It never gets any easier. Each year we worry we won’t raise enough. And now, with the economy faltering, we worry even more.
We’re co-directors of a small, rural Arts Council in Albion, Nebraska. We serve eleven small communities within a 25 mile radius, all with populations of less than 2,000 (some with populations of less than 200). We do our best to present a variety of interesting and inspiring musicians, dancers, actors and speakers. Most of our money comes from selling annual season memberships. Each Fall we put up posters, take out ads, give our board members lists of names to contact — whatever we can do to get people interested in joining.
Last Spring the Wall Street Journal featured Albion as an example of how ethanol is bringing prosperity to rural areas. And it’s true; Albion is benefiting in a number of ways from the ethanol boom. But we’re still a farming community — all of the towns we serve are — and the weather can still destroy a crop in minutes. Costs have risen as fast as grain prices, and with the markets now in turmoil, people are afraid we’re about to go back to the way things used to be when it cost as much to raise a bushel of corn as that bushel was worth.
It’s hard sometimes to explain why the arts and humanities matter. A lot of people understand this — they don’t need a sales pitch. But others view the arts as a frill, something nice to do on a Sunday afternoon, but little else.
It’s not that rural people don’t appreciate the arts, it’s just that here, where most of us live at the mercy of both meteorology and markets, there are more pressing concerns.
One of those concerns is population loss. There’s been a silent out migration going on since the last depression. This area’s population is less than half what it was in the 1920s, and has been declining steadily since that time. Greener pastures abound, and people complain about our lack of shopping, jobs, opportunities and entertainment. Most young people leave never to return.
Those who stay can’t help but grow older. And as our populations age and exit, there are fewer people to keep our communities going. It’s a vicious circle — the more people leave, the more our businesses and volunteer organizations struggle. The more they struggle, the more people leave.
It isn’t just economics that’s hurting us, it’s a lack of people with the time, energy and a sense of community ownership to put in extra hours volunteering. It’s a lack of people to put on soup suppers, to sell concessions, to organize and fund events. And once these things stop happening people don’t see each other as often, don’t talk, laugh and share, don‘t work together anymore. And when this interaction stops happening, communities die.
There is a web of human interactions, an intangible “social infrastructure”, that is just as vital to keeping a community healthy as its more tangible economic and physical infrastructures. A sense of interconnectedness makes a town a community rather than just a group of people living in proximity to one another.
We try to remind people that the arts and humanities play a vital role in sustaining and strengthening this social infrastructure. Not only do the arts nourish the individual’s soul, by providing moving and uplifting community experiences, the arts nourish the ties between people. The arts strengthen people’s sense of connection, nourish a sense of community. And when people feel a bond to where they live they realize that their well-being is intricately tied to the well-being of those around them, tied to the well-being of their community.
It’s easier to find time to volunteer, find a little extra money to give, when one understands the benefits. And while the benefits of the arts may not be as obvious as an application of nitrogen to corn, the arts are just as important to the health of our communities as fertilizer is to our fields. The arts and humanities fertilize the most important assets any community has — the interpersonal bonds between its members and the sense of community ownership everyone gains as a result.
Many people here know this. They’ve kept our Arts Council going since 1979. But this year, like every year, we worry people may eventually forget that none of us — and none of our communities — can live by bread alone.
In May aerial photographs were released purporting to demonstrate the existence of an uncontacted Amazon tribe. These photos captured the world’s imagination until they were revealed to be a misguided hoax intended to secure greater protection for areas where uncontacted people may actually be living.
There may be nearly 100 tribes still living in remote regions who have never had contact with the outside world. As loggers and poachers penetrate ever deeper into the world’s jungles, concern for the well-being of these people grows. The prevailing wisdom is to leave uncontacted people alone — no good has ever come to such groups from contact with our world — but turning our backs on what we could learn from them only strengthens their hold on the modern imagination.
Primitive man has been the subject of much interest and speculation by “civilized” people since at least the time of Aristotle. Alternately romanticized as either noble savages or unintelligent brutes, primitive people offer a glimpse of who we once were, how we once thought and believed and acted. By observing those untouched by the modern world we seek to rediscover our own true essence.
The urge to better understand ourselves by studying primitive people can be great. I still recall an episode from the PBS series Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World which aired in 1992. The film crew had obtained permission from the Peruvian government to seek out an uncontacted tribe rumored to be living in a remote watershed. After an arduous journey upstream, the government rescinded its permission via radio just before a woman from this tribe emerged on the riverbank. The hapless crew could only film her from their boats as she gazed upon them in wonder. She responded to them, in all their mystifying strangeness, by singing.
In doing so she mystified them. Why did she sing? Was it to mark her territory? To frighten them away (there was nothing aggressive or menacing in her demeanor)? After a time, she returned to the jungle and they drifted away, lamenting the lost opportunity to learn more about ourselves by learning about her and her people.
But something valuable can be learned from this enigmatic woman from our past. That she reacted to what must have been a profound event in her life — a close encounter with an alien race — by bursting spontaneously into song tells us much about our deepest selves. Singing was this woman’s natural response to the unknown, her natural response to life.
This woman reminded us that art in its many diverse forms is a fundamental means of human expression, as every parent knows. We sing to our babies from birth, sing to calm them, sing to teach them their ABCs. And they sing to us before they speak, color before they write.
Life for children is often a spontaneous opera — they will sing about what they’re doing, what they’re feeling, and even sometimes dance, without ever thinking about it. And it isn‘t just children. I often find my wife singing as she does dishes or folds the laundry. American music has been shaped in many ways by the simple blues melodies slaves made up in response to the hardships of their lives.
Just as it is our nature to love and to dream, to strive and to hope, it is our nature to paint and to sing. Certain stroke victims regain the ability to sing before they are able to speak, and it has been suggested the spoken language evolved from song. Singing lies at the root of both music and speech just as drawing lies at the root of writing.
Art in one form or another permeates our lives, from elevator music to billboards, landscaping to graffiti — we can’t seem to exist without it. Yet it is so much a part of our daily lives that we hardly even notice. Only those with exceptional talent or creativity attract our attention and earn the title “artist”. This can lead us to forget that in our hearts we are all artists, expressing the experience of being alive in ways both simple and profound.
Artistic expression, whether singing in the shower or on stage at the Met, putting on makeup or painting a masterpiece, is as fundamental to being human today as it was 10,000 years ago. Art intersects all aspects of our lives and one need only look around to see that in this respect we really haven’t changed much at all.