Meaningful Musical Conversations

This is a long read, but really worth it! If you're a musician, or a parent or spouse of one, this will be worth your time:

Welcome address to freshman parents at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Ithaca College:

“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 N**i 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 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.
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."

I love this song so much. I used to play this in Yoga class when people were in child’s pose, or in a long hold of some type of forward bend… hearts opened, tears were shed. Gratitude heals.

Thank you for your music, Sinead.💜

sinéad o connor thank you for hearing me sinéad sings live

What fun I had with amazing musician and beautiful human, Dena DeRose yesterday, in her hometown of Binghamton, for a 6 month-late celebration of her birthday!!

What a gift you are in my life, Dena! And in soooo many others’ around the globe! Happy Belated Birthday! ❤️🎶🌷☀️💞

Links to her music in the comments.

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How Pixar’s ‘Soul’ Animates Jazz A look at the ways filmmakers and musicians collaborated to present an accurate view of players’ artistry.

John Lennon: The Last Interview Three days before he died on December 8th, John Lennon talked with ‘Rolling Stone’ for nine hours. Here’s the extraordinary interview

Wonderful Interview...

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“I, too, sing America,” he wrote.

The descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners, he was born in Joplin, Missouri, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture.

In 1902, when he was born, rigid racial restrictions dominated Missouri.

“I am the darker brother,” he wrote.
They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes.”

“But I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.”

“Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

“Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.”

“Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance,” according to the Smithsonian.

He is one of the best loved poets today and his poems show up on the Peace Page many times.

This is part of a continuing series this month on the Peace Page, sharing awareness on the importance of voting. This story revisits a Peace Page favorite and features additional information previously unpublished here. Missouri’s registration deadline for voting is October 7. You can Google registration and voting information for your community or access your info on Facebook.

“Elected a trustee of the Missouri Society of New York in 1963, he was proud to be part of a great literary tradition that includes Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot and Hughes’s good friend the poet Marianne Moore,” according to the Missouri Public Affairs Hall of Fame.”

“Until his death in 1967, Langston Hughes was arguably the premier poet of the black American experience, the most versatile of black writers, and one of the finest authors in American literature.”

In one of his most memorable poems, as relevant today as it was when he wrote it, he said:

“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!”

According to the Beinecke Library at Yale:

“Among the more than 15,000 folders in the Langston Hughes Papers are many writings that relate to democracy and voting, including many well-known, widely published, and oft-recited poems. There are also lesser-known pieces, such as the notes, drafts, and the author’s copy of an occasional piece from the presidential election year of 1956, “The Ballot and Me: An Historical Sequence”.

“The variety and frequency of Hughes’s work regarding suffrage underscore his concern for voting rights and commitment to the fight for civil rights throughout his life.

“The Ballot and Me”, a short play, covers the history of Black enfranchisement in America from the 18th century forward and features the voices of freedom fighters such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass and the names and stories of every Black federal elected official from Reconstruction to 1956.”

At the conclusion of the play, the Narrator says, “Fellow citizens, your ballot has great value. Use it! When election time comes, to paraphrase by extension a young Negro leader in the South today, the Reverend Martin Luther King of Alabama, "If you can't fly, run! If you can't run, walk! If you can't walk, crawl--to the polls and vote!"

SOJOURNER TRUTH: Vote!

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Vote!

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON: Vote!

NARRATOR: Vote!

ALL TOGETHER: Vote! . . . . . . Vote! . . . . . Vote! . . . . . . . . . . Vote! . . . . . Vote . . . VOTE!

~~~~~

“For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.”

Wonderful interview and review of Dena DeRose’s fantastic album, Ode to the Road, that’s been high on the Jazz charts for months now. What an incredibly gifted musician, hard worker, and wonderful, big hearted human she is. She inspires me. ❤️

Dena Derose: Keeper Of The Song article @ All About Jazz Dena Derose: Keeper Of The Song article by R.J. DeLuke, published on September 7, 2020 at All About Jazz. Find more Interview articles

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In case you missed this...Kendrick Freeman, wise and humble teacher. Comments and conversation welcome. 😊

Episode 20 Kendrick Freeman: Drummer, Percussionist & Teacher, Developing Your Personal Voice, Haitian Polyrhythms, Clarifying Misconceptions about Vodou, Healing and Presence. What you just heard is our guest setting an intention for this interview, by singing this little song in Haitian Kreyol. I’m happy to announce that we have our first drummer and percussionist on the show! I’ve seen him perform many times over the years and...

My daddy passed away last night. We now join the worldwide family who are mourning grandfathers and grandmothers, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers— kinfolk, friends, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances and others.

What can one possibly say about loss in a time when there are many people losing folks that mean so much to them? One of my friends lost both her mother AND father just last week. We all grieve and experience things differently, and I’m sure each of my five brothers are feeling and dealing in their own way.

My daddy was a humble man with a lyrical sound that captured the spirit of place--New Orleans, the Crescent City, The Big Easy, the Curve. He was a stone-cold believer without extravagant tastes.
Like many parents, he sacrificed for us and made so much possible. Not only material things, but things of substance and beauty like the ability to hear complicated music and to read books; to see and to contemplate art; to be philosophical and kind, but to also understand that a time and place may require a pugilistic-minded expression of ignorance.

His example for all of us who were his students (a big extended family from everywhere), showed us to be patient and to want to learn and to respect teaching and thinking and to embrace the joy of seriousness. He taught us that you could be conscious and stand your ground with an opinion rooted ‘in something’ even if it was overwhelmingly unfashionable. And that if it mattered to someone, it mattered.

I haven’t cried because the pain is so deep....it doesn’t even hurt. He was absolutely my man. He knew how much I loved him, and I knew he loved me (though he was not given to any type of demonstrative expression of it). As a boy, I followed him on so many underpopulated gigs in unglamorous places, and there, in the passing years, learned what it meant to believe in the substance of a fundamental idea whose only verification was your belief.

I only ever wanted to do better things to impress HIM. He was my North Star and the only opinion that really deep down mattered to me was his because I grew up seeing how much he struggled and sacrificed to represent and teach vital human values that floated far above the stifling segregation and prejudice that defined his youth but, strangely enough, also imbued his art with an even more pungent and biting accuracy.

But for all of that, I guess he was like all of us; he did the best he could, did great things, had blind spots and made mistakes, fought with his spouse, had problems paying bills, worried about his kids and other people’s, rooted for losing teams, loved gumbo and red beans, and my momma’s pecan pie. But unlike a healthy portion of us, he really didn’t complain about stuff. No matter how bad it was.

A most fair-minded, large-spirited, generous, philanthropic (with whatever he had), open-minded person is gone. Ironically, when we spoke just 5 or 6 days ago about this precarious moment in the world and the many warnings he received ‘to be careful, because it wasn’t his time to pass from COVID’, he told me,” Man, I don’t determine the time. A lot of people are losing loved ones. Yours will be no more painful or significant than anybody else’s”.
That was him, “in a nutshell”, (as he would say before talking for another 15 minutes without pause).

In that conversation, we didn’t know that we were prophesying. But he went out soon after as he lived—-without complaint or complication. The nurse asked him, “Are you breathing ok?” as the oxygen was being steadily increased from 3 to 8, to too late, he replied, ”Yeah. I’m fine.”

For me, there is no sorrow only joy. He went on down the Good Kings Highway as was his way, a jazz man, “with grace and gratitude.”
And I am grateful to have known him.

- Wynton

Kendrick Freeman’s podcast is up- go to your favorite listening platform to listen... and make sure to let other people know who you think might be interested! Thanks for listening and spreading the word!

https://meaningfulmusicalconversations.podbean.com/e/episode-20kendrickfreemandrummer-percussionistteacher-developingyourpersonal-voicehaitian-polyrhythmsclarifying-misconceptions-about-vodouhealing-a/

Remembering McCoy Tyner Over the last month, I’ve read some wonderful tributes to the late icon, McCoy Tyner. They’ve ranged from fans, fellow musicians (some who worked with him, some who didn’t), critics, scholars and t…

Hi Everyone, I just want to update you on what’s happening with the podcast.

We recorded this coming podcast, soon to be released, 5 weeks ago. I know we’re slow on its release, so I wanted to share what’s been going on.

Two days after we recorded, I flew to the East Coast to be with my father the last days of his life and then stayed on for awhile to help my mother. So there’s that...

This coming podcast is our first one featuring a drummer/percussionist- and I’m so excited to share it with you. He is a well known and loved player and teacher, humble as pie, and, I found, full of the kind of wisdom that makes you go, “hmmm...” and sticks with you...

So- stay tuned, new episode coming soon.

I hope you are all well. We send you wishes and blessings for peace, enjoyable connections with others with safe physical distance, and financial blessings as well...❤️❤️❤️

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Great interview!

‘I was a bad influence on the Beatles': James Taylor on Lennon, love and recovery The singer has written many beautiful songs – and was a muse for Joni Mitchell and Carole King. He reflects on his relationship with Mitchell and overcoming childhood trauma and he**in addiction

This is David Worm.

https://youtu.be/nZGrlp0xcus

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Check out Ken Cook Music podcast!

https://meaningfulmusicalconversations.podbean.com/e/episode-18kencookprofessionalpianistcomposerbelovedjazzfaculty-memberat-sonomastateimprovisationandfreeplaydirty-little-secretbetween-instrumentalists/

Episode 18 Ken Cook: Professional Pianist, Composer, & Beloved Jazz Faculty Member at Sonoma State, Improvisation and Free Play, Dirty Little Secret between Instrumentalists & Vocalists Unpacked. Our guest this episode is a professional pianist, originally from Newport Beach, California, currently residing in the San Francisco Bay Area where he performs with his trio, as well as with a long list of other accomplished musicians, including vocalist D...

The Women of Jazz’s Next Generation Are More than ‘Extraordinary’ | Berklee College of Music The newly announced Next Generation Women in Jazz Combo, sponsored by the Monterey Jazz Festival, performed at Berklee and took part in workshops led by the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.

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Are you in the mood to listen in on a fun and enjoyable conversation? Check out today’s podcast episode with this delightfully funny woman, Nancy Hayashibara. We get to hear stories from the front line of what it’s like to be a college accompanist for instrumentalists and voice students. You’ll also get to hear her play the fourth movement from Ravel’s Mirroir, as she sits down and plays live for Daniel and me. Did you know she draws comic strips and creates and stars in Variety shows, too? This is one creative woman, daring herself to take on all kinds of creative challenges. This episode is full of laughs and inspiration! Tap the link in the bio to listen in on our conversation!