NY Times finally reports the plight of Met musicians

Nijinsky says:

What has Classical Music become when there’s not even money for the basic tenements that keep the art going, but ample room for paying and keeping in luxurious pampered lifestyle those who exploit the basic tenements for what often amounts to an adrenaline addiction what might be a circus act where it not for the basic tenements supporting it, the art that actually has meaning and does despite all of it tend to the human soul!?

I find it all more shocking and shocking.

Years and years ago, actually half my life ago, I ended up in an upstairs apartment of someone who had been going to a spiritualist church for years, and they all have it as the holy grail that they want to be able to go into a trance and to give forth this secret holy information that would come from spirits; and I started asking him stuff about Mozart’s mother, who I thought was different people around me reincarnated. I was told that I was collecting parts of her personality and that she was in spirit, and then at one point she put him into a trance, because as I was told he was doubting the information. I then afterwards was told he was blown away by the love between me and Anna, actually sort of akin to Voldemoort, who had never known such love, no criticism on him, even. But so the opening was there, and endured for a year, and I got the chance to talk to all sorts of spirits: Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, I took a theory teacher to the church to play something for flute and piano with me and she talked to Bach about how one of his chorales was handed out to a music theory exam and he got a B on it (I thought it sounded good, was his remark), I especially was dear to Vivaldi and Chopin. Tchaikovsky told me about his suicide, and said that he had been discovered making love to another man, and it being against the law the person discovering him was cruel enough to make a sarcastic remark that he should commit suicide, which is what he did, and what Russia now still denies, along with his nature. And Tchaikovsky was really good about it, not like how others mostly play his music indulging in emotional selfishness or thrill seeking, he asked me about something personal and then said I would make it (in contrast), and then the medium woke up wondering why he had tears on his face. I also talked to Nadia Boulanger, who said that she had taught me the notes, and I actually remembered as a child being able to see the logic of the staff and how notes move in it. Unfortunately given how spiritualism tries to exploit spirit for earthly means that only compromise it, I had to get away from all of that, in fact I couldn’t deal with it, it was too confusing and I had a whole collection of emotional wounds from my youth that made me vulnerable to wanting stuff that wasn’t good for me, which I managed to sabotage not have the sense to play such games to get all such earthly rewards, call it crazy if you will.

And whether you believe any of that or not, right after that year one now extremely famous present soloist showed up, and I knew he would somehow. I found the energy so restless that I called his managers asking them to tell him to leave me alone, and he showed up at my parents house acting cutesy as if his need to be pampered was “just kidding,” while was sitting on the porch just trying to let go of everything, and just that, not needing said ambition coming charging into my life. Music had become something else, and I didn’t even know what it was yet. I didn’t know nor could I cognate, or navigate through quite severe emotional wounds from my childhood and other times beyond perception. That the music was there to heal, would I allow it to be what it’s meant to be, that simple really. That’s really something different then exploiting it for said celebrity, all the marketing games, all the restlessness like some vibrating alarm that doesn’t desist, all of the adrenaline. And it’s taken me years to understand all of the paranoia that it caused, and to let go of it and heal from it.

HOW is this that a whole array of celebrities, some of them making more money in a year than the whole budget of a regional orchestra in the United states, that they pull through this whole pandemic without hardly a scratch, other than petty stuff to complain about along with stories how they never have spent more than said time staying at home keeping house, and others are losing their whole lively hood (have no house to keep anymore), giving upon their career, and even as Anne Sophie Mutter has reported having had letters about, committing suicide!?

Music in “primitive” cultures was actually honored for what it was. That it was spiritual, that is was healing, that it contained the stories, the history of a culture, and brought light to the human spirit. The kind of celebrity fixation that it has become, with something like one tenth or less of the amount of money and institutional support going to those who compose the music and who in the times when there wasn’t such a media binge on celebrity actually did compose the whole mainstay or this present blitz…..

It’s really part of the new wave of colonialism where art itself has lost the spirit it had in indigenous cultures, to become an exploit, a sensual escape, a drug. And the whole mob of adrenaline fixated celebrities, except for a few, are running manic with it……