Reporting from New York — — Jane Moss, vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, appears as worried about what's going on outside concert halls as within them.
"People are just not running their lives," Moss says. "They're overwhelmed yet don't realize they have the tools to turn it off. And the longer you don't have that hour on the beach alone pondering the mysteries of the universe, or anything remotely resembling that communion with yourself, the more terrifying it gets."
Unlike most people, however, Moss thinks she has something that can help. That something is the forthcoming White Light Festival, a new fall event here that Moss has designed to focus "on music's unique emotional capacity to move us beyond ourselves and illuminate our larger interior universe."
There's some Brahms and Beethoven, and such well-known performers as the Westminster Choir, Tallis Scholars and Hilliard Ensemble, but the unusual bill also includes Croatian poetry, Muslim musicians from North India and monks performing modern dance inspired by ancient Chinese martial arts. Writes Moss on the event's website: "These musical encounters enable us — if only for the course of a performance — to experience a shared emotional connection and wholeness in an increasingly frenetic and fragmented world."
Moss isn't the first programmer to notice all this, of course. "Presenters have programmed more and more with an eye and ear toward the spiritual," observes Kerby Lovallo, Connecticut-based director of New World Classics artist management, whose artists include White Light participants Hilliard Ensemble and the Latvian National Choir. "But this is the first festival I see that has made this connection between spirit and sound as its focus, and it's touched a chord. As soon as it was announced, there was a buzz on the Internet."
White Light, which runs from Oct. 28 through Nov. 18, capitalizes on a growing societal worry about what everything from the iPhone to Facebook is doing to our need for quiet time. The Festival's focus offers a great marketing concept, which Moss acknowledges, but the veteran programmer has the credibility and personal conviction to pull it off. Since she took over Lincoln Center programming in 1992, Moss has successfully been reworking schedules and programming options to keep them not just high-quality but more current and more marketable.
Interviewed in her small, uncluttered office, the soft-spoken, fine-boned redhead exudes calm. She has no cellphone and says she has never sent or received a text message. Her catalyst for White Light "wasn't a 'eureka' moment or personal crisis. The word I would use is 'evolution.' Two or three years ago, I got very involved in yoga classes and both the classes and people in them strongly illuminated for me a kind of searching going on."
The tranquillity she found in yoga seemed in direct contrast to the distracted culture she found outside. "Energy is going outward and not toward being fully present in the moment. Experiencing art, including music, is essentially a contemplative act. You empty yourself out, and you let the art fill you up in some fashion. That requires time and space.
"The prime mover of 99% of my energy is providing experiences at a certain aesthetic and quality level. Now, in addition to that, I'm getting more cause-oriented. How do we give experiences to people that enlarge their lives and their understanding of what it means to be alive?"
Enter the White Light Festival. "It's about transcendence and how music is the unique vehicle for that," she summarizes. "The idea is that after a successful concert, life feels bigger and you feel connected. You have been literally transported to a different place. That, to me, is the ideal audience transaction."
Moss oversees programming for about 300 events at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, including its Great Performers series, and such long-running shorter programs as its Midsummer Night Swing, American Songbook and Mostly Mozart Festival. Indoor events generally take place in Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall and other Lincoln Center venues better-known for presenting the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic and other resident groups.
"When Jane first told me about the White Light Festival, I rolled my eyes a couple times," admits dancer and choreographer Mark Morris, a longtime participant in the Mostly Mozart Festival. "Then I saw the proposed programming. Wow. She seems sort of small and unassuming, but she's tough and smart and has fabulous, wide-ranging taste. We don't always agree, but I trust her taste and admire the way she operates. And I love that she's looking at all these alternatives."
