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.
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, 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, on the very evening of September 11th,
was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang
"We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The
first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem,
later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The
first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response
to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense
that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but
recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very
night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is
not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have
us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from
leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass
time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways
we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings
when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our
hearts when we 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 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 a small
Midwestern 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.
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 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."
