How does one choose the right thing to do in the face of significant pressure? How do we choose which values to act upon when our values are in conflict?

After receiving a number of requests to re-publish this speech that I gave at the 2002 American Symphony Orchestra League (now the League of American Orchestras) conference in Philadelphia, I've decided to re-post it. A special thanks to Joe Patti for his encouragement and for his excellent blog. Special thanks as well to Barbara Schaeffer Bacon and Pam Korza for their insights and for helping me think this speech through after events had transpired. For more information about the Animating Democracy initiative, visit Americans for the Arts website.

After doing some thinking about the subject of today’s session, Animating Democracy, I imagine that there are at least some of you who are wondering whether or not Democracy needs animating? Further, you may be deliberating as to whether orchestral music is the appropriate medium through which our apathetically inanimate populi might most suitably be animated. Having spent twenty-five years working with classical musicians and having early run the gauntlet of being a professional classical musician myself, I am acutely aware of the risks of off ending the “dignity” of the field by burdening classical music with re-engineering the cumbersome mechanisms of democracy. Eternal vigilance may be relied upon to produce liberty but it is insufficient in addressing the requirements of Prokofieff .

Please do not mistake me for some species of apologist for musical activism. It is difficult enough to properly tune. On the other hand, from observing people grapple with meaning that they find in music, I am convinced that the listener’s musical passions burgeon with knowledge, reflection, and engagement—with the exception of opera where one’s understanding of the text can both interfere with musical pleasure and indicate a case of arrested social development. No, I am not here to assuage the skeptic’s doubt. Quite the opposite. An organization should engage in this work if and only if not doing so would be a renunciation of conscience, an abandonment of the artist, or a squandering of opportunity.

In preparation for my time this morning, I tried to project myself into the frame of mind of someone who might be reliably called upon to deliver a healthy ration of skepticism. I was struck by a blazing realization that this notion of art as antidote to apathy could lead to disturbing outcomes. Orchestral music might transform into something akin to an anti-Prozac, prodding people from their contented stupor into a depressed and anxious awareness of the real state of civic discourse, an awareness that might depress any one of us. Thinking too much about this late at night, I imagined audience members I have known taking to wearing berets, sipping absynthe, and reading gloomy Existentialist poets. Having succumbed to the ill effects of too much skepticism, I wondered if things might actually be better letting sleeping populi lie, as it were.

Then I remembered the reality of it all. We don’t always get to choose the time, terms, or tempo of things. With apologies to good Will Shakespeare, as Malvolio might have observed on the subject, “Some are born to civic dialogue, some achieve civic dialogue, and some have civic dialogue thrust upon ‘em.” Let me tell you how it was thrust upon me.

Though the 1995 Oregon Bach Festival was entitled, “War, Reconciliation and Peace,” our planned performance of J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion caused a Eugene, Oregon newspaper, The Eugene Weekly, to ask, “How can reconcilation and peace be represented by a musical work whose text has been an incitement to genocide?”

Under any circumstances this question is challenging to answer. The question’s implications, especially in the “What-message-are-we-sending world we live in, were even more disturbing given that our Music Director is a German national. His desire to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War Two also marked off fifty years since the horrific extent of the Holocaust was revealed to the world.

But the real issue, as is so often the case, was that those who objected to the St. John Passion’s performance were justified in their position. It is an historical matter of fact that Passion Plays were mounted in Germany to deliberately arouse violent sentiments toward German Jews. It is a matter of fact that the most violent of pogroms often happened around Easter. As Gertrude Stein might have put it, there was definitely a there there. And though my staff and I experienced a strong impulse to defend Bach, the canon, the Easter story, our Music Director, and the Festival, itself, we were blessed with the presence of mind to try and learn enough, to understand enough, to listen enough, so that our organization and community would not be unnecessarily torn apart by the storm that ensued over the situation.

What WAS the origin of the storm?

Bach’s Johannespassion, like the Gospel of John from which it was taken, portrays the trial of Jesus of Nazareth before Pontius Pilate. In this text, the all-powerful Roman Governor Pilate is portrayed as a magnanimous innocent, “He (Pilate) went out again unto the Jews and saith unto them: I find in Him no fault at all.” Later, the text describes “When the chief priests and officers saw Him, they cried out, saying, Crucify Him, crucify Him!” Pilate again says “I find no fault in him.” The Jews answered him: We have a law and by our law He ought to die because He made Himself the Son of God.”

So here, taken from one the West’s most sacred texts—the New Testament of the Holy Bible—is the core of the issue: a dramatically-told story that, over ensuing centuries, would be fashioned into the perversest of portrayals: Jews as Christ-killers. As history unfolded, unspeakable atrocities committed by history’s fiends – Torquemada, Hitler, Stalin – have been rationalized arguably appropriating the Christian faith’s most sacred story.

Recent events in the Middle East have, for good reasons, raised sensitivity to anti-Semitism, but even in 1995, the anger and outrage experienced by members of my community at reading or hearing the message of Bach’s Passion was enough to incite people to accuse Bach of being an anti-Semite, himself. I cannot know Bach’s heart, but I can share with you a few of the facts surrounding the creation of the work.

In 1724, as part of his duties as Kapellmeister at St. Thomas in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach composed his first Passion, based on text from the Gospel of John within the Holy Bible. The work was both conceived and composed for liturgical purposes as part of services for Holy Week, and was first performed at Vespers on Good Friday, April 7, 1724 at St. Nicholas church. Bach probably never imagined that his St. John Passion might someday be performed in a secular concert setting, as has occurred frequently. During his lifetime, Bach was considered a fairly minor composer and the notion of presenting liturgical music in a concert setting for large audiences would have been imagined as absurd or sacrilegious at the time. Could Bach have foreseen that this masterwork—intended to reveal, through Christian understanding the divinest of loves—might someday be characterized as a musical inducement to hatred?

As so often has been observed, events shape assumptions about questions like this. Some nine months before the Oregon Bach Festival’s June 23rd performance of Bach’s Passion, neo-Nazi skinheads peppered the Temple Beth Israel Synagogue with gunfire. The temple was further defaced with red paint and reprehensible graffiti. The community’s nerves were raw. How could such ugliness blight this easygoing and liberal Oregon University town?

The circumstances of this hate crime were very fresh when the Festival’s audience-development steering committee convened for the first time. Events were especially vivid for one of the committee members, Yitzhak Husbands-Hankins, who was Temple Beth Israel’s rabbi.

We’d planned a series of events focusing on music from the Holocaust and the artists whose promise and genius perished in it. Most of the music, though not all, was from Terezin or Theresienstadt, the camp in which many intellectuals, homosexuals, artists, and political prisoners were interred. Since most of the composers we would perform were Jewish—most of whom perished in the camp—the rabbi’s counsel was important in both involving our Jewish community in the Festival, and in guarding against offending sensibilities, however noble our intentions.

Not too long before our meeting, I read a story in a higher education journal about controversy around the St. John Passion erupting at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. The controversy concerned its alleged anti-Semite meaning. I felt obliged to speak to the committee, especially Rabbi Husbands-Hankins, about those events. Yitz had not yet read the Passion’s text, but he expressed deep concern.

I could describe in vivid detail the months of agonizing conversations that passed between Yitzhak and me, as he gradually moved away from us, eventually absenting himself completely from the Festival, but there is insufficient time. Suffice it to say that, neither before nor since, have I been privileged to experience a more principled, moral, or compassionate example as I did during this time. Perhaps nothing so convinced me of the gravity of his concern as simultaneously experiencing his detestation of our decision to proceed with performing the Passion with his respect and love of me as a person. If I know anything about the subject that we are considering this morning, I learned it from Rabbi Yitz. And here is the most important lesson I learned:

Any person or organization whose artistic work engages in raising issues which engross our minds, hearts, and polity must expect—even bless—the exercise of conscience, even when that exercise takes the form of withholding support, fierce and active opposition, or even condemnation. As artistic organizations, we may own the work, but we do not own the issues. We may hold the match, but nobody holds a conflagration. We should not be surprised that someone we view as principled enough to be invited to serve on a Board or Steering Committee might also be principled enough to withhold the imprimatur of their good name in affairs that they cannot, in good conscience, support.

As I’ve implied earlier, I didn’t go looking for the dialogue that ensued in my community but I certainly found it. As someone who was publicly excoriated for presenting a Karen Finlay residency during the Endowment wars of the late 80s, I never imagined that the most controversial work I would ever produce would have come from Bach and the Bible. Certainly, Helmuth Rilling, the Festival staff, the University of Oregon which was our parent, the Board of Directors, and even our audience were surprised that controversy usually associated with crosses in urine engulfed their Bach Festival’s performance of Bach.

It should be said—at the risk of being obvious—that everyone involved wanted to do the right thing. A not-so-minor-complication of a diverse and free democratic society is that it is not always apparent exactly what the right thing is. Principled people disagree. Values compete. As a lifelong advocate of artistic freedom and freedom of speech, I fervently believed that re-programming another work amounted to censorship. Rilling recalled with loathing the Nazi regime’s treatment of Mendelssohn’s music—forbidding its publication and performance—because Mendelssohn was born a Jew. For Rilling, banishing Bach’s Passion like the Nazis banned Mendelssohn was anathema. Rabbi Husbands-Hankins argued that performing the work amounted to complicity in sowing the seeds of anti-Semitism.

In hindsight, I know that what troubled us most was an emerging awareness that Yitzhak was right. It is very difficult to own and be accountable for something so ugly as complicity in bigotry, especially when owning it flies in the face of one’s image as a good and moral person. But the beginning of reconciliation—the second and most important word in that year’s festival theme—occurred when we decided to share our dilemma, to open our dialogue to the whole community. If a sacred text and a work of the musical canon was keeping the coals of anti-Semitism glowing red, we were going to say it was so. We were going to engage ourselves, our artists, and our community in a discussion about the dynamics and origins of bigotry, even when that bigotry seemed to spring from the dominant culture’s holiest of stories.

On each of your tables, there is a program reprint of a letter that I wrote and mailed to our entire community months before the festival. When you read the letter you will discover that it is long on questions and short on answers. I attempted to frame the issues in a way that members of the community could deliberate for themselves on the matter. By opening up the matter to the community at large and inviting their reflection on the matter, a situation that could have seriously damaged our organization wound up strengthening it. During these times, when people are becoming increasingly disenchanted with institutions, there is no better lesson from my experience that I can offer you today than to trust your public if you want them to trust you.

There are a number of artists who engage in making “topical” work; this work is sometimes controversial. But art becomes most powerfully topical when it taps into community life, and as my example has shown you there can be a substantial disconnect between the artist’s intention and the final effect. We tend to see ourselves as support systems for artists but we are also conveners of audiences where the art that forms the focus of this convention can awaken any number of passions. Human beings are gloriously and sometimes maddeningly unpredictable.

Another vital lesson we learned is that there is no substitute for strong partnerships and strong alliances. In our case, the issue was so much bigger than we were. We could not possibly have dealt with it alone. Fortuitously, as a result of the previous year’s festival, Spirituality in Music, we had forged a strong relationship with the Two Rivers Ecumenical Ministry. One cannot conjure these relationships on demand and I firmly believe we might have foundered without our many clergy friends who organized services, wrote sermons, wrote letters to the editor of our newspaper, and who supported everyone.

Naively, I imagined that, if anyone were to have taken offense at the allegations leveled against the Passion and the Gospel of John, it would have been the Christian clergy or their congregations. On the contrary, they were immediately willing to own the stigma of anti-Semitism, and more importantly to bring their full moral and organizational energy to condemning its continuance.

If you believe that moving beyond experience to engage your audiences in meaning is something that will make both your orchestras and your communities stronger, be prepared. It is important to create capacity first. This work takes time, commitment, and resources. The work requires people who know how to work with a sense of intention to facilitate, not just to lead; to question, not just to answer; to receive, not just broadcast.

While a zealous commitment to communication is pivotally important, a commitment to listening is probably even more important. Sadly, too many people among us simply do not feel they are listened to. Do not assume that the people closest to you—your musicians, your staff, your Board, or your volunteers either fully understand the issues or are comfortable having the organization be emblematic of them.

All too often, people equate engagement in this work with endorsing or promoting a particular point of view. The extent to which our Festival family was angry, bewildered, and confused was extraordinary, especially early on. Only after the Festival’s position and stance in this was repeated and observed repeatedly did people understand where we were in it all. People naturally defend what they love; it’s how we’re wired. In this work, those impulses range from counterproductive to dangerous. Finally, beware the lurking impulse to be “efficient” in your communications. When passions are aroused, efficiency is a synonym for incomplete, abrupt, and ineffective.

To finish my story, we did perform Bach’s St. John Passion on the opening Friday night of the 1995 Festival. On the previous Sunday morning, as a result of the blessing of our partnership with the Two Rivers Ecumenical Ministry, congregations throughout our community heard sermons atoning for centuries of anti-Semitic behavior perpetrated by Christian churches everywhere. The night before the Festival opening, a standing-room-only service of Reconciliation was held in the Hult Performing Arts Center where anti-Semitism was again vigorously condemned by a procession of church leaders in our community.

On the night of the performance—it was a Friday evening which is the Jewish Sabbath— as people entered the center where the performance took place, they were met by an Orthodox Rabbi and his wife distributing leaflets requesting that audience members stand and turn their backs on offensive sections of the work. A number of our longstanding and supportive audience members stayed away. Some donors withheld financial support. Community life was at work.

Personally, I felt buoyed. In a society where the arts are often thought of as the “toy department of life,” at least on that evening we were no longer on the periphery of community life. We performed the St. John Passion, but in a new context. A deep and principled discussion of meaning, history, and accountability had occurred. We had not only talked about reconciliation, but lived its possibilities.