Saving the World

I'm taking a bit of a break for a week or so, and wanted to post something that someone sent me that I found to be profound. It is the Welcome address to freshman parents at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory. However, as you read, maybe you can insert your own calling to the work you do on this planet, and think of it as "world work" that brings more to the world than just your paycheck.

Saving the World

“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 practically 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 pastime. Music is
a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense
of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have
no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we
can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece
Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you
may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone
movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of
music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open
like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had.
Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really
going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely
no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have
been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And
something very predictable happens at weddings —people get all pent up
with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where
the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or
something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t
good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at
a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The
Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of
ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel
even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones
or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it
about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all
the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I
guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it
wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the
relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of
my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand
concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were
important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris;
it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have
played for people I thought were important; music critics of major
newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my
entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years
ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We
began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written
during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a
young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our
audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing
them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the
concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the
program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the
front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was
clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair,
square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his
life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would
be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece,
but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went
on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to
talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the
circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its
dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience
became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly
figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage
afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was
in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I
watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the
Japanese planes 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.”