Hello, My Name is Stegosaurus

So it’s official.  Our recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with the SF Symphony, Symphony Chorus, and Pacific Boychoir Academy won three Grammy awards --  for Best Classical Performance, Best Choral Performance, and Best Engineered Classical Album! This makes a total of five Grammy Awards for SFGC!! (We don’t count the one for engineering.)

For those who may need a refresher course on which SFGC recordings with the SF Symphony have been Grammy winners, so far, here’s the list:

1992 – Best Choral Performance – Carmina Burana -- with SF Symphony and Chorus, Herbert Blomstedt, and Ragazzi Boys Choir

1999 – Best Classical Album, Best Orchestral Performance, Best Engineered Album – Firebird, Rite of Spring and Persephone -- with SF Symphony and Chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Ragazzi Boys Choir

2004 – Best Classical Album – Mahler Symphony No. 3 and Kindertotenlieder -- with  SF Symphony and Chorus, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Pacific Boychoir Academy

I attempted to watch the Grammy Awards last night, even though I knew that no awards for serious music – jazz, classical, etc – would be announced on television.  However, I had to turn it off.  If my recent attendance at performing arts conferences has made me wonder if shallow style has become the new substance, last night’s brainless, tuneless, special effects extravaganza left me utterly convinced.  (I knew I was in trouble when I was actually hoping for a live performance by the band AC/DC in the Best Rock Album category.) 

In this non-profit performing arts business, we are all trying to make sense of 21st century culture, and find where our organizations fit in. While some have given up any notion of curatorial vision or programming, and others have sold out to car sales arts marketing rather than intelligent prose, a few of us Jurassics want to believe we can hang on, at least long enough to evolve into something with wings.

Last week the San Francisco Foundation and Grants for the Arts hosted a local arts conference with a wonderful keynote speaker – Jonah Lehrer, contributing editor of Wired, and author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist.  Among many incredible anecdotes about how the brain works, his description of a study in which the brain lit up while the subject read about dancing, in the same area it would light up if the subject actually danced, told us volumes about how we are wired for the arts. Unfortunately, (according to Lehrer’s research) not everyone is automatically wired to experience the arts in a fully engaged way.  It seems that imagination and deep engagement with art are skills that must be learned and practiced.

We are certainly teaching deep arts engagement skills here at SFGC, and I hope that the girls in our program will also take time to daydream.  According to Lehrer, the brain makes more internal connections while daydreaming than while focused on specific tasks.  It lights up all over the place.  Not surprising to some of us, creativity and daydreaming really do go hand in hand, but Lehrer expressed concern that daydreaming would be a lost skill as kids become addicted to constant, task oriented stimuli (gaming, texting, tweeting, etc, without ever turning OFF – a frenzy not unlike last night’s awards spectacle).  He advocated what he called “useful boredom.” 

Call me a dinosaur, but that sounds pretty good to me. 

I wonder how much time Mahler spent daydreaming…