[NEohioPAL] FW: The Power of Music

[Brian Del Bianco]

Had this forwarded to me.  A nice reminder that what we do isn't just plunking, tooting, strumming, thumping or singing out little black dots on a page as it may sometimes feel.  It came from a blog of Anne Feeney-past president of the Pittsburgh Musician's Union.









The Power of Music

Music can, no less than, save the planet. Here’s an eloquent attempt to
describe the power of music by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music
division at Boston Conservatory. (It's long, but worth it...)



“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 rec
reation, 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, 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, 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 fire houses, 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 pass time. 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 can8 0t with our minds.



Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly 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 which
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.”



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