Critics are so busy playing the parlor game of second-guessing the Touhill, they’re missing a grand arts experiment underway at the University of Missouri–St. Louis
By Lynnda Greene
Unlike painting or sculpture, music exists entirely within the dimension of time. We can’t comprehend its ultimate effect upon us until the last note has sounded. I thought of this a few weeks ago as I listened to the Arianna String Quartet, the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ superb resident ensemble, perform chamber works by Mozart and Tchaikovsky in the Touhill Performing Arts Center. I couldn’t know, enfolded in the chocolaty cantabile swirls of the Tchaikovsky work’s second movement, how much I’d love the Slavic romp that would open the third. All I knew in the moment was that this group, performing this incomparable music in this splendid venue on this public campus, represents some of the best music-making in the world. Full absorption of that magical afternoon would not bloom for another hour, week, a month maybe; in some sense, we live into such an experience, and vice versa, over a lifetime.
As the Touhill Center’s second season closes, nearsighted critics—and they have been myriad since the center’s inception decades ago—continue to decry its very existence, pointing to shortfalls in bookings and revenue as proof of its ultimate folly. “We told you so,” the chorus crows, even as the state-of-the-art venue draws thousands of new visitors and dozens of arts groups to the campus each year. Such naysayers, stuck on balance sheets only two bars into the music, miss the point of the whole “piece” playing out at UM-St. Louis these days. Because the $52 million facility, conceived 30 years ago by eventual university chancellor Blanche M. Touhill, was never about revenue or prestige.
What it was about was a vision: a long-range, wide-angle approach to higher education centering the community of thought (what any university should be) in the arts. The performance center was intended to serve as a lens, a means to a revolutionary end—the establishment of a vibrant, well-funded music and arts community on this state school campus. The real news at UM-St. Louis has been the birth of the new College of Fine Arts and Communication, which has, in its four years, expanded beyond its four thriving departments (art and art history; music; theater, dance and media studies; and communication) into the community itself. Through UM-St. Louis’ partnership with the Des Lee Collaborative Vision, students and faculty now pair up with professionals at such cultural institutions as Jazz at the Bistro, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Missouri History Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum to gain hands-on, real-life experience in all aspects of arts creation, production and management.
Then there was the hiring of the Arianna, a true stroke of genius, for in bringing in a resident string quartet, UM-St. Louis effectively hired an entire string faculty—four people already committed to working together, performing as a world-class ensemble. In addition to their work with UM-St. Louis string students, they give presentations to classes in business (about the psychology of management), physics (on the science of sound), language and writing (in the breathing that is grammar and syntax) and psychology (about interactive cues). Avid outreachers, they network with local school string programs and perform throughout the region, as well as at the Touhill, to enthusi-astic crowds and rapturous reviews.
Granted, most colleges and universities here offer solid, traditional arts programs, but UM-St. Louis’ daring vision for a higher education experience infused and aerated by the arts recognizes a seminal truth we’ve been slow to accept: Our left-brain education system of rote learning, so deftly measured by SATs, has produced a generation of test-takers who, ranking far behind their peers academically (17th among industrialized countries), lack those right-brain skills necessary to function in a global economy. Heretofore, the formula for “success” has been simple: Go to college, pass tests, get the degree, get the job, get set for life.
But now that legions of foreigners can program code, process data, crunch numbers, read charts and service accounts in a cut-rate click, those linear, logical, left-brain skills at which Americans have always excelled no longer suffice. As multiple studies bemoan the American undergraduates deficient in skills of language, problem solving, information processing, reasoning and creative thinking, we must embrace what scientific evidence has confirmed for decades: Sustained arts edu-cation is essential to academic achievement, ergo professional success, ergo a competitive edge. Ergo—our economy, stupid.
UM-St. Louis’ daring, as signified by the Touhill Center, recognizes that our survival as a city, as a nation, may now depend on how well our education system can shift gears to nurture those creative right-brain learning skills that arts education facilitates. And what better place to get serious about art-for-learning than on this urban campus, most of whose 16,000 students are products of local public schools and have probably had limited, intermittent exposure to the arts?
The Hebrew word for “art” shares the same root as the words “faith” and “training,” the full effects of which, like an afternoon of music, evolve only slowly, over time. We cannot measure the success of any artistic effort by short-term results, the number of butts in seats or bucks in the till. “Concert halls,” the great violinist Gidon Kremer once said, “are not places to get knowledge, but places to experience something directly that leads to knowledge.” Later, over hours, months … years. UM-St. Louis should be commended and supported for an ambitious, prescient venture that may produce the very thinkers and creators our city desperately needs. Let the music play on.
