I imagine that most readers will already have made connections between these observations and my “Before the First Lesson” topic. But to point to a few that seem important to me with respect to the development of artistic potential in young persons:

To the extent that they have not cultivated a strong capacity for empathy, they are apt to  have difficulty in imagining themselves into the lives of the characters they are seeking to interpret. In fact, they are unlikely to have experienced emotional attachments to fictional characters, either in their reading or in their early theatre encounters as audience members, and to thereby understand that it is part of their artistic responsibility to do so.

To the extent that their emotional experience, and their habits of communication in general, have been media-mediated rather than physically immediate, they will not have habituated the energies of urgent expression or the sense of personal give-and-take, of picking up on bodily cues and the vibe of a real-life, real-time exchange, that are necessary for vital contact with performing colleagues or with an audience.

To the extent that they have been held in the multi-tasking, addictive grip of the onscreen Now or Right Away, at the expense of remembrance, of wonderment, of daydreaming, they will have less to draw on in their creative pursuits, less sense of exploring the content of a moment before moving on to the next, and less patience with the long view, the trajectory, of a given artistic task. Or of the slow gains of study, or the rhythm of their own lives and careers.

Finally, the word “intuition” pops up in Rosen’s article. I’ve often been baffled by its use among the digitally advantaged—”Oh, that’s just intuitive,” they’ll say with an airy tone, in reference to some wretched tangle or inexplicable glitch. I have come to believe them—that is, I see that there’s a kind of intuition that works for the digital mind. It makes quick connections in a context that is mathematically determined and non-linear, that jumps about from place to place in a metaphorical world and is happy to be without narrative, and no doubt feels instinctual to those who have cultivated it. But it is alien to how I think of “intuition,” and is surely fatal to any dalliance with the Romantic. The structuring of that sort of intuition is built into education now, and is part or all of nearly every young person’s day job.

And I realized something a while back: for the first time in my long teaching life, I have no students working the long-standing actor/singer/dancer day job as a restaurant waiter. Not that it was wonderful—double shifts, frantic pace, noisy environment to shout over, weird co-workers, lots of guff from customers and bosses. It kept you moving, though, and it wasn’t virtual.

˜ ˜ ˜

With the pink slip now final and the breach-of-contract lawsuit underway, the Metropolitan Opera has officially entered the PostLevinian era. Like most phenomena bearing the prefix “Post,” this one hasn’t, at least yet, much in the way of recognizable characteristics of its own, which is why it’s defined only in relation to what came before it. Here at the dawn of the PostLevinian, things don’t seem at all different from the waning years of the Levinian proper, which had itself become pretty hard to pin down. But the special queasiness of the moment has stirred stomach rumblings in the local press. First, there was Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic of the Times, facing the ethical dilemma of whether or not to dismantle his James Levine CD shrine, now that the household god is under perv proscription. Then, there was NYT co-critic Zachary Wolfe asking “Is It Time To Rethink Maestro Worship?”, which one hopes Tommasini took in good collegial spirit.