Art: Not about comfort and familiarity

TO THE EDITOR:

I was puzzled and disheartened by Friday’s editorial, “Carolina Performing Arts should continue featuring more well-known works.”

It should not be the duty of a performing arts organization to provide a stable of familiar works to placate audiences who are apparently uninterested in the unknown.

Rather, it is the duty of a performing arts organization — especially as part of a university, which promotes learning and cultural awareness — to innovate and invent, to not only recreate works of the past, but help foster new art for the present.

Carolina Performing Arts does just that.

“The Rite of Spring at 100,” an interdisciplinary exploration of the legacy of Stravinsky’s 1913 masterwork, is not an attempt to showcase the familiar to sell tickets.

Faced with unorthodox music and violent dancing at the premiere of “The Rite,” the Parisian audience rioted; police had to be called, and the dancers couldn’t even hear the orchestra over the shouting and fisticuffs.

By embracing that riotous moment, CPA has chosen to treat the arts as they should be treated — not as a comfortable bubble-bath for the ears but as a vital part of modern culture.

This is the reason that performances have sold out — because CPA has lined up a cadre of artists who will embrace “The Rite” as a symbol of newness.

CPA has commissioned 12 new works from contemporary composers and choreographers that connect not only to “The Rite” but also to a vision of art in the 21st century.

New art can be just as powerful as the classics. Commissioning new choreography and music, as CPA has done and will hopefully continue to do, allows the UNC and Triangle communities to engage with works that can speak to today’s culture, often quite beautifully.

So please do not pat CPA on the head for putting together a fantastically innovative season and call it “familiar.”

Maybe people do “like to hear and see something that’s at least somewhat familiar to them.”

But this weekend’s performances by the Silk Road Ensemble exclusively feature music written in the past decade, including two world premieres which one can 100 percent guarantee that none of the audiences think of as somewhat familiar.

And, what do you know, it’s the best-selling concert of the entire CPA season. Go figure.

William Robin
Graduate Student ’16
Musicology