Educated Men and Women

Everyone who lives in San Diego knows that it is a great place to live.

There are the beaches, the long stretches of freeways, the weather, the relaxed atmosphere. It has Los Angeles' benefits without its distractions, and oasis in the Southern California desert.

A recent annual survey of the best places to live in the United States confirmed this view of my hometown--for the most part. San Diego ranked 16th, markedly up from last year. Its weather rating, as it always is, was 100 out of 100.

So far, so good. Yet its rating for the arts was a dismal 20 out of 100--and that was before the city's symphony orchestra declared bankruptcy three weeks ago.

Driving last week by downtown's Symphony Hall, built in the past decade to much fanfare, I was struck by its desertion. No signs up for upcoming performers; no banners announcing that the Symphony Pops would once again be held on a peninsula jutting into the bay. The symphony's finances were badly mismanaged; that is something everyone here seems to agree on.

Yet there is no excuse for the nation's sixth-largest city not to have an orchestra. Someone should have stepped in.

I began wondering if it was a lack of desire for good music that hindered the symphony's efforts. In San Diego, it is often difficult to raise large amounts of money for the arts. Representatives of the Old Globe Theatre, which shows Shakespeare and many plays that eventually reach Broadway, said in last week's San Diego Union-Tribune that it is nearly impossible for any arts organization to raise more than $2.5 or $3 million per year here.

The symphony had budgeted more than $4.5 million in donations this year, perhaps unrealistically. Yet I would hope that there would be enough wealthy people in San Diego who care enough about music to underwrite the symphony, give it a long-term loan, do something.

Apparently, there were not--or not enough. Some of the blame for the lack of caring about musical institutions must fall on the symphony itself--and a great portion must fall on our nation's great colleges and universities such as Harvard.

In the days I was reading about the after-math of the symphony's demise, I was also listening to a CD I had just bought: Bach's six solo cello suites. A friend had recommended them, and as I listened I thought that there was little better than this on earth. I have had similar feelings about many of the pieces I was exposed to in Robert Levin's Core course, Literature and Arts B-54: "Chamber Music from Mozart to Ravel." From Schubert's light Trout Quintet to Beethoven's brooding late string quartets, all nine pieces I was required to know have stayed with me and spurred me to look for other chamber pieces.

As valuable as that class was, it is not enough. Chamber music is only one part of the vast musical canon. At Harvard, because of concentration and other Core requirements, I will not take a class on symphonies, opera or choral works, and I will be the poorer for it.

The Core Review Committee lies lying dormant this summer, but when it returns to full force in the fall, it would be well-advised to require a class in music appreciation: appreciating all types of classical music, from Verdi to Vivaldi.

This probably will not happen; I am not so naive as to believe that the committee will take any steps to mandate more strictly what students must take. Its members likely already believe that the category of Literature and Arts B is unduly restrictive, in that it is virtually confined to the visual and musical arts.

As it stands, Harvard students are not required to take any music class to graduate.

We can fulfill our Lit and Arts B slot with studio art or the study of architecture or art history. All of these pursuits are just as important as that of music, yet to force students to choose whether they will be culturally literate in music or art is ridiculous.

Harvard should require music appreciation, and it should require art appreciation. it should demand that students take two courses, or it should create an all-encompassing course that includes all of the arts. Harvard students are graduating without knowing anything about art or anything about music, and even in cases where they have learned one of the two solidly, their knowledge is often restricted to one architect or five great pieces. Forget about the "methods and approaches to knowledge" clause in the description of the Core. Let us focus instead on tangible pieces of music, solid hulks of sculpture, well-designed buildings--and lots of them.

Harvard is doing its students a disservice by sending them into the world unschooled in art and music. For the Core to truly be a Core, for President Neil L. Rudenstine to be able to say in good conscience that Harvard students are being graduated into "the company of educated men and women," Harvard must require music and art appreciation.

Without such education and subsequent cultural leadership from the leaders of tomorrow, perhaps other cities' orchestras will fall victim to neglect and indifference. Many already have. With the exception of culturally thriving cities such as New York, symphonies in other cities constantly must struggle to meet their debts. Halls are rarely full. A city without a thriving cultural life has no soul; a college which does not teach its students to appreciate such culture is in the process of selling its own.