One would think that having the Courtyard Café in the Hopkins Center would increase students’ interaction with art. As long as we are physically close to Beethoven, we might as well have studied his oeuvre, right? The reality is that campus largely views the Hop as a veritable white noise of exhibits, performances and demonstrations that are enjoyed by a niche within a niche. Lost in the shuffle is the literal sub-culture of classical music, to the detriment of both the dozens of musicians who live in the Hop and to campus at large.
Consider this a crash course in Dartmouth music. We have one recital hall. Practice rooms are acoustically impotent and scarce. A handful of professors are lucky enough to have windows in their offices. Musicians joke about living in the basement beneath the Hop, but some keep sleeping bags in their lockers. The weight of the Hop above us sags on our psyche, like we are treading water fully clothed. The effort it requires to polish musical skills or prepare for a performance easily surpasses the hours spent writing a paper or studying for a midterm. We carry on diligently; sometimes we even find true guidance and inspiration from faculty and peers around us. But this happens on a person-by-person basis. We are each responsible for creating our musical sphere, and our success as musicians is entirely dependent on what that sphere looks like. Oftentimes we find exactly what we need — the right instructors, the right instrument parts and the right friends. We are nonetheless trapped in our corner of the universe, which feels about a million miles a way from the fries whose smell permeates the building. There is no loneliness like the Hop basement.
Many of us enter Dartmouth asking, “Why are we bringing our instruments to this place?” and “What is the point of studying music?” The lack of a suitable response perhaps is the reason why music majors without a second major or modification are rare to the point of almost extinction. A career in music is not something one stumbles into, yet the onus is put entirely on students for determining what they want out of music and how they will achieve it. Students maintain an oral tradition of the music major, telling underclassmen which classes to take with which professors. We fight tooth and nail to keep our world alive, for the loss of a single violist, a single French horn player, can have devastating consequences for our own prosperity.
Every advertisement for visiting artists and every exhibit that is not student work blinds campus to what we do. I hear more about theater productions from my fraternity than from my academic peers. When you eat in the Hop, the looping video of the next chamber group you won’t see drowns out the noises of real rehearsals happening just feet away, while we fight for visibility and credibility at every corner. Meanwhile, some students even abandon their instruments within the first week of freshman fall. At a school where students nail down their primary extracurricular involvements before it snows, we simply do not have time for people to casually discover what awaits downstairs. The arts bureaucracy suffocates us with platitudes like “activating neutral spaces.” I posit that every person on this campus who played an instrument in high school and who doesn’t know the location of Faulkner Recital Hall is a victim of administrative negligence.
What we do is not a side dish. Music and the arts should be a central part of any liberal arts education. Administrators need a vision for a self-sustaining arts culture. We need better infrastructure — practice and performance spaces are rare, under-furnished and downright unpleasant. More importantly we need support. The Hop should be a champion for student art, not a patchwork of guest artists and amorphous collaborations. Until that day, our sound will be stifled by our concrete tomb as fellow students eat above us.
Robert Herbst '16 is a guest columnist.
