We Are All Illegal Aliens Now: Ageism in Calls-for-Scores and Competitions as Quasi-Immigration Policy?

P  eople are not equal, partly for the reason that they cannot all be born at the same time.”
  —  Walter Miles, Handbook of Social Psychology, 1935, p. 596.

I  n my first career in I.T./computers, I earned my degrees in Math and then M.S. and part Ph.D. in computer science. So when I decided back in the summer of 2003 to pursue a composing career, I decided to start totally from scratch. … I was almost 52 years old at that time.”
  —  Joel Irwin, post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 01-MAY-2008.

W hat is it about people over 35 (or 15, 25, or 90 for that matter) that should prevent them from competing with their artistic efforts? Is it that they have ‘had their chance’ and now need to get out of the way? For me, that argument does not hold water. With the ‘baby-boomer’ generation, we will see more and more people who are over 40 and at the beginning of their creative careers after having worked in other professions for years, often not by choice. These folks need a chance to show what they can contribute just as much as the person who is also starting out but under a certain age. Why should the older beginner be excluded from participating in publicly held competitions?”
  —  Robert Raines, post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 30-APR-2008.

I  founded Juventas with two other young composers who felt there was a flaw in the ‘system’. Instead of ‘whining’ … we decided to take initiative and form an ensemble that focuses on giving amazing performances of music by primarily young, living composers, and to perform this music as repertoire—meaning more than once. Since that time, we have worked diligently to form a community of supporters for our mission. Juventas, as it stands, is the result. I encourage you all to do the same. If you see a problem with the way ensembles, calls-for-scores, competitions, etc., are run … then create something that supports your ideas.”
  —  Erin Huelskamp, Executive & Artistic Director, Juventas New Music Ensemble (Boston), post on SCIMEMBERS listserve, 01-MAR-2008.

Within the last several days there has been a vigorous dialogue about the topic of ‘ageism’ on the Society of Composers listserve, triggered by a new call-for-scores posted by Juventas New Music Ensemble. Ageism has to do with prejudice and injustice based on age. It appears in all sorts of situations and affects people of all ages. The thread on the Society of Composer’s listserve this week concerns the frequent stipulation of rather low upper age limits for composer competitions.

Of course, energy and dynamism and value are not the exclusive monopoly of youth, anymore than they are exclusive attributes of the citizens of a country. It’s not a very profound insight but it is one that has caused a prolific reaction—so much so as to cause some of the SCI listserve members to complain. The reaction has not been about Juventas (whose charter and founding principles are specifically focused on youthful composers). Instead, the reaction has to do with the pervasiveness of the age restrictions on many, many competitions.

In a way, each age bracket is like a different ‘country’. We leave one country and enter another. There is even the expression ‘over the hill’, which is where we go in middle or later life. Those of us who are ‘refugees’ from over the hill leave behind a place that is familiar but problematic, and we progressively acquaint ourselves with a new place. We hope that our reception by the locals will be supportive and friendly, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. We hope that we will rapidly become connected, able to navigate efficiently in the new landscape and form relationships that will nourish us and that we, in turn, can nourish. Composing as a second career (or as an avocation) is like this.

Kyle Gann’s post a couple of years ago on his ArtsJournal blog suggests that the restriction of entries for many competitions to composers under 30 or other youthful limits is not so much a manifestation of the aim to provide aid to needy young people as it is an embodiment of a ‘cult of prodigy’—as if truly stellar composing is, like ballet or theoretical mathematics, somehow only possible when one is very young, as if the ability or potential to do truly new and spectacular things is lost as one enters middle age, or as if discovering and supporting young Mozarts is a goal that trumps all others.

This is more about power—who is able to grant or withhold privileges, and which stakeholders in the status quo stand to benefit from that power—than anything else. It is about civic stratification and welfare policies in the social/political microcosm of music. It is about who is “in” and who is “out”.

Twenty years ago Gary Freeman wrote a famous paper that argued that the welfare state is necessarily ‘bounded’—that national welfare states cannot co-exist with the free, uncontrolled movement of labor. In establishing a principle of distributive justice dependent on membership of a limited community (for example, of people under a certain age) the ‘welfare state’ [the constellation of commissioning and competitions that exist for new composers right now] inherently and unavoidably departs from free-market capitalism.

Welfare provisions serve at least two purposes: (1) to provide for ‘needy’ segments of the population and (2) to indirectly influence or control the dynamics of the labor market. In other words, the setting of assistance benefits and criteria indirectly affect the wages and number of commissions. None of the dialogue on the SCI listserve has suggested that purpose (2) is in-play with the current powers-that-be for supporting new composers, which is why I raise it in this CMT post. In fact, purpose (2) is very often discussed in social economics journals and other scholarly writing that is far afield from the sphere with which musicians and arts administrators/policy-makers are conversant. There, it is not a ‘hypothetical’; welfare provisions to indirectly control a market are an acknowledged reality.

Which is funny. Compared to other “isms” associated with stereotyping or prejudice against a group of people, ageism is unusual. Unlike racism and sexism and homophobia, ageism represents a prejudice against a group that all members of the “in” group will inevitably join if they live long enough. Exclusionary, indirect policy decisions where the ones who make them are never themselves in the “out” group are somehow predictable, understandable; by contrast, exclusionary indirect policies that are against the interest of those who establish or support those policies are paradoxical—perhaps denoting denial, self-deception, or lack of forethought.

In any case, the [eventual] movement of labor across age threshholds exposes the tensions between ‘closed’ welfare states and ‘open’ economies, just as movement of labor across national boundaries expose the same tensions. Such movement reveals that, ultimately, national welfare states are incompatible with the free movement of labor. An effective, just welfare state is supposed to balance the distributive principles of justice and mutual aid against the distributive principle of the marketplace. The welfare state is an imperfect but important (and maybe inadvertent) consequence of capitalism. Foreign workers (in this case, older ‘emerging’ composers) show the extent to which the distributive principle of mutual aid is politically viable and sustainable only so long as it is restricted to members and excludes outsiders. Given the deficiencies of the current ‘system’ and the current plight of the NEA, we needn’t discuss the political viability and sustainability of a just and effective welfare-statist policy supporting categories other than the young. There is no policy and little justice, which is the point of many commenters on the SCI listserve. And, given the NEA’s and other organizations’ tiny budgets to commission new works or fund competitions, one might reasonably assert that, in the U.S., there is no ‘state’ [for composition, as an element of the arts], and there is no ‘territory’.

In modern society, we have borders that are ‘constitutive’ for and only for the political system. Geographical extension (in German, the term for it is ‘Staatsgebiet’) has become a prerequisite to modern statehood. States without territories can hardly be proper states; they couldn’t make collectively binding decisions or exert real power; they couldn’t ‘govern’.

But other organizations in society with different purposes are not at all dependent on ‘fixed bodies’, or so you might think. Business enterprises, for example, are not only multi-national but are also these days substantially ‘virtual’, conducted in the “electronic ether”, from anywhere. But the ‘lightness’ of virtualizable endeavors like composing is, however, constrained by composers’ dependence on functioning arts organizations to commission and perform the works, and this in turn depends on the existence of stable and just ‘states’. Deflecting the responsibility away from the ‘state’ (including not-for-profit NGOs) and fobbing the entirety of it off on the immigrant-aspirant, to raise themselves up by their own bootstraps or find a wealthy private patron for support is contrary to the notion of music and the arts as a public good. The issue is about what constitutes a just and virtuous state.

The political science/public policy and political sociology literature on this topic relatively small. A conventional approach was adopted by Gary Freeman who argued that welfare states are inevitably exclusive, and aim indirectly to protect the privileged citizens more than they aim to provide aid to the needy. Migration and the ‘welfare state’ are separately two very controversial areas: unsurprisingly, their nexus attracts polemics of all camps, with relatively little serious analysis.

Assumptions commonly used in published studies of migration-welfare linkages include:

• that welfare states and immigration policies are independent variables;
  
• that different welfare states have similar modus operandi;
  
• that immigrants are an homogenous group; and
  
• that the raison d’être of welfare states is socio-economic redistribution.

In other words, most of the existing theoretical welfare social policy literature is grounded on false premises.

Recently, research has also been conducted in Sweden and Denmark and Germany and elsewhere within the E.U.

	Reason for Older Composer Immigration
Genre	Family	Labor Import	Refugee
	Reunification	Guest Worker
String Quartets	××	×××	×
Piano Trios	×	×	××
String Sextets	×	××	×
Piano Quintets	×	×	××
Brass Quintets	-	××	×
Cello Sonatas	××	××	×
Fugues, Gigues and Sarabandes	×	×	×
Recorder Sextets	××	×	×
Intermezzi	×	××	×
Festen und Gedenksprüchen	-	×	×××
Accordion Duos	×	×××	×××
Tragic Overtures	-	×	×
Electro-Acoustic	-	×	×
Choral Ensembles	××	××	×
Songs without Words	×	×	×

Brücker et al. (2001) note a clear pattern of strong residual effects is in countries with generous welfare systems, which they suggest indicates a “welfare magnet” attraction for migrants and “reverse discrimination” against the locals. (Hypothetically possible in music, I suppose, but I doubt that the youf composer prodigies’ chances are in serious jeopardy from ‘emerging oldster re-treads’, so strongly stacked is the deck today against late-bloomers.)

Have a look at some of the links below, to see whether you agree that current practices and policies restricting calls-for-scores to composers under a certain age are not discriminatory against ‘emerging’ older composer refugees, in a way that resembles ill-conceived welfare statist policies with regard to political immigrants/refugees. I’m not wingeing, just suggesting that things are currently unjust and might be improved. I don’t disagree with Erin Huelskamp’s statement (blockquote above), but I do think we have every reason to be disappointed with the state of affairs in this country—disappointed with the situation that makes Erin’s statement the only realistic response these days. The solution to every injustice in the U.S. seems still to be privatization: find yourself a wealthy donor to fill the gap; start something yourself to address the need or right the wrong that has been caused by inadequate or unjust infrastructure and public policy. It’s a sorry situation, and no way to live or govern.

• Society of Composers Inc (SCI)
  
• Juventas New Music Ensemble
  
• National Endowment for the Arts
  
• National Institute on Aging
  
• American Geriatrics Society
  
• Gerontological Society of America
  
• OECD page on International Migration
  
• OECD page on Social and Welfare Issues
  
• Bommes M, Geddes A, eds. Immigration and Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State. Routledge, 2001.
  
• Branine M, Glover I, eds. Ageism in Work and Environment. Ashgate, 2002.
  
• Brücker H, Epstein G, McCormick B, Saint-Paul G, Venturini A, Zimmerman K. Managing migration in the European welfare state. Proc Immigration Policy and the Welfare State, Trieste, 23-JUN-2001,
  
• Freeman G. Modes of immigration politics in liberal democratic states. Int Migration Rev 1995; 29:881-902.
  
• Freeman G. Migration and the political economy of teh welfare state. Ann Amer Acad Pol Social Sci 1986; 485:51-63.
  
• Morris L. Rights Sociological Perspectives. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Morris L. Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants Rights. Routledge, 2002.
  
• Nelson T, ed. Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice against Older Persons. MIT, 2002.
  
• Palmore E. Ageism: Negative and Positive. 2e. Springer, 1999.
  
• Papademetriou D, Hamilton K. Converging Paths to Restriction: French, Italian and British Responses to Immigration, Washington DC: Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, 1996.
  
• Sciortino G. Toward a political sociology of entry policies. J Ethnic and Migration Studies 2000; 26: 213-28.
  
• Soysal Y. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Univ Chicago, 1995.