Worrying the Strings: Traditional Music and Anxiety, Part 1
Lament, Meet Anxiety
Have you ever read Rothschild’s Fiddle by Chekhov? It’s a very short story, but in it he manages to weave so many of the themes we’ve covered. And he makes them dance.
I don’t want to say too much about it, the story is perfect as is. But one thing deserves mention. In the story, the main character’s disgust with lament is strongly linked to his anti-semitism. This may seem far-fetched and perhaps a wee too poetic, but it’s very real.
Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, says that basically “human civilization is an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of mortality.” Huh? In short, our fear of death is overwhelming so we keep it as unconscious as possible. In the meantime, we seek ways around it through validation via cultural systems: fame, art, heroics. And of course, progeny.
All this scraping and scuffling we do is not for material comfort ultimately, as much as it is existential comfort, (which is why we see so many people with endless resources still very miserable.)
At any rate, this all goes along merrily until that affirmation is interrupted. For instance, this often happens during an encounter with other cultures. If we say the world was created by some dude breathing on water and they say it was created by dewdrops falling off a speartip - then one of us is wrong. This is made worse when the institutions that shore up our razor thin defenses fail, and we are relegated to the “bronze” medals (Chekhov’s main character’s nickname.) And boom, the fear of death resurfaces, with often very real and lethal circumstances.
Back to Chekhov. As I’ve stressed in other posts, we see that the lament of the Jewish musician is not simply a catalog of historic ornaments, but encompasses an entire worldview. It is a worldview that profoundly challenges Yakov’s own, mostly because some deep part of him recognizes it’s truth. This is not to say that Judaism is more true than Christianity or any such nonsense- as I’ve shown in the last series, the lament’s truth is deeper than both (Chekhov’s understanding of this and how he works it in reflects his genius). This dynamic doesn’t only affect Russia either, it is found all over the world, and often in the the context of music and minorities.
What’s the solution?
Becker’s original intuitive insights have been taken up by more rigorous social scientists in the field of Terror Management (what a name). They have submitted his ideas to quantitative methods, with fascinating results. Those looking for a wonderful entry to this should look up Sheldon Solomon’s many lectures or his book, The Worm at the Core.
And here Chekhov and Solomon strangely agree. An honest and painful confrontation with death can do radical things. But while the social scientists have begun to build on the skeleton of Becker’s original poetic insights, we still are in the very early stages of finding practical ways of facilitating that confrontation.
I think traditional musicians and artists, many of whom are alienated from those cultural norms by virtue of their profession, are pioneers of those frontiers of anxiety and have much to offer. But it’s not something that is often talked about or even claimed. Today however, we find a perfect storm, whereby those cultural institutions which allayed death anxieties are crumbling, whereas the reminders that irritate our collective death anxiety are growing exponentially (see “likes”). People, in short, are going crazy.
What can we, as traditional musicians, do about that besides clinging to the sinking lifeboats of those alternative structures? Does our experience on the margins give us any tools that we can use to build alternatives?
For now, that Chekhov story is really good.