Fellow Gaia members, I received this statement attached to an email from my Philosophy of Music professor.  To say the least, it made me rethink my place in this world as a musician, especially during these trying times.  I share it with you all in the hopes that it will make an impression on you, as well.

-Aaron

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Below is the welcome address given to entering freshmen and their parents at the Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division.

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 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, 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 a 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 cannot 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 butno music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right  moment in ET so that all thesofties 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 cords 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 medical 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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(Addendum: This article also made me think of my good friend Elizabeth, who began teaching high school band immediately after getting her Bachelor's Degree in Music Education.  In reference to her never-ending struggle to maintain funding for music in her school, she mentioned a time when she asked her classes: "Imagine a world without music, dance, or any other kind of art, what would it be like?"  The response, by and large, was "Hell.")

So a couple of weeks ago in "Philosophy of Music," we had a guest speaker who guided us in poetry writing.  First, we each chose two postcards with vivid pictures on them and some free writing based off of the pictures.  Then, we went around the circle several times, each person reading a word or phrase from their writings.  Whenever we heard a word or phrase we liked, we wrote it down.  Finally, we were invited to write a poem, based on our own writing and those ideas shared by others...or something completely different, if we so chose.

And so, I give to you, the Gaia community, the first poem that I wrote that means something to me.

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Love is an art, a bridge to nowhere...
But does nowhere actually exist?
It makes me happy, but in a way it's a shame.
Although this is true, should I fly closer?
All the smiling faces make me happy!
The quilted truth - it is all our story now.
Maybe they will listen, maybe not.

Love is an art, the claw that drags you kicking and screaming!!!!!!!!
The artist plays with the contrast...
Love plays with the contrast...
Something great is about to happen.

Love is an art, and art is love...
One and the same.
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-Aaron

Apparently, the Federal Reserve is the entity to which our country currently owes more than $10 trillion.

www.abolishthefederalreserve.com

Also, Symphony no. 3, also known as the "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," by Henryk Gorecki, is one of the most beautiful works of art you will ever hear.  Listen to the recording with Dawn Upshaw, or, if you have access to classical.com, listen to that one.

An email came my way today, from my high school's choir teacher (I believe), bringing to my attention an online petition, began (or inspired) by Quincy Jones' lobbying efforts to have the newly sworn-in President Obama create a "Secretary of the Arts" cabinent position.

Sign it here:

www.petitiononline.com/esnyc/petition.html

Tell your friends!

-Aaron

Here's a thought I just had to get out after watching an episode of "Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit," an anime I had never seen before.

In the episode, the heroine is hiding from the bad guys in a swordsmith's shop.  The bad guys speak with the smith, and he tells them a story about a warrior who was being pursued by men who were once his friends, but had been charged to assassinate him.  The smith had forged for him what he believed to be the ultimate weapon:

"The ultimate weapon is the one that sheds no blood, and thus frees the warrior from   his fate."  (paraphrase)

Which reminds me of another anime, "Rurouni Kenshin."  Without getting too far into it, the hero receives the final and greatest work of a certain swordsmith.  That sword is a "sakabato," a sword with the cutting edge on the wrong side of the blade, making it virtually incapable of killing.

Finally, a certain scene from the 2002 Chinese wuxia movie "Hero" comes to mind. The King of Qin, faced with assassination and resigned to his fate, has come to a realization about the highest ideal of the man who once was his enemy:

"In the first state, man and sword become one and each other. Here, even a blade of grass can be used as a lethal weapon. In the next stage, the sword resides not in the hand but in the heart. Even without a weapon, the warrior can slay his enemy from a hundred paces. But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains."

Yes, all these examples are from Asian sources.  Perhaps we could learn from them - we, who are at conflict with enemies without and within.

"The ultimate weapon, the ultimate warrior, is the one that has transcended the need to harm others."

What a world the Earth would be if such a philosophy were embraced by all.

Being sick during finals week is not fun.  Not fun at all.

Once again, I am utterly shocked at the devaluing of Christmas by the corporate advertising oligarchy.

My Muse kicked my ass last weekend. (finally!)  Maybe now I'll actually finish those piano pieces and songs I've had in my head for the last two months or so.

Never underestimate the restorative power of cold pizza.

I want a dog.  A Boxer, German Shepherd, or APBT.  Basically, any dog I can wrestle with.

I wish my younger sister and I would talk more.  I don't think I've had a call from her in at least a year.  But I'm just as much at fault, for not calling her either.

Does anyone want to have a meaningful discussion about the mystery of existence?  Let me know!

I need more popular music in my CD rack.  (That's right, CDs.  I don't HAVE an mp3 player yet.  I'm SOOOOOO antiquated :P)

I would be more moved by Nickelodeon's Big Green campaign to promote green living...except that it's coming from Nickelodeon.

I love a good beer.

If you haven't read any of the poetry of Taylor Mali, stop reading this and go to www.taylormali.com RIGHT NOW!

Spelling, Capitalization, Grammar, and Punctuation.  Just Do It.

If I ever go to a high school reunion, it would be for the sole purpose of seeing the looks on the faces of my former classmates when I tell them that I went to college for six (or more) years to major in "music."

Flying home next week for Christmas (aka "the holidays").  Looking forward to some nice R&R...oh, wait, I have to practice piano while I'm home, and can you do the dishes tonight, and quit leaving your crap all over the living room, and where the hell is the remote control?!?!?!

-Aaron

...A second chance to make things all right,
Like a new love, calling,
New snow is falling,
Just outside my window tonight.
    -Flim and the BB's, "New Snow"

I'm originally from Northern California, the parts that don't get snow.  Now I'm in Boone, North Carolina, and I'm looking out the library window at the snow flurries as I type this.  We got about two inches last night, and it's still growing.

I joke with my classmates, saying "after about a week of this, I'll hate it as much as everyone else."  But the thing is, I don't think I will get tired of it.

When I get up on a snowy morning such as today, and I look out my bedroom window, at all of the whiteness covering everything, I feel...at peace, calm and serene.  I feel that the snow is not just covering all the trees, grass, cars, and houses around me, it covers all the worries and negative feelings I've been having lately.  No longer do I worry about my financial (in)security or all the school work I have to do.  I am at peace with the world and myself.

I hope I can figure out how to feel like this more often.

-Aaron

Well, it's all over.  And by "it," I mean the election and (especially ) ALL the campaigning that came with it.  Barack Obama won over John McCain by an electoral landslide, making history as the (soon-to-be) first African-American President of the United States.

For the first time in several years, I feel hope - for myself, and for all of America.

However, while I was listening to Obama's victory speech, something was nagging at the back of my head.  It had to do with a small conversation I had had with one of the vocalists in the quintet that I accompany.  We were getting ready to rehearse yesterday (Election Day), and she had mentioned that she had seen news reports showing massive lines of men and women ouside of polling places, especially black men and women.

I told her, "I really hope that all those people are voting for Obama because they think he'll do a good job, and not just because he's black."

She replied, "Are you kidding?  Obama should be President because he's black.  Think about our last 43 Presidents - middle aged white men.  It's time for a change."

I don't want to undermine the historical significance of the 2008 election, especially its significance to African-Americans.  I think what bugged me about the conversation was the prejudiced ideas directed at our former Presidents - the idea that having an unbroken chain of old white men as our Presidents was somehow an inherently bad thing.

Yes, they were all middle-aged white men.  But I would gladly take another Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt or FDR.

Sure, George Bush hasn't done very well in his office as President, in my opinion.  But did the color of Bush's skin have anything to do with his actions, policies, and decisions?  I would like to hope that wasn't the case.

Sure, Barack Obama will make history as the first African-American President.  But will he also make history for whatever he does in that office of the President, good or bad, during the next four years?  And will his leadership, policies, actions, and decisions have anything to do with the color of his skin?  Once again, I hope that will not be the case.

I voted for Obama (and against McCain) because I believe he can make the kind of changes I want to see in our country.  And that's what I really want him to be remembered for - not his words, not his looks, but his actions.  Only time will tell whether this will be the case.

-Aaron

I checked my school mailbox last Thursday to find a small card titled "Draft Notice."  I was understandably shocked - I had just started grad studies, was finally getting into the groove of things here in Boone, NC.  Draft?!  How dare they!

A closer look at the card revealed the ugly truth - the subtitle was "-Elective- Services."  "Serve your country by voting Democrat!"

So that was officially the straw that broke the camel's back for me.  I am looking forward to the 2008 election, not because it is the one day out of every four years that I get to excersize my only true democratic right, but because it will mean the end of political campaigning.  I'm fed up with all the mudslinging, all the commentary, all the promises from both parties.

I suppose the card in my mailbox made me mad because of this: I always fostered the possibly unrealistic hope that a candidate or political party could sufficiently engage the public without resorting to things like mass mailings and mudslinging.  However, after a candidate has stated his platform, what's left for him or her to do?  Dig up dirt on the other guy, I guess.

Now this group of Democrats has to scare me into voting by sending me a "draft notice?"

Politics suck.

-Aaron

Currently, I'm in the middle of reading Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong by William Kirkpatrick.  I dare not try to summarize what I've read so far.  All I will say is that it presents certain propositions about the teaching of morality to children and adolescents, and these statements are what some people would consider "old-fashioned" or "conservative."

My own opinion on Kirkpatrick's ideas is rather divided - especially concerning a chapter about the effect of music on one's morality, as indicated in the title of this entry.

In short, and at the risk of oversimplifying what he wrote, Kirkpatrick argues that popular music, especially rock and rap, is devoid of any moral incentive.  What's more, he argues that attempts to instill good moral values (Christian rock/rap being a prominent example) will fail, because the music itself transcends the lyrics, and said music is, more often than not, a loud, steady, pulsating beat.  Not surprisingly, Kirkpatrick is an advocate of classical, gospel, hymn, Broadway, and folk music.

Though I am a classically-trained musician, I found this chapter rather unnerving.  After all, I listen to and enjoy many different kinds of music, and some of my most frequently-played CDs are rock CDs.  Does this mean I am listening to music that is fundamentally devoid of morality?  I would like to believe that, by now, I have developed some sense of morality.

I believe that Kirkpatrick is overreacting to the nature of popular music.  Though there is music out there that I would consider morally empty, there is plenty of popular music which at leasts speaks of good virtues, love being the most frequently used.  I believe the problem with the popular music that young people listen to today is that the kids aren't really listening to said music.  I would argue that they passively accept the aggressive nature of today's rock and rap, without taking the time to analyze the music, especially the lyrics.  Popular music becomes background filler.  If they are given at least a little moral upbringing from their parents, and they take the time to truly listen to their music and its lyrics, they will be better able to understand exactly what it is they are listening to, and would at least shy away from music with morally bankrupt lyrics.

I put a lot of stock in the notion that music can shape a person's growth, moral or spiritual or whatever.  With proper moral upbringing, people can truly listen to the music they hear, and then make their judgement of it, instead of letting it go "in one ear and out the other."

-Aaron