GASLIGHT OF THE GODS: CHRONICLES OF TRAUMA, SURVIVAL, AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE IN MUSIC EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

IN PROGRESS

EXCERPT FROM PROLOGUE

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… Gaslight of the Gods is about systems of sexual and emotional abuse in music education throughout the world, with case studies spanning the six inhabited continents. I gather stories by speaking with – and, when there is mutual consent, by bringing together – survivors, allies, perpetrators, bystanders, and enablers, who variously acknowledge or contest their labels, roles, and responsibilities. Although the book makes no claims to a universal narrative about music and abuse, the geographical sweep illuminates two crucial ideas.

First, that such abuse is pervasive and underreported across cultures. Second, that understanding (even rectifying) these patterns of abuse will require careful consideration of a particular culture’s attitudes toward education, art, privacy, sexuality, race, gender, speech, childhood, adolescence, authority, celebrity, idolatry, and touch. A child who is abused in a country with legal corporal punishment may develop beliefs and coping mechanisms different from those of a child who grows up in a country where spanking is illegal or taboo. Thresholds for determining appropriate versus inappropriate touch may vary based on whether a culture observes traditions of habitual hugs, salutary kisses on the cheek, locker room horseplay, or platonic hand holding between men in public.

One phenomenon tends to hold true across societies: famous musicians are often lionized or outright deified. Rock stars, illustrious conductors, tabla masters, and distinguished conservatory professors can achieve a godly status. These luminaries are capable of scrambling the moral compasses of students and admirers. Someone’s tear-jerking, spine-tingling, hair-raising, feet-tapping, jaw-dropping performances may cast a mesmerizing mist over bodies and minds, momentarily transporting awed listeners to alternate realities. 

In the windup to the 2016 United States presidential election – a period engulfed in an epistemic pandemonium of “fake news,” “post-truth,” and “alternative facts” – the concept of gaslighting permeated the national conversation, with the gerund accusatorily deployed by voters and pundits as well as by journalists and scholars. The neologism is derived from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, in which the female protagonist is manipulated by her husband into believing she is going insane and “hearing things.” Today, gaslighting describes a psychological tactic in abusive relationships. To gaslight someone is to make this person question their own sanity, intelligence, perceptual acuity, memory, or faith. Gaslighters manipulate their victims into absorbing blame, withholding complaint, relinquishing authority, defending the abuser, forfeiting a stable sense of self, and ultimately remaining in deleterious arrangements.

Glorified musicians, both in spite of and because of their transgressions, are capable of gaslighting fans and critics alike. To be sure, gaslighting may occur even in the absence of physical proximity or cohabitation. Think of how we sometimes treat our favorite musicians as if they were intimate partners: their songs nesting in our custom playlists; their posters and photos gracing the walls of our offices or the walls of our social media pages; their specters making cameos in our aspirational daydreams. So when we do learn unsavory details about our idols – say, about their alleged perpetration of sexual assault – we might voice our outrage, our sympathy for the victims, and our feelings of betrayal . . . or perhaps not, in the event we continue to slumber under the maestro’s spell.

In 2017, #MeToo caught fire from public outcry over the predatory behaviors of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. (Tarana Burke had long before used “Me Too” to call attention to the widespread and underreported nature of sexual assault, posting the phrase on MySpace in 2006.) Related hashtags such as #TimesUp began trending on social media as survivors of sexual assault painfully inventoried their abusers’ versatile arsenals of gaslighting tactics.

Music has power to jolt the body, work wonders on the mind, and twist the tongue. And so music offers one medium through which we can better understand forms of interpersonal and institutional victimization. But while high-profile musicians have numbered among the accused in the age of #MeToo, many observers point out that musical circles have been exceptionally slow to address sexual abuse. Whether concerning R&B star R. Kelly or former Metropolitan Opera director James Levine, numerous articles surmise that the music industry might “finally” be facing its own #MeToo moment, implicitly noting the relative delay. So why the delay – or perception thereof – in the spheres of popular music and classical music alike?

Some chapters in Gaslight of the Gods zoom in on powerful institutions, such as Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and Venezuela’s music education program El Sistema, where accused faculty and leaders have found protections in vast, complex, and often shrouded networks of complicity and enablement. Other chapters veer away from the big names and scandals that make instant headlines, and instead focus on transgressions in everyday music education, in everyday places – the living room, the local elementary school, the multipurpose community center. A teacher, after all, does not need to be famous in order to appear authoritative to students (especially young ones), and to find ways to abuse this authority.

Extended stories of individuals are punctuated by reflections on difficult questions. How does the typical space of a private music lesson – a room with a closed door and even soundproofed walls, the teacher alone with the student – give rise to potential feelings of seclusion, intimacy, or precarity? To what extent do we hear (or imagine hearing) traces of trauma and healing in the music making of survivors? Why do some people fervently believe we cannot separate art from artist, whereas others, with equal confidence, insist otherwise? Is calling a perpetrator a “monster” any more meaningful and constructive than calling them a “god,” insofar as both terms stress inhuman otherness? How do the etymology, tradition, and format of the masterclass fortify values of hierarchy and authority in classical music? For students, what are the mental, physical, and spiritual costs of buying into romantic tropes of the imperatively suffering artist? For individuals accused or convicted of assault, what paths exist for penitence, rehabilitation, and restorative justice, and why have so few people seemed to pursue these paths? In the age of #MeToo, is it possible to condemn unwanted and inappropriate interactions while accommodating the comforting, even humane, potential of physical touch? [end of excerpt]