Do We Need the Arts?

A lot of people have no interest in the arts at all. The citizens of Water Valley, MS, however, are not those people. As a case in point, Mickey Howley and Annette Trefzer, owners of Bozart's Gallery, say their mission is to “expand community appreciation of the arts and promote the town of Water Valley as an art destination."  They take exception to H.L. Mencken's famous 1929 assessment of the South as "the Sahara of the Bozarts," a literary pun on the French term beaux arts. There are so many people in Water Valley who feel the same way as Howley and Trefzer that the town's Arts Council instituted what has become the famous—and award winning—Art Crawl. The 7th Annual Art Crawl took place on Saturday, September 19th, from 5:30 to 9:00 p.m. Each of the 16 stops on this year's tour featured the works of participating local artists; seven locations were new to the Crawl, and all of them were comfortably within walking distance of each other. Half the stops were on Main Street. These included First United Methodist Church's Wesley House where I contributed to the event by playing piano Blues right on the front porch. Many hold the opinion that, without the arts, humanity would have more time, talent, and energy to devote to "real world" problems like curing cancer. I think, however, that to ignore our inner lives (as expressed in the arts) imperils our natural instinctive states of mind, our morals, our values, and our spirituality. German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright Friedrich Schiller once said, “The aesthetic education of man is his one true preparation for rational life.” In other words, intelligence itself is linked to organized, sensorial perception which is a great definition of Art with a capital "A." Deepak Chopra, MD has gone so far as to say, “The world we live in...is completely dictated by how we...perceive it.” Without pre­tend­ing the issue is simpler than it is, the logical conclusion of this train of thought is that the discovery of, say, for instance, new medical treatments depends entirely on fostering the arts.

Visit the Water Valley Arts Council's website at http://watervalleyartscouncil.com/

ZANE GILLESPIE

After six years as Minister of Music at Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church (UMC) in Holly Springs, MS, I was recently called to continue to work to address public engagement in music participation as Director of Music Ministries at First UMC in Water Valley, MS. I am a Composer, Theorist, and member of both The College Music Society as well as The Poe Studies Association (PSA). I am also an active pianist and vocalist, specializing primarily in church music. My paper entitled ““Mesmeric Revelation”: Art as Hypnosis” has been published by the international, peer-reviewed journal Humanities. In addition, another paper of mine entitled “A Model of Triadic Post-Tonality for a Neoconservative Postmodern String Quartet by Sky Macklay” has been submitted to the peer-reviewed Music Theory journal Perspectives of New Music. At the end of February 2015, I served as Chair for the session entitled “Aesthetics and Philosophy” at The Fourth International PSA Conference in New York City. On June 21, 2014, my Quartet for Alto Saxophone and Strings, a commission from concert saxophonist Walter Hoehn, was performed as part of Concert V of the Eighth Annual Belvedere Chamber Music Festival held at Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, TN. Characteristically neo-romantic (in the original sense of the word), my music earned me the Nancy Van de Vate Award for Composition three times from the University of Mississippi Department of Music. A native of Pontotoc, MS, I hold degrees from the University of Mississippi (BM; MM), and the University of Memphis (DMA) where I was the 2011 recipient of the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music's Smit Composition Award. I live in Memphis, TN.