Welcome Address, by Karl Paulnack

“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 cannot 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.”

07:46 pm - 5 More Words from little_wren82

1. Tarot: I started reading tarot in... 1995, I think. Or thereabouts. I found the imagery and symbolism on the cards very compelling, archetypes and metaphors dancing in and out of waking consciousness. Tarot speaks to some very deep levels of our understanding of ourselves and what we're about on this journey between cradle and grave. Used in that context it is an invaluable tool for self-examination and growth, one I still use today.
   
   It's not a chronic substitute for intuition and good sense (though it can pinch-hit, occasionally, when inspiration fails). It's not an excuse to be self-righteous. It doesn't foretell the future. Used with a dose of good humor, it can plot out an intriguing storyline. :) If you're a writer stuck for plot and you understand tarot symbolism, give it a try sometime.
   
   
2. Language: A transmitter of information, but it is not the information being transmitted. It is a means of communication, but not that which is being communicated. Spoken/written language in particular is a poor way to convey truth, but it's what we continually fall back on, which explains a lot when you think about it.
   
   I love language and I hate it. I love its poetry, its power, its rhythm. I love how it motivates and provokes change. I love it when it is used to carry and convey truth, and on those (exceedingly) rare occasions when it actually does facilitate communication.
   
   I hate it because it is used to lie, to obscure truth. I hate it when it wounds, tears down, destroys. I hate it because it is WAY too easy to use to divide us -- a tool this powerful should be more difficult to wield, should perhaps require years of training and licensing. Instead we let just anyone use it -- which again explains a lot, doesn't it.
   
   
3. Music: Now this is a means to communicate truth which is MUCH more accurate and efficient than spoken/written word. :) I would argue, for the fun of it and using up lots of those silly words, that humankind only really achieved civilization when it discovered how to record its music and make it available to everyone. All else up to that point was mere prologue.
   
   I studied music in college, saxophone and voice. I was a band/choir geek in high school. I had every Christmas Carol imaginable memorized when I was a girl in elementary school. My earliest memories are of my mother singing to the car radio. She stopped when she noticed me listening. I remember asking her not to stop, to please keep singing. :) Eventually, shyly, she did.
   
   No other force in this reality can bring me to tears as quickly, make laughter bubble up and spill out of my throat as heartily, open me up to transcendence as reliably as music. I hope that after I pass through the veil at the other end of this vale of tears that those who gather to celebrate my life do so with music. If they do, I'll surely be there too!
   
   
4. Parent: If there is any area of my life where I'm more ambivalent about my performance, I can't think of it off-hand. I like to think I did the best I could, parenting my boys, but I'm not convinced of it. In fact, I'm actually pretty sure I could have done better, that I missed the point of parenting entirely, with them. :( I was selfish. I didn't figure out until it was much too late that their childhood should have been all about THEM; instead, it was much too much about me.
   
   Neither of them seem to resent me for it, not overtly. Ah well. At least they have something to tell a therapist, if they ever decide to go.
   
   
5. Sexuality: I was really relieved this was "sexuality" rather than "sex" until I saw that creativedv8tion settled on the smaller word for one of the five he gave me. :-0
   
   Sexuality used to be a huge part of my self-identity. Hell, it used to be a huge part of my self-worth, for all of that. I was not only open about my sexuality, I was up front and assertive about it. I wanted you to know that I was bisexual and polyamorous, playful and adventurous and available -- I truly believed these were important facts for you to have. They were very much a currency I needed us to use in any relationship we might have constructed.
   
   Somewhere along the way, in the past five years or maybe ten, that has changed. I don't really know how or why, but it has. My sexuality is now just another trait about me, like being overweight or having brown eyes. It's simply there, no more or less important than anything else. Somewhere along the line I was able to effect some healing and integration on the issues that originally caused the imbalance, though I didn't honestly recognize that until just now.
   
   I'm... grateful for this, very much so. My life feels much more intricate and depthful and complex now that so many other things can come into focus, in their turn. :) I can build relationships using currencies other than sexuality, a realization that has expanded the palette of interconnectedness enormously.
   

"There is no other equally ancient body of songs to which Western society continues to return to in such a systematic and regular fashion: the Medieval Christmas carols are indeed the greatest hits of the Western musical canon."

• I have clean sheets and a freshly-laundered quilt on my bed right now. My skin is already tingling in anticipation of crawling in between the sheets.
  
  
• We have all three Pirates of the Caribbean moves this weekend. Watched Curse of the Black Pearl last night. Tonight, it's Dead Man's Chest, of course. I lust after Johnny Depp but by God, Geoffrey Rush just steals scene after scene in At World's End.
  
  
• Bathroom deconstruction progresses well. My role is mostly clean up right now while M does the technical stuff that takes his know-how. As soon as he finishes getting the drywall up, I'll be doing the taping & joint compound thing -- reminds me, we need to grab a texturing thingie next time we're in the hardware store...
  
  
• A guy showed up out of the blue (=heh=) today to talk to M about hauling off a lot of the old appliance husks and scrap metal that he's been storing here against the day we had the extra funds to haul it all off ourselves. He's starting tomorrow -- I'm stoked!
  
  
• On Friday poor MacDuff got his pads run off chasing the disc in a parking lot during our all-day ordeal in Eureka. Well, just one pad actually, and one of his claws worn down into the quick - that dog will run himself into the grave if there's a disc or a ball or a stick involved, I swear. We got him home and cleaned up and he's been a very good boy about not licking it like crazy. As a result, he's almost back to normal today -- though I must confess it's been kinda nice to have a couple of days of mellow MacDuff...
  
  
• Did I mention Russian Orthodox Church music yet? Oh yeah huh... The Chorovaya Akademia is an all-male choir singing these hymns a capella and the vocal ranges involved are enough to take your breath away. One of these tracks ends in one of those chords where the contrabasses are singing the lowest notes you can hear (seriously -- any lower in pitch and only the dogs could hear it) while the contratenors are up in the stratosphere somewhere and the baritones and tenors are filling in everything between with mathematical artistry... makes me choke up and get hard goosebumps every time I hear them hit that final chord. The CD is entitled Ancient Echoes, for those interested. I highly recommend it.
  
  
• Cycling back to movies for a bit, I started my very first-ever list of movies to own, and movies to rent, in my Treo last night. We finally got fed up with getting into the video store and going "duuuuurrrr.... what did we want to see, again?" Hopefully, if I've got my Treo at hand, we'll never have another of those embarrassing moments again. ;)
  
  
• I still don't watch enough movies to join the community creativedv8tion was just journaling about though. Sorry to say.
  
  
• I made a kick ass pasta salad with a balsamic vinaigrette as a side for the leftover cold fried chicken from last night. Had a very sharp bite, it did, but it offset the relative blandness of the chicken just perfectly...
  
  
• In addition to spear-heading the bathroom thing, M is also on point for the MediaWiki installation and integration thing at LCG. I love this man -- I could do neither of these things as quickly or as well as he does them, I swear. :)
  
  

dancing_ashes

it's music doofery, i'm game for another ;)