To the Editor:
As one of the "male conservatory students" who participated in the Talcott Formal betting pool, I'd like to speak. I make apology to those who felt the betting game "disgusting," "inexcusable" or "sick." I'd like to suggest to those people that if they look at the world beyond the Conservatory, they will find there are more substantial issues toward which they might direct their indignation: people starving to death in North Korea because their well-fed leaders won't come to the negotiating table; the results of neighbors executing neighbors in Africa; jailers of young offenders in this country making their prisoners scrub the toilets of their confines with toothbrushes and then forcing them to brush their teeth with the same. These might be more important foci for my critics' energies.
With my apology in place, I'd like to give my reasons for supporting a betting pool that involved Objectification, Competition and Comparison, and Money. The betting pool was a graphic and emotion-evoking way of revealing values that Con students live with and accept as constants in their lives. I could write quite a lot about each of these, but I'll state briefly what I mean and let your minds ponder it from there. Objectification is a part of every Con students performance on stage-if it weren't we'd wear jeans and tee shirts and the audience, rather being prostrated in seats before us, afraid to cough or drop their programs, would instead be moving to our music and sitting all around us. Competition and Comparison-Con students are constantly compared with one another, judged, ranked in orchestra chairs, chosen or not chosen above others for participation in master classes, etc.. When this isn't done by instructors, it is done by the students themselves to one another. I asked a Conservatory student what made her most nervous about her upcoming recital. Her response: "the negative judgments of the other music students in the audience." In other words, her main concern and fears were of the people with whom she would "someday be working in the professional environment the Conservatory supports and develops" in the words of Ms.'s Bartnicki, Brown and Regelin. Yep.
Money-there was a small amount of money involved in the pool and it too is a part of the Conservatory environment. Talk of the expensiveness of each others instruments or the fact the many musicians from the Con will be competing for a relative small number of money-paying jobs are with us every day.
Look again at what was written in last week's Review against the Talcott Pool and then inset the word "conservatory" for "pool," the word "students" for "participant" and the phrases "best technique," "best interpretation" and "best intonation" for "best dressed," "best looking," and "best acting." Then ask yourself if judging one another is wrong, demeaning and sick. Why have we placed ourselves in an environment where judgment and discrimination are taken for granted daily and viewed as totally acceptable?
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