To the Editors:

Michael Gallope’s excellent commentary in last week’s Review (“James Keller, the new face of Emerging Arts at Oberlin”) brought to light important and unsettling information regarding both the young Emerging Arts program and the broader role of the Arts on the Oberlin campus in general.

When I first noticed the flyers advertising Mr. Keller’s lecture, proclaiming him the new Luce Professor of the Emerging Arts and saying his presentation was titled “A Minute with Stravinsky,” I nearly thought it to be a joke. Surely a professor who is now the head of a unique department based on interdisciplinary study at a supposedly progressive institution would not be lecturing on a dead European male’s string quartet that was written some 90 years ago.

If this is Mr. Keller’s idea of a new sort of arts curriculum, “heavily concentrated on what’s happening now” (quoted from the same Oberlin Online article Mr. Gallope references), then I hope I am not alone in sensing that something in Oberlin is severely wrong and out of touch with today’s student of the Arts.

Although I did not attend his Stravinsky lecture, I was in the audience for Mr. Keller’s convocation speech back in 2000. I recall him being much as Mr. Gallope described: a buttoned-down pre-concert lecturer with a historical bent who seemed to dance around the ominous questions that many of us were really curious about:

What is our role as artists and how is it changing? How is what we do relevant to the world we live in? How is our art form perceived and why? How do artists and artistic institutions deal with these questions beyond the boundaries of academia?

My impression is that due to its insular institutional nature, these extremely important questions are not asked nearly enough by Oberlin students, whether from the perspective of performers or viewers, and they are certainly not posed enough by most of the Oberlin faculty.

It seemed that the Emerging Arts program, particularly as first proposed, presented an important and fresh way of addressing these issues (“new interdisciplinary models of arts education and intellectual frameworks for examining the criticism, theory, ethics and aesthetics of new modes of making art”).

Alas, with Mr. Keller at the helm, it certainly appears that instead we have just added another musicology professor to the faculty, albeit one with a fancy “progressive” title. His background, as Mr. Gallope demonstrated, suggests he is fundamentally at odds with what the Emerging Arts claims to be about.

Plus, he couldn’t even appreciate OK Computer.
–Jacob Adams
OC ’03