Hi guys..
This is a speech that Mr Chiang wants me to post on the blog. Its a little long but do bear with it, and read carefully!
What follows is long, a welcoming address to new students at Boston Conservatory of Music last fall. I don't think there's any question that there's a massive shift going on in he arts in the U.S. and probably world-wide, although the culture in Europe, Asia, parts of Latin America and Australia still appears to include far more of the so called high arts in the consciousness of the general population than here.
Certainly, cutting arts classes out of the curricula of so many thousands of schools across the country has has had a devastating effect on the development of new audiences and has also led to the false and destructive myth that the arts are somehow "elitist" and not something that good, right-thinking American kids should be interested in. The welcoming speaker in the welcoming talk (sent to me by a colleague) addresses this particular issue.
As musicians, we believe deeply in the importance of what we do, and the power of music to heal. We know that you do also, as a fan of classical music, so the following may be of interest to you. It is a welcome address given to entering freshmen at the Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack [who has been addressing groups all of the the country with variations on this message], pianist and director of the music division:
Welcome Address, by Karl Paulnack
"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society wouldnot properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. Ihad very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math,and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or anengineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. Istill remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision toapply to music school—she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what thevalue of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, theylistened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit,because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts andentertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kindyour kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever todo with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Letme talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
The first people to understand how music really works were the ancientGreeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that musicand astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen asthe study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships betweeninvisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helpingus figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered thewar against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in aconcentration camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paperand a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp,a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote hisquartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed inJanuary 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prisoncamp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in therepertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the concentrationcamps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energywriting or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good dayto find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escapetorture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, wehave poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just thisone fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in aplace where people are only focused on survival, on the barenecessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow,essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope,without commerce, without rec reation, without basic respect, but theywere not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of thehuman spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one ofthe ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."
On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to theworld. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice aswas my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinkingabout it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I satthere and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completelyirrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journeyof getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, andin fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play thepiano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble.We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn'tshop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organizedactivity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. Peoplesang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome".Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized publicevent that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, atLincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organizedpublic expression of grief, our first communal response to thathistoric event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense thatlife might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recoverywas led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music isnot part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section wouldhave us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund fromleftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a passtime. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of theways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we expressfeelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things withour hearts when we cannot with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heartwrenchingly beautiful pieceAdagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some ofyou may know it as the background music which accompanied the OliverStone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know thatpiece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack yourheart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn'tknow you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get atwhat's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutelyno music. There might have been only a little music, there might havebeen some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. Andsomething very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent upwith all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment wherethe action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the fluteor something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn'tgood, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cryat a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? TheGreeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces ofourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what wefeel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watchingIndiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music?What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ETso that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly thesame moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the musicstripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is theunderstanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I'll give you one more example, the story of the most importantconcert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than athousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that Ithought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyedplaying in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St.Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; musiccritics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The mostimportant concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home inFargo, ND, about 4 years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. Webegan, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was writtenduring World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, ayoung pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to ouraudiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providingthem with written program notes. But in this case, because we beganthe concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece laterin the program and to just come out and play the music withoutexplanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair nearthe front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I latermet, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70's, it was clear from hisbuzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent agood deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit oddthat someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement ofthat particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard cryingin a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided totalk about both the first and second pieces, and we described thecircumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned itsdedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audiencebecame so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestlyfigured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstageafterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and Iwas in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes washit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, butthe Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunnedacross the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from thepilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizingthat he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, butduring that first piece of music you played, this memory returned tome so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn'tunderstand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came outto explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lostpilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music dothat? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationshipsbetween internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most importantwork I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and helphim connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect theirmemories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn hisfriend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshmanclass when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility Iwill charge your sons and daughters with is this:
"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med studentpracticing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously becauseyou would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltzinto your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life.Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into yourconcert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that isoverwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole againwill depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sellyourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being amusician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies.I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, afirefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort oftherapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor,physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if theyget things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony withourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music;I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellnesson this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutualunderstanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will comefrom a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer evenexpect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seemto have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is afuture of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding ofhow these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect itwill come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in theconcentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the oneswho might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."
