Holiday greetings, one and all!!!
Not much to say right now. Due to colds, we had to cancel our vist to the relatives. Instead we slept or watched strange Holiday TV specials. Had soup for dinner and went to bed early. I don't think it cleared 20 degrees and the wind was howling. The half block walk to feed the neighbor's cats was a struggle. They seemed happy to be fed and petted.
Still the spirit of the season shines. Hope it touches you.
Keep the Sol in Solstice!
Friday, December 25, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Remembering Zechariah
Last Wednesday I got a message that one of my oldest and closest friends had died complications from Hepatitis C. It’s been a year for losses. Les Paul, an old school pal, Eddie Johnson, my sister-in-law, Kathy… It seems like every time I fire up the computer someone I know just died. Zech’s death hit me the hardest, though.
In the past few years his health had been in decline. He was living with his elderly parents in Las Vegas, an atmosphere that was anything but supportive. He’d trashed his body doing physical labor as a cement mason and his immune system was weakened by a bout with cancer in the late ‘70’s that he beat, but he thought that it was during his time in the hospital that he contracted the hepatitis. And he was anything but a candidate for a transplant.
In the last few years it seemed like he was a test subject for what ever drugs his doctors wanted to experiment with. He went through quite a few doctors and I think it took a while for him to get a proper diagnosis. And the drugs affected him in different ways. Zech would call me, usually on Sunday afternoons when his cell phone rates were cheapest and I’d listen to his latest adventures. You were never quite sure what you were going to get. Some conversations would be more coherent then others. And they left me in various states from sadness to hopefulness. He had a fighting spirit and was making plans for the future up until the end.
Another aspect of Zech’s personality was that he was always encouraging and positive, especially encouraging me with my music. He was always glad to hear when I was out playing and told me it was what I should be doing. The other side of that was that he could come down hard on himself. He could be your biggest cheerleader and his own worst critic. The last time we spoke was about two weeks ago. As we finished up the conversation he said something about his doctors giving him another five years to live. The thought that jumped in to my mind was that he wouldn’t be around anywhere near that long. But I had no idea it would be a matter of weeks.
I first met Zech on a trip to Tucson. One summer two friends, Dave and Frank, borrowed another friend’s ’59 Chevy Panel Truck and we went on the road driving from the bay area, to LA, Tucson, The Grand Canyon, Provo, Utah, Yellowstone, Seattle and back down the coast. Zech was the roommate of friends we had in Tucson. A bond was made and we kept in touch. A few years later we re-connected at a wedding and a few years after that, Dave brought him up to Eureka where I was living and we got a house together. That first night we got out the guitars and jammed.
Before long, we heard that we could sing for our supper at a place in Arcata called the International Peasant. Then we found out that not only could we get fed, but we could also get paid at Tomaso’s Tomato Pies in Eureka. That soon became our home base. As the King Salmon Nuke Spooks (believe it or not, at that time, no one could spell “nuke.” It was almost always misspelled “nook”), we became one of three or four ensembles who rotated on Friday and Saturday nights. We added Dan Berkowitz on bass and had occasional guests from other bands. The band name came from the fact that we lived in the village of King Salmon, right next to the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant. And when he’d been in the army, Dave worked on the electronics of the nuclear arsenal in Germany.
In Eureka, I was a sometime student and janitor, Dave was a fulltime student on the G.I. Bill and Zak had a number of jobs including Special Ed teacher and logger. One of Zech’s nicknames was “Skinner.” He was a skinny guy, anything but the typical lumberjack. He didn’t last long, but he gave his best.
It was a wonderful time to be young. There were many beautiful girls in our lives. Zech attracted many. He was a little pock marked but good looking and charming as could be. And when he sang that voice would just melt their hearts. There were a few he loved and lost that he could have probably settled down with. But that was never to be.
The music carried us. We could be cranky, depressed, over thinking a situation and we’d get together and sing and all of the BS would be gone. We weren’t the greatest band there ever was, but we made magic together. There were times we’d be playing and Zech would throw in a harmony that would make give you goose flesh. There was a spot in the set where he’d play two chords on the guitar back and forth, usually Am7 to Gm7 and he’d improvise lyrics while Dave, Dan and I backed him up throwing in lead licks or vocal fills. That was often the highlight of our show.
The Nuke Spooks were from the CSN school of music, acoustic guitars and harmony singing. Only we rarely worked out our vocal parts. And besides the sensitive singer-songwriter stuff, we played some songs that the Fugs might have found appealing. But it made people laugh and sing along. We never took it that seriously.
The show was arranged where we’d play a dinner set of softer songs, then at 10:00 PM, we’d take all the tables out and stack ‘em outside by the front of the door and play rowdy dance music. Our bass player, Dan also played Sousaphone for the HSU marching band. To begin the dance set we’d go out the side door of the restaurant and walk down the alley playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” entering through the front door and up on the little platform that was our stage.
Another part of our show was the Hoky Poky where we’d sing, “You put your crotch in, you put your crotch out, you put your crotch in and you shake it all about…” And we also played musical chairs where the winner got a pitcher of beer. After a little while we realized that we could rig the results. We tried to be fair, but there were those nights when you thought to yourself, “which one of those girls would I like to see drunk?” and we’d stop the music appropriately.
Zech was the first to leave Humboldt County. I don’t remember the circumstance, but I think he got his heart broke and shipping out was his way of dealing with things. Dave and Dan and I played a few gigs afterwards, but it wasn’t The Nuke Spooks anymore. Dave bought a mandolin and moved to Arizona where he started playing old time string band music, which led him to Celtic music. He’s since become one of the best Celtic Mandolin players on the planet.
Since then our paths crossed. I ended up in Tucson on and off and Zech was living there some of that time. After living in Minneapolis, Dave relocated there too bringing his soon to be bride, Jean, with him. Though we played together from time to time, we never had a band again. Zech had little self-confidence in his abilities as a musician, I wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll and Dave was playing the contra dances.
After a difficult break up, it was my turn to runaway and join the circus. I hooked up with the Elkins, WV band “Trapezoid” and worked for a couple of years as their touring sound-dude, merch peddler and assistant office manager. One tour brought us to Arizona. We were playing up in Tempe and I made sure that Dave and Zech were on the guest list. Only it was real hard to get Zech to go out. So Dave called him up and said, “Let’s go out for a burger.” That was something Zech could relate to. So Dave picked him up and they got to talking and driving and around Casa Grande, Zech turned to Dave and said, “Just where is this burger place were going to?”
It’s interesting to note that Dave used this same ploy to get Zech out of the house (and town) at least two other times!
Zech was Polish. He made Dave and I honorary Polish Brothers. He was proud of that part of his family heritage, even though he rejected a lot of other aspects of it. His parents had a strong influence on him, not always positive. I don’t know the details so I’ll refrain from saying more. One story I do know was that Zech was pressured to play golf as a teenager. By all accounts, he was great at it. Only he hated golf. So he never developed his talent.
One game he was good at and liked was billiards. Besides a little herb dealing he made his way through the University of Arizona as a pool hustler. During our time in Eureka, Zech entered a pool contest in Arcata. We used to have the chart of the matches and the outcomes on our wall. Starting at the bottom of the list he ended up winning it all. During his last match, he cleared the table. His opponent left the bar whining, “He didn’t even give me a chance to shoot.”
Zech was a compassionate soul. He’d help you in any way he could. But if you crossed him, or he felt you burned him, then you no longer existed. He was also psychic. His abilities got strongest right before he started taking medication for his illness while living in Las Vegas. In one instance, he gave a women he knew the numbers that won her a substantial amount of money at a casino. The next time he was in that casino for the buffet, two burley guys escorted him out and told him in no uncertain terms that he was unwelcome there, or any other casino in Vegas. Yes, it was related to the woman’s winnings. How they found out, I never knew.
He was good at predicting things. He predicted things about my partner Laura’s brother’s life that were dead on. He told Laura some thing’s as well that were scary accurate. I’m not sure how to came to be but his doctors diagnosed him with psychosis and the drugs they gave him diminished his gift and he gave up his powers. He wasn’t psychotic, he was psychic. And “Medical Science” doesn’t yet recognize the difference. Yes, they still burn witches in the 21st Century. Only they burn them from the inside out with anti-depressants and mood-altering chemicals. Living in Las Vegas he didn’t have a support network he could trust to practice his gift openly. And he suffered for it.
He could be one of the funniest people, too. There were things he said that I’ll never forget. Little one liners, comments, descriptions. Some I could write, others I shouldn’t use in polite company. I could go on with Zech stories. But I’ll save them for another time. I regret that I didn’t get to say goodbye. I couldn’t get to Las Vegas in time for the services and the last time I talked to him, I thought there’d be another chance.
I’ll miss those weird Sunday phone calls, his laugh, but most of all his voice soaring along with mine. One night Zech and I sang with Belle Weil, a dear friend and one of Zech’s loves at a little restaurant/bar in Arcata. I played guitar and there was an amazing bassist and drummer backing us up. We played “Wooden Ships.” We sang that song like a prayer, like our lives depended on it. CSN or Jefferson Airplane couldn’t hold a candle to us that night. Those are the moments I’ll forever keep in my heart when I think of Zech.
I’ll miss you, my Polish Brother. God Speed.
In the past few years his health had been in decline. He was living with his elderly parents in Las Vegas, an atmosphere that was anything but supportive. He’d trashed his body doing physical labor as a cement mason and his immune system was weakened by a bout with cancer in the late ‘70’s that he beat, but he thought that it was during his time in the hospital that he contracted the hepatitis. And he was anything but a candidate for a transplant.
In the last few years it seemed like he was a test subject for what ever drugs his doctors wanted to experiment with. He went through quite a few doctors and I think it took a while for him to get a proper diagnosis. And the drugs affected him in different ways. Zech would call me, usually on Sunday afternoons when his cell phone rates were cheapest and I’d listen to his latest adventures. You were never quite sure what you were going to get. Some conversations would be more coherent then others. And they left me in various states from sadness to hopefulness. He had a fighting spirit and was making plans for the future up until the end.
Another aspect of Zech’s personality was that he was always encouraging and positive, especially encouraging me with my music. He was always glad to hear when I was out playing and told me it was what I should be doing. The other side of that was that he could come down hard on himself. He could be your biggest cheerleader and his own worst critic. The last time we spoke was about two weeks ago. As we finished up the conversation he said something about his doctors giving him another five years to live. The thought that jumped in to my mind was that he wouldn’t be around anywhere near that long. But I had no idea it would be a matter of weeks.
I first met Zech on a trip to Tucson. One summer two friends, Dave and Frank, borrowed another friend’s ’59 Chevy Panel Truck and we went on the road driving from the bay area, to LA, Tucson, The Grand Canyon, Provo, Utah, Yellowstone, Seattle and back down the coast. Zech was the roommate of friends we had in Tucson. A bond was made and we kept in touch. A few years later we re-connected at a wedding and a few years after that, Dave brought him up to Eureka where I was living and we got a house together. That first night we got out the guitars and jammed.
Before long, we heard that we could sing for our supper at a place in Arcata called the International Peasant. Then we found out that not only could we get fed, but we could also get paid at Tomaso’s Tomato Pies in Eureka. That soon became our home base. As the King Salmon Nuke Spooks (believe it or not, at that time, no one could spell “nuke.” It was almost always misspelled “nook”), we became one of three or four ensembles who rotated on Friday and Saturday nights. We added Dan Berkowitz on bass and had occasional guests from other bands. The band name came from the fact that we lived in the village of King Salmon, right next to the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant. And when he’d been in the army, Dave worked on the electronics of the nuclear arsenal in Germany.
In Eureka, I was a sometime student and janitor, Dave was a fulltime student on the G.I. Bill and Zak had a number of jobs including Special Ed teacher and logger. One of Zech’s nicknames was “Skinner.” He was a skinny guy, anything but the typical lumberjack. He didn’t last long, but he gave his best.
It was a wonderful time to be young. There were many beautiful girls in our lives. Zech attracted many. He was a little pock marked but good looking and charming as could be. And when he sang that voice would just melt their hearts. There were a few he loved and lost that he could have probably settled down with. But that was never to be.
The music carried us. We could be cranky, depressed, over thinking a situation and we’d get together and sing and all of the BS would be gone. We weren’t the greatest band there ever was, but we made magic together. There were times we’d be playing and Zech would throw in a harmony that would make give you goose flesh. There was a spot in the set where he’d play two chords on the guitar back and forth, usually Am7 to Gm7 and he’d improvise lyrics while Dave, Dan and I backed him up throwing in lead licks or vocal fills. That was often the highlight of our show.
The Nuke Spooks were from the CSN school of music, acoustic guitars and harmony singing. Only we rarely worked out our vocal parts. And besides the sensitive singer-songwriter stuff, we played some songs that the Fugs might have found appealing. But it made people laugh and sing along. We never took it that seriously.
The show was arranged where we’d play a dinner set of softer songs, then at 10:00 PM, we’d take all the tables out and stack ‘em outside by the front of the door and play rowdy dance music. Our bass player, Dan also played Sousaphone for the HSU marching band. To begin the dance set we’d go out the side door of the restaurant and walk down the alley playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” entering through the front door and up on the little platform that was our stage.
Another part of our show was the Hoky Poky where we’d sing, “You put your crotch in, you put your crotch out, you put your crotch in and you shake it all about…” And we also played musical chairs where the winner got a pitcher of beer. After a little while we realized that we could rig the results. We tried to be fair, but there were those nights when you thought to yourself, “which one of those girls would I like to see drunk?” and we’d stop the music appropriately.
Zech was the first to leave Humboldt County. I don’t remember the circumstance, but I think he got his heart broke and shipping out was his way of dealing with things. Dave and Dan and I played a few gigs afterwards, but it wasn’t The Nuke Spooks anymore. Dave bought a mandolin and moved to Arizona where he started playing old time string band music, which led him to Celtic music. He’s since become one of the best Celtic Mandolin players on the planet.
Since then our paths crossed. I ended up in Tucson on and off and Zech was living there some of that time. After living in Minneapolis, Dave relocated there too bringing his soon to be bride, Jean, with him. Though we played together from time to time, we never had a band again. Zech had little self-confidence in his abilities as a musician, I wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll and Dave was playing the contra dances.
After a difficult break up, it was my turn to runaway and join the circus. I hooked up with the Elkins, WV band “Trapezoid” and worked for a couple of years as their touring sound-dude, merch peddler and assistant office manager. One tour brought us to Arizona. We were playing up in Tempe and I made sure that Dave and Zech were on the guest list. Only it was real hard to get Zech to go out. So Dave called him up and said, “Let’s go out for a burger.” That was something Zech could relate to. So Dave picked him up and they got to talking and driving and around Casa Grande, Zech turned to Dave and said, “Just where is this burger place were going to?”
It’s interesting to note that Dave used this same ploy to get Zech out of the house (and town) at least two other times!
Zech was Polish. He made Dave and I honorary Polish Brothers. He was proud of that part of his family heritage, even though he rejected a lot of other aspects of it. His parents had a strong influence on him, not always positive. I don’t know the details so I’ll refrain from saying more. One story I do know was that Zech was pressured to play golf as a teenager. By all accounts, he was great at it. Only he hated golf. So he never developed his talent.
One game he was good at and liked was billiards. Besides a little herb dealing he made his way through the University of Arizona as a pool hustler. During our time in Eureka, Zech entered a pool contest in Arcata. We used to have the chart of the matches and the outcomes on our wall. Starting at the bottom of the list he ended up winning it all. During his last match, he cleared the table. His opponent left the bar whining, “He didn’t even give me a chance to shoot.”
Zech was a compassionate soul. He’d help you in any way he could. But if you crossed him, or he felt you burned him, then you no longer existed. He was also psychic. His abilities got strongest right before he started taking medication for his illness while living in Las Vegas. In one instance, he gave a women he knew the numbers that won her a substantial amount of money at a casino. The next time he was in that casino for the buffet, two burley guys escorted him out and told him in no uncertain terms that he was unwelcome there, or any other casino in Vegas. Yes, it was related to the woman’s winnings. How they found out, I never knew.
He was good at predicting things. He predicted things about my partner Laura’s brother’s life that were dead on. He told Laura some thing’s as well that were scary accurate. I’m not sure how to came to be but his doctors diagnosed him with psychosis and the drugs they gave him diminished his gift and he gave up his powers. He wasn’t psychotic, he was psychic. And “Medical Science” doesn’t yet recognize the difference. Yes, they still burn witches in the 21st Century. Only they burn them from the inside out with anti-depressants and mood-altering chemicals. Living in Las Vegas he didn’t have a support network he could trust to practice his gift openly. And he suffered for it.
He could be one of the funniest people, too. There were things he said that I’ll never forget. Little one liners, comments, descriptions. Some I could write, others I shouldn’t use in polite company. I could go on with Zech stories. But I’ll save them for another time. I regret that I didn’t get to say goodbye. I couldn’t get to Las Vegas in time for the services and the last time I talked to him, I thought there’d be another chance.
I’ll miss those weird Sunday phone calls, his laugh, but most of all his voice soaring along with mine. One night Zech and I sang with Belle Weil, a dear friend and one of Zech’s loves at a little restaurant/bar in Arcata. I played guitar and there was an amazing bassist and drummer backing us up. We played “Wooden Ships.” We sang that song like a prayer, like our lives depended on it. CSN or Jefferson Airplane couldn’t hold a candle to us that night. Those are the moments I’ll forever keep in my heart when I think of Zech.
I’ll miss you, my Polish Brother. God Speed.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Why Music Matters
This was posted on the Telecaster Discussion Page Reissue. Things I try to say but can't find the words to explain.
Why Music Matters
Karl Paulnack, Director, Music DivisionThe Boston Conservatory
Dr. Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to parents of incoming students, September 2004
“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician… 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… 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…
Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
One of the first cultures to articulate 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 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. 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 Nazi 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 even from the concentration 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.”
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 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, 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, on the very evening of September 11th, 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.
Very few of you have ever 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 with few exceptions there is 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 most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Mid-western town a few 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. The concert in the nursing home 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.
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 2 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 cars. 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.”
Why Music Matters
Karl Paulnack, Director, Music DivisionThe Boston Conservatory
Dr. Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to parents of incoming students, September 2004
“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician… 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… 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…
Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
One of the first cultures to articulate 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 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. 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 Nazi 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 even from the concentration 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.”
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 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, 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, on the very evening of September 11th, 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.
Very few of you have ever 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 with few exceptions there is 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 most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Mid-western town a few 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. The concert in the nursing home 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.
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 2 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 cars. 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.”
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
I Object!
My post was cut off.
What I was saying was, if you find my blog objectional, why don't you contact me and discuss it? I won't flame you, I'm a nice guy. Otherwise, I'll think you're just someone who has way too much time on their hands and is easily offended and shouldn't venture out of their house and be exposed to the real world. Let me tell you, I could be REAL offensive. But I choose not to be. There's enough crap out there.
Peace.
What I was saying was, if you find my blog objectional, why don't you contact me and discuss it? I won't flame you, I'm a nice guy. Otherwise, I'll think you're just someone who has way too much time on their hands and is easily offended and shouldn't venture out of their house and be exposed to the real world. Let me tell you, I could be REAL offensive. But I choose not to be. There's enough crap out there.
Peace.
A Good Evening
Tonight there was a showing at a gallery and a reception for the artist. The Gallery is Fort Collin's own Walnut Street Gallery (The Art of Rock 'n Roll www.walnutst.com) and the artist was Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. Laura and I went for the private reception at six o'clock. This is the third time we've met Bill. He's a wonderful guy and one of the best drummers on the planet. The last time we saw him he gave us tips on where to go and what to see in Hawaii. His art is made on computer using Photo SHop and is transfered to canvas. It's very psychedelic with images upon images with good use of color. It's reasonable as far as cost goes too. We didn't get much one on one time with Bill, but I did give him one of Tuatha's CD's and told him it was nothing like The Grateful Dead.
I got to meet another person tonight as well, a fellow named John Turk who produces The Jay Marvin Show on AM 760 KZZN in Denver. (www.am760.net.) Jay is a lefty talk show host who I enjoy and have been listening to since before the 2006 election. John is the guy who screens the calls, gets guests on and sometimes pipes in with his own commentary. He's also a big jam-band fan, especially Widespread Panic. They've been talking about music, art and literature more now that the election is over and I gave him contact info on Tuatha. We got on like old pals. He brought a friend who lives here in Fort Collins named Paige who Laura struck up a conversation with and we didn't hear from them for quite a while. Very cool guy. It's a little odd to be looking for someone you never met, who you feel you know because you listen to them on the radio. I had no idea what he looked like, I just knew his voice. I was listening for it, but never heard it until he came up to me. (I'd left him an e-mail after listening to his interview with Bill Kreutmann this morning discribing myself.) It's even better to discover they're down to earth, good folks.
Thanks to Laura and Bill at Walnut St. Gallery for hosting the shindig. One of these days we'll be able to buy more art!
I got to meet another person tonight as well, a fellow named John Turk who produces The Jay Marvin Show on AM 760 KZZN in Denver. (www.am760.net.) Jay is a lefty talk show host who I enjoy and have been listening to since before the 2006 election. John is the guy who screens the calls, gets guests on and sometimes pipes in with his own commentary. He's also a big jam-band fan, especially Widespread Panic. They've been talking about music, art and literature more now that the election is over and I gave him contact info on Tuatha. We got on like old pals. He brought a friend who lives here in Fort Collins named Paige who Laura struck up a conversation with and we didn't hear from them for quite a while. Very cool guy. It's a little odd to be looking for someone you never met, who you feel you know because you listen to them on the radio. I had no idea what he looked like, I just knew his voice. I was listening for it, but never heard it until he came up to me. (I'd left him an e-mail after listening to his interview with Bill Kreutmann this morning discribing myself.) It's even better to discover they're down to earth, good folks.
Thanks to Laura and Bill at Walnut St. Gallery for hosting the shindig. One of these days we'll be able to buy more art!
Is This Blog Objectional?
Someone has flagged my blog as objectional. Huh? I reread some of my posts. The only thing I found that to me seems like it could be considered objectional is my take on the movie Goldfinger. It was made in 1965 or there abouts. In case you weren't alive back then, people looked at the world a lot differently then they do now. In some ways it's better, in others worse. If you have a problem with my perspective
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Just Past The Full Wolf Moon
I haven't had much to say lately that I wanted to post about. The holidays have come and gone. We're well into the first month of the new year and we're about to say goodbye to Mr. Bush. (And not a moment too soon...)
There's some things going on, but it's too soon to write about them. We'll see how things are in six months.
Last night Laura took me to hear (and later meet) Jean-Michel Cousteau at the Lincoln Center. He shared some video footage of underwater creatures and talked about our relation and connectedness. The water in the Colorado Mountains comes from evaporated sea water turned to snow. It melts and turns into the rivers and eventually it returns to the ocean. What gets in that water between the time it's snow and when it's in the ocean again is the problem. Not to mention what we dump into the air as well. He sees our situation as serious, but he feels that we can and will make the right choices and changes as soon as we understand that protecting the oceans is protecting ourselves.
There was a meet and greet after the lecture, and we were among the last to talk to him. He teased us about wasting our time to do that. I couldn't think of much to say other then to thank him for his work. Laura got to thank him and his father for inspiring her to become a scientist. When she told him she works with water quality data at the National Park Service, he asked her to send information to his organization and to keep in contact. He's someone I'd love to have dinner with. Or better yet, learn to dive from.
His organization is called Ocean Futures Society. Visit them at www.oceanfutures.org.
What is the Full Wolf Moon? It's the time of year when the hungry wolves would come to the edge of the village and howl, especially around the full moon. Thank you, Old Farmers Almanac.
There's some things going on, but it's too soon to write about them. We'll see how things are in six months.
Last night Laura took me to hear (and later meet) Jean-Michel Cousteau at the Lincoln Center. He shared some video footage of underwater creatures and talked about our relation and connectedness. The water in the Colorado Mountains comes from evaporated sea water turned to snow. It melts and turns into the rivers and eventually it returns to the ocean. What gets in that water between the time it's snow and when it's in the ocean again is the problem. Not to mention what we dump into the air as well. He sees our situation as serious, but he feels that we can and will make the right choices and changes as soon as we understand that protecting the oceans is protecting ourselves.
There was a meet and greet after the lecture, and we were among the last to talk to him. He teased us about wasting our time to do that. I couldn't think of much to say other then to thank him for his work. Laura got to thank him and his father for inspiring her to become a scientist. When she told him she works with water quality data at the National Park Service, he asked her to send information to his organization and to keep in contact. He's someone I'd love to have dinner with. Or better yet, learn to dive from.
His organization is called Ocean Futures Society. Visit them at www.oceanfutures.org.
What is the Full Wolf Moon? It's the time of year when the hungry wolves would come to the edge of the village and howl, especially around the full moon. Thank you, Old Farmers Almanac.
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