Cleveland State University EngagedScholarship@CSU The Gamut Archives Publications Spring 1985 The Gamut: A Journal of Ideas and Information, No. 15, Spring/ Summer 1985 Cleveland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/gamut_archives Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, Life Sciences Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! Recommended Citation Cleveland State University, "The Gamut: A Journal of Ideas and Information, No. 15, Spring/Summer 1985" (1985). The Gamut Archives. 13. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/gamut_archives/13 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Gamut Archives by an authorized administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A JOURNAL OF IDEAS AND INFORMATION Number 15 Spring/Summer, 1985 CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY ISSN 0275-0589 $5.00 CONTENTS OF ISSUE NO. 15, SPRING/SUMMER, 1985 2 Robert Finn: Learning to Enjoy Today's Music Getting past Stravinsky and Mahler to the hard stuff 12 James C. Haden: Stoning Socrates A philosopher looks at I. F. Stone's revisionist view of Socrates 23 William F. Lyon: Fireflies llluminate Life Processes Perhaps you should have kept those lightning bugs you used to catch on hot summer nights 26 John F. Donoghue: Two Poems "Space-Time and Sinkers" and "Concerto" 28 Louis T. Milic: Giving Away $1,000,000 a Year Stewart R. Mott's individualized philanthropy 37 David Sheskin: Four Drawings SPECIAL SECTION: SUPPORTING THE ARTS 41 Editorial 50 Louis R. Barbato: Cleveland Opera at the Crossroads, or, Colonel Klink's Monocle A long-time opera buff considers past progress and future prospects 59 Susan Daniels: Bankrolling the Cleveland Ballet A young company's rise to financial stability 62 Mary Reeb: AdelIa Prentiss Hughes and the Founding, Fostering, and Financing of the Cleveland Orchestra A woman who wanted to do more than play the piano in the parlor 69 A Thriving Enterprise-with a Sharp Eye down the Road Interview with Evan Turner, Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74 Lana Gerlach: The Art That Pays Its Own Way Culture at the movies 79 Mary Grimm: Writers' Workshops: the Need to Talk Writers require more than typewriter and paper 85 David H. Evett: A Model Cultural Hotbed-Elizabethan London Could Cleveland produce another Shakespeare? BACK MATTER 93 Hester Lewellen: Jury Followup 93 Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena: Paradise is Heaven 95 Ted Hopes: Elmer Flick of the Cleveland Blues Robert 'frelawny: Comment on Comment Cards This issue of The Gamut was printed by R.Y. R. , Inc., Newbury, Ohio. Typography by Schaefer Printing Company, Cleveland, Ohio. A JOURNAL OF IDEAS AND INFORMATION Number 15 Spring/Summer, 1985 Editor: Louis T. Milic Co-Editor: Leonard M. Trawick Managing Editor: Mary Grimm Circulation Manager: Lana Gerlach Asst. Circulation Manager: Kristin Blumberg Intern Editor: Susan Daniels Advisory Board John A. Flower Robert Cheshier At the east entrance of the Oeveland Museum of David Guralnik Art, The Thinker, damaged by vandals in 1970, ponders the vicissitudes of art, as does The Gamr;t Julie Haug in its special section on Supporting the Arts, Herbert Karnm pp. 41-92. Katherine Torgerson The Gamut: a Journal of Ideas and Informlltion is published in Diana Tittle the fall, winter, and spring of each year by Oeveland State University, Oeveland, Ohio. Subscription rate: one year (three issues), $12.00; two yeaTS, $20.00; three years, Editorial Board $25.00. Library rate, $15.00 per year. Foreign subscrip' Stephen R. ColemaI\" tions $3.00 per year additional. Single copies, $5.00; back issues, $6.00. Oaims for missing issues honored within George A. Coulman six months of publication. Fred E. Ekfelt Th e Gamut invites commentaries for its " Back Matter" section and also the submission of new articles and crea­ Gary Engle " tive works, especially by Ohio writers and artists, on top­ John Gerlach ics of interest to readers of this region. Preliminary inquir­ ies are welcome; detailed information for contributors on Bernard Hamermesh request. Submitted material will be returned if accompa­ William R. Martin nied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Address all correspondence to: The Gamut, Room U16 Rhopes Tower, Cecilie Goodrich Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH 44115. Copyright c 1985 by Cleveland State University. All rights Photography: Louis T. Milic reserved. Printed in the U.s.A. ISSN 0275-0589. 2 Robert Finn Learning to Enjoy Today's Music One of the major mail-order record emy territory, to be travers~d with earplugs clubs is fond of dividing up the product list­ at the ready, and only in the protective com­ ings in its newspaper and magazine ads into pany of Haydn and Mozart on the same pro­ convenient categories, presumably to make gram. life easier for its customers. The records of­ Clearly something is wrong in the field fered are listed under "Classics," "Roman­ of music that is not wrong, or at least not tics," "Moderns," "Baroque," and other wrong to the same extent, in other fields of such historical tags. American culture. Even within the arts them­ I have long been fascinated by the list selves, the gap between the creators and au­ of "Moderns" there offered. It includes such diences seems wider in music than it is in the elderly pieces as Stravinsky's Firebird (1910) sister arts of architecture, theater, painting, and Rite of Spring (1913), the suite from Pro­ sculpture, literature, and dance. It might be kofieff's Love of Three Oranges (1919), Carl helpful, given this unfortunate state of af­ Orff's Carmina Burana (1935), Gustav Holst's fairs, to consider how the interested listener The Planets (1916)-and, as they say in the who clearly needs help with "modern" mu­ theatrical ads, much, much more. sic can get it, and even to consider the larger What a curious definition of "mod­ question of why he should try to get it. ern"! Automobiles dating from those same years are already rare antiques; houses built Obviously, few if any concertgoers go at the time of The Planets have already crum­ to concerts out of a sense of educational duty. bled into disuse and been torn down; the They pay good money for those tickets and clothes people wore when Carmina Burana they expect some enjoyment, or perhaps in was new are already regarded as quaint relics their more optimistic moments some mental of a bygone era-but all this music is still uplift or ennoblement for their money. I am "modern"-for which, in the lexicon of far not here concerned with the concertgoer (or too many concertgoers, you can substitute more properly the concert seat-occupier) "ugly," "unmelodic," "dissonant," "ca­ whose reason for attending the musical cophonous" or any number of other pejora­ event has nothing much to do with music. tive adjectives. There are all sorts of nonmusical reasons for If we are brave enough to move our being present at concerts, but most people definition of "modern" up to more truly re­ who make use of them bring dead ears with cent times, to the terrifying rollcall of com­ them. I address myself here to the person posers active within the past 30 years or so­ with a willing ear, an open and inquiring dis­ from, say, Schoenberg to George position and a genuine, though perhaps un­ Crumb-the wall of audience resistance be­ tutored, interest in music. There are many comes higher and thicker yet. So far as many such honest souls who are genuinely bewil­ concertgoers are concerned, this is really en­ dered by much contemporary serious music. Robert Finn is interested in crossword puzzles, literature, baseball, poli­ tics, and history, but the central love of his life is music. He has been, he says, involved with music all of his life, as student, performer, and of course as music critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a position he has held for 21 years. Finn believes that "the problem ofaudience resistance to contemporary serious music is one of the central dilemmas facing any critic or any performing organization today. It bears constant study in search of solutions or at least mitigating factors. " LEARNING TO ENJOY TODAY'S MUSIC 3 Nobody but a masochist would delib­ The evolution of musical style is not erately listen to music he did not like. Not too now and never has been a tidy straight line. many people, even among the well-inten­ Every artistic age has its radicals, its middle­ tioned, are willing to listen several times to a of-the-roaders and its conservatives. For ev­ piece they did not care for at first hearing in ery Beethoven, considered a wild-eyed radi­ the hope that they will somehow come to un­ cal by his contemporaries, there is a Brahms derstand and even like it. So, what is to be or a Bach, regarded as old-fashioned, out­ done? dated, or Simply dull and pedantic (one of First, a couple of definitions must be Bach's own sons, who himself became a offered. For want of a precise term, let it be noted composer, referred to his father as "an understood that I am here dealing with the old peruke"). In our own day, the stylistiC sort of art music performed in general in for­ gulf between the jagged, non-thematic con­ mal concert halls, opera houses, and cham­ structivist abstractions of Pierre Boulez and ber music sites, written by trained composers the tuneful, neo-Puccinian operas of Gian­ and performed mainly by musicians trained Carlo Menotti is wide enough to convince in the"classical" tradition.