Klarinet Archive - Posting 000054.txt from 2010/06

From: "Tom Servinsky" <tompiano@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] The value of music
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:59:55 -0400

Dan
Thank you for sharing this wonderful essay. I'm filled with emotions as
those words hit home for me.
Tom Servinsky
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
To: "Klarinet" <klarinet@-----.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2010 3:53 PM
Subject: [kl] The value of music

>I came across this wonderful essay that speaks to the question of the value
>of music. It is a three handkerchief essay, so gird you loins. In our
>continuing focus on reeds, mouthpieces, articulations, and other important
>parts of playing clarinet, we may need to rethink the question of :
>
> Welcome address to freshmen at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl
> Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory.
>
>
>
> One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not
> properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had
> 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 an engineer, I might be
> more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my
> mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she
> said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores.
>
>
>
> On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value
> of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened 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 and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and
> serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely
> nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of
> entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
>
>
>
> The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient
> Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and
> astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study
> of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and
> music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal,
> hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving
> pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us 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 the war against Nazi
> Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across
> Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.
>
>
>
> He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and
> a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a
> cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet
> with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for
> four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of
> the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
>
>
>
> Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps,
> why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or
> playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food
> and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture -- why
> would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we
> have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen;
> many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only
> focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is
> that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without
> money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic
> respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is
> part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is
> one of the 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 the world. I
> sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice, as was my daily
> routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about 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 sat there and thought does this
> even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right
> now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd,
> irreverent, and 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 journey of
> getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact
> I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano 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't shop,
> and we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity
> that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People
> sang around firehouses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people
> sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I
> remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with
> the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief,
> our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That
> was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military
> secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the
>
> arts, and by music in particular, that very night. From these two
> experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and
> entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a
> luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a
> plaything or an amusement or a pastime. Music is a basic need of human
> survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the
> ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to
> understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.
>
>
>
> Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece
> Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you
> may know it as the background music, which accompanied the Oliver Stone
> movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of
> music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open
> like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had.
> Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what'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 absolutely no
> music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been
> some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something
> very predictable happens at weddings --people get all pent up with all
> kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action
> of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something.
> And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably
> 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a
> couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us
> to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our
> insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about
> it. Can you imagine watching Indiana 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 ET so that all the softies in the audience start
> crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie
> with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks:
> Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal
> objects.
>
>
>
> I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of
> my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand
> concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were
> important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it
> made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played
> for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers,
> foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took
> place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago. I was playing
> with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often
> do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and
> dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down
> during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are
> going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But
> in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to
> talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play
> the music without explanation.
>
>
>
> Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the
> front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was
> clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair,
> square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life
> in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved
> to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it
> wasn't the first time I've heard crying in 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 to talk
> about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances
> in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed
> pilot.
>
>
>
> The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to
> leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again,
> but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
>
>
>
> What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was
> in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I
> watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the
> Japanese planes that had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the
> parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot. And I
> watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I
> have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of
> music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as
> though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why
> now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was
> written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could
> handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings
>
> and those memories in me?"
>
>
>
> Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between
> internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have
> ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect,
> somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost
> friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This
> is why music matters. What follows is part of the talk I will give to
> this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The
> responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: "If we
> were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing
> appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would
> imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into 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 your concert hall
> and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul
> that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how
> well you do your craft. You're not here to become an entertainer, and you
> don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell;
> being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used
> Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a
> firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist
> for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical
> therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to
> line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves 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 wellness on
> this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual
> understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from
> a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect
> it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have
> brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace
> for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible,
> internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the
> artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the
> evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us
> with our internal, invisible lives."
>
>
>
> Dan Leeson
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