Arts and Community
My output will likely be down a bit this week because I have rehearsals every night and a performance Friday evening. I'm singing in a community chorus about 100 people who get together every other year to perform a big chunk of Handel's Messiah along with some other seasonal stuff.
We are all volunteers who have real jobs doing other things. I sing in a section with my doctor, a couple of students, my father-in-law, a psychologist-counselor, a few retired folks, including some who used to work building coal mining machinery. We'll be accompanied in performance by a small pick-up orchestra.
We'll perform in the town's one theater, a performance space that was purchased and reconditioned by the local community theater group about twenty years ago. If this goes like most years, the concert will be close to selling out.
For most of the people involved, this is a typical use of spare time. Many of the singers also sing in their church choir. For me, this is how I spend much of my off-duty time. I play in a 159-year-old town band-- concerts on the bandstand in the city park and everything-- that is also filled entirely by non-professional amateurs. And I work with community theater, also loaded with people who have a real job, but who somehow seek out artistic activities in their lives.
Arts and music are under attack in many school systems. This is not new. They have always been under attack. It's just a little worse now that the forces of reformsterism have been busy stripping public schools of resources; when the budget gets tight, the arts always look like an easy target for destruction.
The arts matter. We spend a lot of time trying to defend how they matter to individual CURMUDGUCATION: Arts and Community:
