, flutes, and so on---who play an unearthly improvised music like nothing I have ever heard, and there are musicians who play instruments of a totally electronic, synthetic-sound type. The one dominant characteristic of all such music styles, however, is a strong dance beat. In fact you seldom see a band playing without some people in the vicinity dancing. Classical music, incidentally, is also heard widely, especially as played by street musicians. It's difficult for my ear to catch the words of songs, and people dislike the idea of writing them down for me. Still, I was able to pick up the themes of several currently popular ones. They turned out to be largely romantic lamentations, not terribly different from our hillbilly music---complaints about being deserted, dirges for the unhappy end of true love, expressions of anger or despair. There is a resilient humor to some of these songs, but evidently the Ecotopian revolution, whatever else it may have accomplished, has not touched the basic miseries of the human condition. The burning musical issue in Ecotopia at present concerns electrification. At the time of Independence, rock music was entirely electronic, and groups carried around with them a whole truckload of heavy amplifiers. They soon came under attack from "folkies," musicians who used only traditional instruments such as the recorder, banjo, guitar, piano, and antique types such as the lute or oriental types such as the sitar. Folkies argued that music could not be a truly people's art, accessible to all, if it depended on high-cost electronics; and they also maintained that music should not depend on the artificial aid of electricity. Their final argument was that amplified music was a biological offense because it damaged eardrums. The development of small, inexpensive amplifiers undermined their first point, and the last didn't seem to impress young Ecotopian musicians any more than it had our own. And so the debate rages on. A number of Ecotopian artists have apparently gained some international status, with shows in Paris and Tokyo. However, the main focus of Ecotopian artistic activity is aggressively domestic. In fact one young artist went so far as to refuse even to give me his name, lest it be bruited about the world through my columns. "We\'re like the Balinese," he insisted. "We have no 'art,' we just do everything as well as we can." The effects of this attitude can be seen not only in the high level of beauty attained by craft products---pottery, weaving, jewelry, and so on---but also in the quality of Ecotopian furniture, utensils, and house decorations. Some of these last, like a stunning feather mandala given to me by an Ecotopian friend, are not exactly art and not exactly anything else either. But they certainly add to the aesthetic enjoyment the Ecotopians provide for each other.