Artistic Matchmaker
Collaboration as Modern Narrative: A Conversation with Members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum
As much as I have enjoyed writing my “Artistic Matchmaker” column throughout this semester, I have found its tone to be frustratingly speculative. The takeaway of each post has been limited to “these two people ‘could’ work together” or “these interdisciplinary projects ‘could’ be amazing,” without any evidence of such a project really coming to fruition. For this reason, when I first heard about “battle hymns,” a collaboration among the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, the Boston Children’s Chorus, and the Harvard Dance Project, I was eager to delve more deeply into this real-life example of the type of partnership I had been exploring only on a more theoretical level. Through its amalgamation of dance, history, architecture, visual art, and music, “battle hymns” combines everything I have written about in this column so far—art as a different reality, as a metaphor, as social commentary, and as a force of change, as a universal language, as a recontextualization of time and space—into a single artistic undertaking that truly showcases the creativity and intellect of the Harvard community and whose motivations and merits should not be ignored.
“battle hymns,” which will take place on May 2, is the second installment in a three-part concert series given by the Holden Choruses called “…unfinished work…” which commemorates the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War. “…unfinished work…” is interdisciplinary collaboration at its most consummate, combining not only different art forms but also distinct academic circles. Distinguished Harvard faculty members such as professors Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer helped develop the narrative of the concert series by gathering primary source documents from the Civil War, including letters and petitions written by members of the Harvard community. These faculty members have been listed as “creative consultants” in the concert program, signaling a genuine intersection of artistry and academia toward which Harvard’s arts scene seems to be trending, particularly with its new Theater, Dance, and Media concentration.
Art as a Different Reality
The artists:
The relationship between art and reality is perennially ambiguous. Should the purpose of art be to reproduce reality or to break away from reality in what English writer Arthur Christopher Benson calls a “story of escape?” Should artistic representations of the past be factually accurate or opposed to historical fact? One potential answer to these questions can be found in the words of Swiss visual artist Alberto Giacometti: “The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” In this vein, what brings together screenwriter Michael B. Luo ’16 and pianist Alex P. Beyer ’17 is their use of a modern artistic lens to recontextualize universal human experiences that are otherwise difficult to articulate, giving these experiences a greater relevance, intensity, and viscerality.
The Universal Language of Art
The artists:
In defense of foreign language study, American author Lydia Davis wrote in the New Yorker that every language is “a form of music. Each music is different … [and] it is variety, and the rich provocativeness of variety, that we lose if we give up foreign languages.” Over 400 years earlier, French writer and dance theorist Jehan Tabourot wrote in his treatise on 16th-century Renaissance dance that “dancing is a kind of mute rhetoric by which the orator, without uttering a word, can make himself understood by his movements.”
Industry of the Message
The artists:
Unlike some of his contemporaries, famed British composer Thomas Adès is an impassioned believer in art for art’s sake, eschewing any ethical or political considerations in his work. He claims that philosophical logic taints the purity of musical logic, and for this reason he despises composers such as Richard Wagner, who was openly anti-Semitic and whose music became one of the cornerstones of German culture under the Nazi regime. In an interview with music journalist Tom Service, Adès elaborates: “In Wagner every note is political and that to me is repulsive. Ethics are a distraction an artist cannot afford.”
The Artistic Space-Time Continuum
The artists:
- Sean K. Rodan ’17, Music concentrator in Adams House; classical composer, singer, flautist, and music director of the upcoming Cabot House Musical, “Once Upon a Mattress.”