Recent posts by Christy Tennant

Most people who pay big bucks for orchestra tickets will never know the joy of receiving music as a gift. While music will not change these homeless people's situation in any pragmatic sense—they are still homeless at the end of the concert—I think one of the workers hit the nail on the head: "Mr. O’Connor said he was struck by how the men opened up after hearing the two violins in dialogue. 'Maybe through this music there’s healing,' he said."

re: community, grace, homeless, music, traces of god

Christy:

Just three blocks from Lincoln Center, they arrived at the concert on Thursday night by shelter bus, not taxi or limousine. They took their seats around scarred, round folding tables. The menu was chicken curry and rice served on paper plates.

These concertgoers were eight tired, homeless men who had been taken to the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church shelter for the night. They listened to the latest performance by Kelly Hall-Tompkins, a professional violinist who has been playing in shelters for five years under the banner of Music Kitchen.

Ms. Hall-Tompkins is not the only do-gooder in the classical music world. Orchestras nationwide took part in a food drive this fall, and Classical Action raises money for AIDS programs through concerts and other activities. Hospital Audiences brings musicians and other performers into wards. But most classical music institutions — orchestras, opera houses and conservatories — pour their philanthropic efforts into large-scale music education for children, supported by hefty fund-raising and marketing machines. They organize youth orchestras; play concerts in poor, urban schools; and provide lessons.

Music Kitchen has a catchy motto (“Food for the Soul”), T-shirts with a logo and a pool of donors. But the operation is essentially Ms. Hall-Tompkins, 38, an ambitious New York freelancer who plays in the New Jersey Symphony and has a midlevel solo and chamber music career.

“I like sharing music with people, and they have zero access to it,” Ms. Hall-Tompkins said of her homeless audiences. “It’s very moving to me that I can find people in a place perhaps when they have a greater need for, and a heightened sensitivity to, beauty.”

These undergrads at Columbia are surpassing every other effort I have seen at green living. Regardless of what is or is not happening with the climate, this short news article inspires me to think once again about what it means to be given the mandate of caring for that which God called "good." I'm embracing the the 5-minute shower and unplugging unused appliances, but I'm afraid I have to draw the line at worm bins in my bedroom.

re: creation care, cultivation and creation, environmentalism

Christy:

Todd Nelson, a Columbia sophomore, plans a double major in environmental science and history with a focus on industrialization and the rise of consumerism. He sleeps next to a worm bin where he composts food scraps.

He’s one of 13 students in Columbia’s GreenBorough dorm, where an experiment in sustainable living launched this semester is a competitive sport.

Showers are limited to five minutes (Nelson’s personal record is 1:50). A chart on the wall keeps track of offenders who forget to turn off lights and unplug appliances.

“We’re semi-paranoid about leaving on lights,” Nelson said. “We try to implement social pressure.”

The house won’t buy anything wasteful — like plastic cups — so its “off-the-grid” party two weeks ago had acoustic-only bands, flashlights, and was BYOC — Bring Your Own Cup.

This week, I visited with Nick Wolterstorff at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, a think tank connected to the University of Virginia and housed in a beautiful, unmarked building on University Circle (I found it by deductive reasoning: it was the one building that did not even remotely resemble a frat house). As we sat in the dining area enjoying homemade soup and bread, which is available at the Institute most Tuesdays courtesy of a lovely woman who prepares the feast as an act of generosity, Nick pointed out some detail in the wooden molding that ran along the ceiling in the room. He helped me to see how that detail, unremarkable to the average eye, changed the entire feel of the room. The conversation quickly turned to woodworking and craftsmanship, and I remembered this essay of Nick's reviewing Richard Sennett's book The Craftsman. I am grateful for craftsmen who understand how small details can open up an entire room, and I am likewise grateful for those whose "'primordial mark of identity' is that he or she is focused on achieving quality, on doing good work."

re: craft, cultivation and creation, nicholas wolterstorff

Christy:

Mine is a family of craftsmen—woodworkers, to be specific. My grandfather was a cabinetmaker, my father was a cabinetmaker, I have done woodworking, my sons work in wood. I have always resented the many ways in which those who work with their hands are demeaned. R. G. Collingwood’s aesthetic theory is shaped by his contrast between “mere craft,” as he calls it, and true art; the attitude expressed is typical.

I spent thirty years of my life teaching philosophy at Calvin College and fifteen teaching philosophy at Yale University. At both institutions there was a pecking order (these institutions are typical in this regard, not unique), more evident to those at the bottom of the order than to those at the top. If you use your hands or teach those who use their hands—“hands” being used both literally and metaphorically here—you are inferior to those who use only their heads: practicing musicians are inferior to musicologists, painters are inferior to art historians, teachers of business are inferior to economists, teachers of preaching are inferior to theologians. The basic attitude was stated crisply by Aristotle at the opening of his Metaphysics: “We think the master-workers in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers.”

It’s a strange attitude for Christians to hold, since Jesus was the son of a carpenter and since God is presented in the opening pages of Scripture as a maker, not a thinker. Sennett observes, correctly, that “early Christianity had from its origins embraced the dignity of the craftsman.” That dignity was vigorously reaffirmed by the early Protestant reformers.

A craftsman, for Sennett, is someone who is dedicated to doing good work for its own sake. This good work will normally have desirable consequences; if things go well, the craftsman will get paid for what he does or makes, for example. But the craftsman is not content to aim at those external consequences; if consequences become his preoccupation, he will think in terms of getting by rather than getting it right, in terms of good enough rather than good. The craftsman’s “primordial mark of identity” is that he or she is focused on achieving quality, on doing good work. Craftsmanship is quality-driven work.

Sennett holds that in thinking about craftsmanship it helps to begin by looking closely at those crafts in which one uses one’s hands to make something. But if craftsmanship is doing good work for its own sake, then craftsmanship obviously extends far beyond manual crafts. It extends to the craft of writing book reviews. It extends to the craft of governing well that I mentioned at the beginning.

I confess that I have co-sponsored baby talk among some of my favorite under-fives. Indeed, I was crushed the day one of my nephews explained to his younger brother that my name was not, in fact, Aunt Toasty. Yet as much as I miss the days of serving up hot choplate to my friend's young son, I agree that, by school-age, it is best for children to have learned correct pronunciations (though I would draw the line at calling one's mother his old lady).

re: community, cultivation and creation, language

Christy:

The child’s language learning, now and later, is governed by two obvious motives: the desire to communicate and the desire to be admired. He imitates what he hears. More or less successful imitations usually bring action and reward and tend to be repeated. Unsuccessful ones usually don’t bring action and reward and tend to be discarded.

But since language is complicated business it is sometimes the unsuccessful imitations that bring the reward. The child, making a stab at the word mother, comes out with muzzer. The family decides that this is just too cute for anything and beams and repeats muzzer, and the child, feeling that he’s scored a bull’s eye, goes on saying muzzer long after he has mastered other and brother. Baby talk is not so much invented by the child as sponsored by the parent.

Eventually the child moves out of the family and into another speech community - other children of his neighborhood. He goes to kindergarten and immediately encounters speech habits that conflict with those he has learned. If he goes to school and talks about his muzzer, it will be borne in on him by his colleagues that the word is not well chosen. Even mother may not pass the muster, and he may discover that he gets better results and is altogether happier if he refers to his female parent as his ma or even his old lady.