For the Value We Have Yet to Name

I love the brief moment before the music begins.

Instruments are arranged on stage. In the audience sit people who have each lived through a different day. What the music is about to bring, and to whom, no one yet knows.

Some may be deeply moved. Others may leave thinking they felt nothing at all. And yet, years later, a melody may return to someone in an ordinary, unguarded moment.

What name could we give to that time?

When we speak about the arts, we are often asked to explain their value.

How many people attended? What was the economic impact? What changed in the community? What did the children learn?

These are important questions. We work with limited resources and within society. We need to engage with others and find words for what our work means.

But sometimes I pause.

In searching for value we can explain, are we beginning to create only what is easy to explain?

When planning a concert, for example, we may first ask how many people will come, or what outcomes we will be able to report. There is nothing wrong with those questions. They are essential if our work is to continue.

Yet they can gradually begin to determine the work itself, shaping what we perform and how we express it before the artistic process has even begun.

No one has forbidden anything. We believe we are choosing freely, only to find ourselves walking a path whose answers have already been prepared.

An expression that perhaps no one has asked for. A work that will not be immediately understood. A new attempt with no certainty of success.

The space for choosing such things slowly narrows. That quiet change troubles me.

The process by which culture and the arts are treated as commodities is often called commodification.

Selling tickets or putting a price on a work is not, in itself, the problem. Bringing art to people requires labor, time, and money. Artists deserve fair compensation, and reaching a larger audience matters if their work is to endure.

But when sales and immediately demonstrable outcomes become the only measures of value, artistic expression gradually begins to take the shape those measures reward.

If the value being demanded always looks the same, the works and projects we choose begin to resemble one another. Things that should be different are given the same explanations, asked to produce the same results, and eventually begin to look alike.

Where does that lead us? Toward richness, or toward a loss of individuality?

Art should also be an encounter with something no one has seen before, or something only a particular person could bring into being. If the effort to prove its value wears away creativity and originality, we may be narrowing the space in which art can emerge, even as we try to support it.

Something falls outside the frame.

Time spent working on music that is not yet widely known. Opportunities for young musicians to learn through failure. Time spent with a work, searching for a feeling that has not yet found its words.

Such things rarely reveal themselves easily in a short report or a set of figures.

I think of the time I spent making music with the young musicians of the Dallas Asian American Youth Orchestra.

They were not the only ones who grew. Through our work together, I too was able to grow as a conductor, as a musician, and as a human being.

How could I express the value of that growth in numbers?

We can count participants and performances. We can observe changes in musical technique. But it is difficult to reduce to a single number what that shared time has left within me.

The fact that I cannot fully describe that growth does not mean that nothing happened. Something from those encounters is still present in who I am today.

In a place where I thought I was helping others grow, I was growing too. I am still searching for the words to explain the value of that experience.

An orchestra, likewise, is not made up of individual concerts alone.

There is a sound that develops through playing together. There is the knowledge of those who support the stage. There are relationships with audiences built over many years. What passes to the next generation is more than the notes written in a score.

Once that accumulated experience is lost, it cannot simply be recreated.

For that reason, I do not believe we can protect the arts by separating them from society.

There is great possibility in bringing music to schools, care facilities, hospitals, and other places in a community. We meet people who may not previously have had the opportunity to encounter it. Relationships emerge that would not have formed on stage alone. Performers, too, may come away with new questions.

It is wonderful when art meets society and something grows from the encounter.

But if we insist too strongly on asking what art is useful for before that encounter has even taken place, we risk making it serve only purposes that have already been decided.

Art should also be able to question those purposes, or to reveal a landscape we had not imagined.

How can we remain open to society while also protecting forms of expression that offer no easy answers?

In an age that asks for efficiency and results, it can be difficult to wait for a value that has no name yet. Still, I want there to be room for things whose role cannot immediately be assigned.

The first note sounds.

We may never fully know what resonance it leaves, or in whom.

Even so, we listen for the next note.

Trusting that something we have not yet seen may come into being.