How I Discovered My Passion in Life

                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                          

Let me start by saying I wasn't trying to discover my passion in life. Of course I had heard many say that one should find and follow one's passion in life to be happy and successful.  There are books written on the subject, blog posts and websites with lists of questions to ask one's self to discover it, as well as courses offered on the subject by websites and even churches.  I had no urgency about finding my passion, as I had been working successfully for over thirty years in a career that I enjoyed and it always kept the wolves at bay.  I had a lot of interests in life which occupied whatever free time my work allowed.  Mostly my life was goal oriented, following the path to accomplish that next purpose.  So I had never tried any of those approaches, as there was apparently no need.

                                                                 

But my approach to life began to change in the summer of 2009 when Marcia got her diagnosis of cancer, not long after I learned that one of my very best friends in college had succumbed from a heart attack.  Life had become more precious and my generation no longer enjoyed a really long future, the immortality of youth.  One began to think more seriously about what to do with whatever time one might have left.  Then on November 1, 2009 when Marcia passed on, I found myself in new, uncharted territory.  Suddenly all that mattered was to deal with our loss, as the mourning process began.  There was no purpose to achieve, no clear path to follow, no timetable to meet a deadline.  Thankfully, Marcia's suffering had finally ended.  Nothing could be done to bring her back.  But how would I deal with this?  

                                                                

At her memorial service, I listened in my grief to her friend and minister of forty-three years and his wife tell about her life, stories going back to 1966.  Then her son gave a beautiful, emotional, chronological account of her life, story after story after story that illustrated the strength and character of his mother, who he clearly loves and respects very much.  There we all were, her friends and family, enjoying these stories, learning all kinds of interesting things about her life, and remembering those parts we had experienced directly.

             

As I looked around the room, I could see we were all genuinely grateful to hear more about her life and to discover things we hadn't known.  But it suddenly dawned on me that there had not been a single story told that I had not already heard, directly from Marcia!  I had known her for nearly forty years, but only intimately during the last decade of her life.  I realized that during those ten years, Marcia had shared with me everything she considered precious and important about her life.  A huge wave of gratitude came over me as I realized how lucky I had been to share that time with her.  This feeling was a blessing, but quickly an even stronger, transcendent feeling of pride and joy welled up inside of me, as I realized the particular bond we had developed was a gift she gave only to me, a very strong and intimate connection, which I will always keep close to my heart and will never ever forget.

                                 

This brought me a huge amount of relief and peace.  I resolved to always honor her memory, and attend to whatever came my way in this mourning process.  The grief had been replaced by the wave of gratitude.  I  still thought of her every day, but I was in no hurry for that to change, or to "get over it" in any way.  I would just see how life would go now.  I was open to any thoughts or feelings I had about her, was willing to accept any communication I had to her, or from her, and remained open to any other ideas that might come my way.

                                            

And it was with that open attitude that I planned to celebrate her birthday on January 24, 2010.  I've already written about that evening when I listened to Mahler's "Farewell to Life" and realized that I needed to experience more live classical music in my life, which led to my planning the series of concerts that I have been attending.  And now I've written about the first concert with the performance of The Planets (don't forget the Corn Nuts), the magnificent performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony and the transcendent moment I experienced upon the completion of the Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto.

          

But now it's time to go back to February 10, 2010, the evening before that first concert in the series.  I had made the final plans with my Chiro Friend for getting to the concert hall for the show.  She had never attended a symphony orchestra concert, so I had briefed her on what to expect.  I told her she could wear a ballroom gown, but then relented and admitted that concerts were no longer quite that formal.  In fact, I assured her that I would probably not even wear a tie, just a nice sweater.

                      

So the night before the concert I decided to pick out what I would wear from my closet.  I slid open the closet door and began to pull out sports jackets for consideration.  As I looked over the shirts, I began to think about ties and I had this strong feeling that one goes with the other.  So I pulled out some ties and found myself selecting which tie would look the best with the shirt and jacket I had chosen.  I set them aside, so they were ready for the following evening.  Okay, I was going to wear a tie after all, in spite of what I had told my Chiro Friend!  Somehow, that felt very good.  I went to bed looking forward to the next day and the start of my concert season.

               

Only I couldn't get to sleep right away, as I thought about how I felt as I picked out those clothes.  A comfortable, familiar feeling had come over me.  I was feeling very much at home, in a safe frame of mind.  What was this feeling?  Was it because I was going to wear a jacket that Marcia had bought me many years earlier?  No, it went deeper than that.  I was pulled back to 1964, getting ready for one of the dozens of concerts that I attended as a student at Oberlin College, where we always wore a jacket and tie, both at concerts and at dinner every evening.  Decades later I had been experiencing that same delicious anticipation from getting ready to see another live performance of music.  It was a dance I had been through so many times, which always led to a very positive and enjoyable experience.

                

As I had been going through the mourning process, I had been paying close attention to my feelings and seeing where they would lead me.  And that's what I did again that night.  Only this time, parts of my life began to fall into place like a puzzle.  The feeling I had when I began the process of dressing for a concert was the key that unlocked the door and all the connections came tumbling out.  I began to look over parts of my life, the important parts, and my life began to make sense, in a way that had never occurred before.  As more and more of these connections came to mind, I began to get more and more excited, as the epiphany fully took hold of my consciousness.

                                  

Far too excited to sleep, I finally switched on the light and pulled out the notebook by my bed and started to write, summing up my life, as I now clearly saw it, in one single line.

   2:43 AM       What ties my life together: MUSIC!       2/10/10

This was followed by five pages of single spaced writing, listing one example after another of that realization, covering events from all periods in my life, going all the way back to before I started grade school.  I finally stopped after listing fifty of these examples from my life.  My understanding of my life had taken a quantum leap forward.

                                         

I had discovered the thread that ran through my entire life.  I had discovered my passion in life.

                                  

                                                                                               

The mourning process had gotten me to open up my attention, to let it reach out in all directions, not just the path ahead.  And finally I came to see what held my life together.  I had always concentrated on the path to my goals.  The beautiful green trees were always there, but they didn't lead anywhere.  It was the path that lead somewhere and so it was the path that needed to be followed.  Or so I thought.

                            

Those trees had always been there.  They were so much always there, that I didn't realize this was anything unusual or special about my life.  They were so much a part of me that I didn't even recognize that they define who I am.  It wasn't until February 10, 2010 that I finally got a look at the forest from above.  And then I realized that it was a forest, not just a path passing through pretty green trees.

                   

Of course the forest is the music, my love for music, my passion for music, that holds together all phases of my life and makes it uniquely MY LIFE.  Realizing this has changed everything.  I have given myself some time to let this sink in, perhaps to make sure that I'm not just delusional.  I'm not.  This is important and real.

                                        

As I said at the outset, I wasn't looking for this understanding.  And if the question had been posed to me, "What is your passion in life?" I would have said, "I don't know."  Or maybe I would have said that I was passionate about a lot of things, and I'm not sure that One Single Passion in Life is possible, or worth trying to discover.  Marcia once wrote that I am an "honorable and passionate man."  I liked that, because I knew I could feel passion and express passion at times, and it felt really good to do that.  But how could there be a Single Passion in my life?

                           

But there can be, if you realize that the passion can be as big as a forest going out in all directions and off into the distance.  And there are a lot of paths down there among the trees, but what is most important is the beauty, strength and stability of the forest.  Even though I wasn't looking for it, I'm very glad I found it.  And now I encourage everyone, including you, to take a look around and notice what is always there in your life, that makes you YOU.  And if you're fortunate like me, and you discover your passion, I think you'll find that it brings a lot of order to your past and it orients you in a positive way that you may not have previously experienced.  And if this does happen for you, tell me about it in the comments.  I would be very interested in your experiences.

                                     

                                                       

The Redemptive Power of Music

       

Yesterday an important new talk was posted on the TED TALKS website.  It is a talk given in Long Beach in February 2010 by Robert Gupta, a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, about his experiences with his musician friend, Nathaniel Ayers.  He describes how he personally witnessed "the redemptive power of music" work its healing magic on Mr. Ayers.  Please watch this short video right now, before I continue. 

          

                         

Were you moved by his story and his conviction to always make music with his friend?  I certainly was!  Gupta was very eloquent when he summed up his experiences with this man and how it relates to music.

"And I understood that this was the very essence of art.  This was the very reason why we made music.  That we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality.  And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us."

And in the line that TED used for the title of the Gupta talk, he said the following.

"Music is medicine.  Music changes us and for Nathaniel, music is sanity."

Correctly, the title of the talk generalizes the last three words, by removing the specific reference to Nathaniel.  This applies to all of us.  I don't suffer from a mental illness, but as I was going through the mourning process after the loss of Marcia, I realized the medicine I needed to add to my life.  Which I stated in the following way.

"I need to experience live classical music more often. It makes me stronger, more sane. I will be better, with more of it in my life."

 And clearly I was totally right to draw this conclusion, as shown by the fact that I experienced healing moments during both the performance of Mahler's 2nd Symphony and the performance of the Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto.  

In the TED Talk by Evelyn Glennie, she said, "Music really is our daily medicine."  And you may recall that Dr. Karl Paulnack says that "Music is a basic need of human survival."  So there is a lot of agreement on the importance of music and I started this blog to report on my life in music.   

Now as it turns out, I had already heard something about the life story of Nathaniel Ayers, as I had seen the piece 60 Minutes did on him.  When you watch that video below, you'll get to see him playing his cello and trumpet and you'll get to meet the journalist, Steve Lopez, who discovered him on the streets of Los Angeles and wrote many columns, and then a book which became the film The Soloist, about those experiences.  You will also see Ayers interacting with Gupta and other members of the LA Philharmonic.

             

You will also see his sister, Jennifer Ayers-Moore, describe the devastating after effects of the shock treatment that Ayers was subjected to, in an attempt to restore his sanity, after he first became ill at Julliard.

"I remember when he came out, he had this look on his face, it was . . . almost like a zombie.  She [their mother] expected him to go in and come out a different person.  And that . . . it just didn't work out that way."

You may recall that Gupta mentioned that Ayers now refuses treatment, having been treated so long ago with "shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs."  In the 60 Minutes piece, the journalist and his sister are left hoping at the end that he will eventually accept treatment from one of the so-called "new, more effective drugs."  It seems to me that Ayers learned his lesson then and it's time the world recognizes he now benefits from a humane treatment, in his work with music and his musician friends.

                            
So the journalist voiced his wish that, "This man is well on the way to recovery" only to discover that, "The next day, he's the devil."  But the musicians clearly get that his redemption has come and will continue to come through his work with the music and the musicians.  How much easier would his path had been, if he had not been so seriously harmed by the shock treatment?  Well the musicians and Ayers himself are the heroes of this piece, saving the planet, one soul at a time!!

And notice that Ayers does not view himself as a victim, in spite of the harmful treatment he received.  On the contrary, in one lucid moment in the video, he states, "Music is saying, you know, life isn't that bad . . ." and in another, "It's very good to be alive right now."  And think about this.  How many people on the rough streets of Los Angeles has Ayers himself helped by performing his own live music?  My guess is that it is more than a few.    

And so we end with a performance on the cello by Nathaniel Ayers, accompanied by Joanne Pearce Martin, Principal Keyboardist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

                                                                              

                                   

Remembering Bill Bacon

                                                                              

Monday night, March 22, 2010, I met the Dancing Cellist at Davies Symphony Hall for the third in my current series of concerts.  Our seats were in the first row of the 1st Tier on the left side of the stage, so we had a bird's eye view of the orchestra, with a clear view of the hands of the pianist, Denis Matsuev, for the Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto.  I had brought along my binoculars, so I could get good close-ups on any of the performers.

"The Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 by Sergei Rachmaninoff (colloquially known as "Rach 3") is famous for its technical and musical demands on the performer. It has the reputation of being one of the most difficult concertos in the standard piano repertoire."

                                                
The Rach 3 was the reason I bought tickets to this concert.  When I was a student at Oberlin College, one of my best friends, Bill Bacon, was a piano student at the great Oberlin Conservatory of Music.  Bill was consumed by one purpose at that time.  He wanted to learn to play this difficult piece.  I'm sure that was the first time I had heard of Rach 3 and maybe even the first time I had heard about Rachmaninoff.  That was back in 1965, long before the movie Shine had introduced the piece to millions all over the world.  Bill was excited because the great piano virtuoso, Vladimir Horowitz, had recently returned to the stage at Carnegie Hall.  And I'm pretty sure that it was the Horowitz performance of  Rach 3 on RCA that Bill had in his collection.  So that's how I first heard the great concerto.

I always meant to go see the film, Shine, but somehow it never happened.  I understand it is a true story about a talented Australian pianist, David Helfgott, who learned Rach 3 for a concerto competition, but suffered a mental breakdown in the process.  Sadly, that seemed to be the process Bill was going through at Oberlin as well.  He became depressed and dropped out of the school sometime during my sophomore year.  But he continued to hang out in our section of the dorm until the end of the school year, as he had a girl friend, Cheryl, who was still a student.  In the end, they moved to Chicago together and the last time I saw them it was when I visited them in their apartment there.  I remember the apartment had been furnished with an ancient and very black and crusty gas stove, which Bill had proceeded to take apart and refurbish to a grand and nearly new looking condition.  I think all that manual labor had been good for Bill and he was justifiably proud of the restored stove.  He and Cheryl seemed happy together.  And then we parted and went about our separate lives.

I never knew what became of Bill, or whether he ever learned to play the Rachmaninoff 3rd Piano Concerto.

So when Denis Matsuev, a large handsome Russian, came out to perform the piece, I had Bill in the back of my mind.  Bill had told me what a difficult piece the concerto was to perform, so I felt a sense of danger as the music began.  Would this young man be up to the task?  Well he certainly was!  I have played the concerto on my stereo many times (dozens, hundreds of times?) over the years and know the sound like an old friend.  There below me on the stage, Matsuev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev, were performing the music just like I had heard it so many times in my home. Only this was far better, as it was a live performance in a wonderful concert hall.  The feeling of danger quickly subsided as Matsuev tore through the piece with no sign of distress or difficulty.  He made it look easy.

And so I relaxed and just reveled in the glorious sound, sometimes with my eyes closed, sometimes while watching his fingers fly across the keyboard.  It came to a most amazing conclusion, with a flourish of virtuosity from the pianist and a crescendo from the orchestra in support, all ending with a glorious crash, that sent a chill down my back.  Wow!  I had not expected such a dramatic conclusion and it felt great to feel a chill down my back again from live music.

And just like that, Matsuev was up and taking his bows from an excited audience. Cheers and cries of "Bravo" rolled across the concert hall as we clapped and clapped.  The conductor and orchestra took their bows, then left the stage and returned two or three times and finally Matsuev came back out without the conductor.  I had been taking it all in and enjoying the celebration that accompanies the end of a fine musical performance.  Life was good.
                                  

And so Matsuev sat back down at his Steinway for an encore.  He announced what he was going to play, which from the 1st Tier sounded like "Music Box," (but was actually "Musical Snuffbox"  Op.32 by Anatol Liadov) and proceeded to perform this new number, a delightful, mostly quiet piece that contrasted nicely with the virtuosity of Rach 3.  As soon as his fingers touched the keys and the music began, I was nearly overcome by a sudden intense feeling of grief mixed with joy.  If I had been home alone, I would have just burst out in tears, with loud sobbing.  But with Matsuev playing quietly down below me, I had to restrain myself, so as not to disturb the attentive audience.  I slammed my eyelids shut, as my eyes filled with tears, and I reminded myself to breathe, and keep on breathing, deeply.

As the Music Box played quietly down below me, the sudden surge of feelings began to subside, like a wave pulling back from the shore.  I opened my eyes and watched the end of the encore and the applause that followed.  An excited peaceful feeling returned.

What was that?!  I think my body had been experiencing the loss of my friend, Bill, and when the concerto was concluded so successfully it allowed all the tension about the difficulty of the piece to be released, which led to the feeling of joy, but it was accompanied by the long ago submerged grief over the loss of my Oberlin friends from my life.  The suddenness with which it appeared was rather disconcerting, but the experience was healing, as the feelings made their way out.

Once again I had experienced a transcendent moment at a live performance of music in San Francisco!   

                                

                                                                 

Experience the Sound

                               

Did you ever attend a concert performed by a solo virtuoso percussionist?  Could there even be such a thing?  Well yes, there really could be.  But let's stretch credulity a bit more.  How about a solo performance by a virtuoso percussionist who is so profoundly deaf that she must read people's lips to be able to converse with them?  There is such a woman!  She is Evelyn Glennie from Scotland, "the first full-time solo percussionist in 20th-century western society."  Please take a brief detour and follow the above link to the Wikipedia entry, to get to know a little bit about this remarkable woman.  I'll wait for you to get back.  You might even want to follow the link there to her "Hearing Essay."
                             

Okay, I'm glad you're back.  I discovered a Ted Talk this woman gave in Monterey, CA in February 2003.  I just started watching it, with no idea of what she had in store for me.  I've now watched the entire 32 minutes three times through.  She begins with this startling statement, especially so, coming from a so-called "deaf" woman.      

                                

"Of course, my job is all about listening.  And my aim, really, is to teach the world to listen.  That's my only real aim in life."

And that is what she proceeds to do in the talk.  I'm sure you've heard about how those with a particular disability (e.g. deafness) can develop the other senses (e.g. hearing) to a much greater degree.  This is what she has done, as she doesn't just listen with her ears.  She says, "I also hear it through my hands, through my arms, my cheekbones, my scalp, my tummy, my chest, my legs and so on."  In fact you'll notice that the first thing she does is to remove her shoes, so that she can hear the music she plays better.

Well, do we need to be deaf too, to do this?  No, she encourages us all to really learn to listen, to fully experience the sound of the music.  She says, "It's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills.  To really use our bodies as a resonating chamber."

And she concludes with the following challenge.

"The next time you go to a concert, just allow your body to open up, allow your body to be this resonating chamber.  Be aware that you're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is.  The performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound, because they're hearing the contact of the stick on the drum, or the mallet on the bit of wood, or the bow on the string, etc.  Or the breath that's creating the sound from wind and brass.  They're experiencing that rawness there.  But yet, they're experiencing something so unbelievably pure, which is before the sound is actually happening.  Please take note of the life of the sound, after the actual initial strike or breath is being pulled.  Just experience the whole journey of that sound, in the same way that I wished I'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference, rather than just arriving last night."

                                                                                                
Wow, now there's a woman who has mastered her instruments.  And I really love her wonderful Scottish way of speaking!  I wish I could roll my R's like that!

Well I took her challenge to allow my body "to be this resonating chamber" when I went to see the Mahler's Second Symphony performed last Sunday.  And it was certainly a wonderful experience, with the amazing variety of sounds that Mahler delivers in that awesome piece.  And really, there is no way to experience that sound as fully as at a live concert hall with a full orchestra and chorus.

What does this say about the ear buds and iPods we see everywhere we go these days?  Well it certainly is limiting the experience of the sound to what is coming in through the ears!  Remember, she said we should "really try to connect with those sounds far far more broadly than simply depending upon the ear."  So for me, attending a live performance of music is far and away more satisfying than any other way of experiencing music.  I invite you to put down your headphones, or turn off your boom box and go to the telephone and order some tickets to a real live concert.  You'll be glad you did.

           

But I just can't restrain myself from making one final point.  You'll recall that she said, "Every one of us, depending upon where we're sitting will experience this sound quite quite differently."  Of course she's right, but for one exception!  And that is when the performers, the conductor and the audience are all participating as one in the creation of the sound of silence!  I had the privilege of being able to help create that glorious sound when I went to hear Mahler's Ninth Symphony.  It was an exceptionally rare and moving experience and one that I will never forget!!  Remember when she asked about the sound of snowing?  It's the same thing!  So you can do that too, on a snowy night.

                                                                                                                                         

Uncle Art's Scrapbook

                                                    

I was born in Galesburg, IL and my family lived in a rented house on Florence Avenue at that time.  Right behind our house was the backyard of a house on Brown Avenue, which was the next street over.  In those days in the Midwest, people talked to their neighbors and often became good friends with them.  That's what happened with my family and Art and Mary Stilson, who lived in that house behind us on Brown Avenue.  My Mom and Dad became close friends with the Stilsons while we lived there.  In 2007 I took a picture of that house, which is a lot fancier now than when the Stilsons lived there.
                                                        

 I don't remember anything from that period on Florence Avenue.  Before I started grade school we had moved to another house that my father had built for us across town.  My memory does go back to that house.  Even though we had moved across town, we stayed close friends with the Stilsons and would often go visit them in their small home.  And they had come to be known as Uncle Art and Aunt Mary to me and my brother, even though there was no true blood relationship there.

Uncle Art was a large man of modest means who lived happily with his wife, who was an excellent homemaker and interested in the arts.  She was an excellent cook, she did a lot of sewing, and she often sang in a local choir.  They had an upright piano, which she liked to play  Their backyard was filled with a very large garden, where they probably grew most of the food they ate.   I remember row after row of very large stalks of corn in that garden.  They didn't have any kids of their own, but they were always glad to see me and my brother arrive for a visit.  We always got Christmas cards and birthday cards from them, and probably some presents along the way as well.  Aunt Mary always had a cat.

Uncle Art had been laid off from his job, so they were getting by with limited resources.  But they had that garden and Aunt Mary always canned a lot of food for the winter months.  Occasionally there were serious talks with my parents about their situation, but usually they were just happy to see us and we'd have a lot of fun together.

Uncle Art did a lot of reading in newspapers, magazines and books.  I don't recall there being a television in their home in those days.  Uncle Art loved to find interesting stories, tidbits, and oddities in his readings.  He would clip them out and when we would come to visit, he would be sure to pull  something out from his scrapbook to show us.  "Oh, look what I found in the paper the other day," he'd say.  Then he'd watch while my Dad read it, perhaps aloud to us all, and then he'd laugh loudly with us all about the story.

He also had records that he'd pull out to play for us.  Early on they were probably 78's, but later he upgraded to regular LP's.  I remember him playing Spike Jones for us and howling with laughter over those hilarious tracks.  And one time he had a very special record to play for us, as he had discovered this amazing piano player called Victor Borge, who could really play the piano, but was really a comedian.  I clearly remember the day he played the Phonetic Punctuation routine for us.  We were all rolling on the floor with laughter on that one.

Uncle Art would have loved the Internet.  I'm sure he would have been all over the web, reading and saving interesting tidbits and oddities for his scrapbook.  And when I came across the following video, it made me think of Uncle Art immediately.  He would have loved this video of Carl Sandburg, in which he makes an accurate prediction about the outcome of the 1960 Presidential election.

You see Uncle Art was a big fan of Carl Sandburg, who was also born in Galesburg, only a long time before me.  He had written the definitive three volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, which was on Uncle Art's bookshelf and I'm sure he had read them.  Of course Lincoln was the most famous American our state of Illinois had ever produced and Sandburg was the biggest name to ever come out of Galesburg.  Uncle Art loved them both.

Many years later, after Uncle Art and Aunt Mary were gone, I discovered a link between this favorite son of my hometown, the favorite son of my home state and my favorite songwriter, Bob Dylan.  In fact, Dylan had once quoted Sandburg when he was performing one of his early songs, Talkin' World War III Blues.  When I first heard this song on the Freewheelin' album, Dylan was quoting Lincoln in the song.                                

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time,
But all of the people can't be all right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

And yet when he performed it in the Halloween Concert at Philharmonic Hall in NYC in 1964, he sang:

All the people can be some right part of the time,
Part of the people can be some right all of the time,
But all the people can't be all right all of the time.

                        Carl Sandburg said that.                          

What's with that?  Why did he change the line?!  Which is right?
                                                                 

Of course with the connections to my hometown, I had to research the point and finally wrote up the answer to those questions on my Dylan bibliography website, Conclusions on the Wall.  The key to my solving this puzzle came when I discovered a two record set of Sandburg reading from his Lincoln works.  I had to buy the records because I remembered that Uncle Art had owned that album and had played it for us.  It was Halloween 1998 when I found it in the CD shop and took it home with me, exactly 34 years after Bob had sung the Sandburg line in New York City.

Once I figured it all out, I put together a page in my bibliography website all about it.  I think I enjoyed making that page more than any other on my website.  And to be sure, if Uncle Art had still been around, I would have proudly pointed him to it.  He would have loved it and would have surely added it to his scrapbook!
                                                  

Take a look for yourself and see what you think!

                                                     
                                                                  

That Magnificent Sound

                                                                  
It is 8:00 pm and I just returned home from a Sunday afternoon San Francisco Symphony performance of Mahler's Second Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), with Laura Claycomb (soprano), Katarina Karnéus (mezzo-soprano), and the full San Francisco Symphony Chorus, directed by Ragnar Bohlin.
                                 

The original plan was to take both my Chiro Friend (CF) and the Dancing Cellist (DC) to this concert.  But as it turned out, the Dancing Cellist was under a lot of pressure to prepare for her college final exams, which are next week.  So on Saturday, it was decided that her mother, the Dancing Poet (DP), would attend in her place.  Neither CF nor DP had ever been to a live performance of any music by Gustav Mahler.

DP attended the pre-concert talk with me and CF joined us for the concert itself.  The very informative talk was given by the Program Annotator for the symphony, James M. Keller.  Keller is a graduate of my alma mater, Oberlin College.

I am not a music critic, nor a music journalist.  So I don't intend to write a review of this, or any other, concert.  I intend to describe my life in music in this blog, and that is all.  I will write about what I personally experienced  in hopes that the reader might find this of some use.

On the drive home, one word came to mind to describe this performance.  It is magnificent.  Look it up and you'll find the following words as synonyms for this word: grand, splendid, majestic, superb, glorious, impressive.  They all apply.  

There is no way to describe this experience in words.  One simply must experience  the music  directly oneself.  And that is what I encourage everyone to do.

I am partial to Mahler.  He and Bob Dylan are the two musical giants who have meant the most to me in my life and have had the most impact upon me as a listener.  So perhaps I came to the concert with a bias in favor of this piece of music.  But upon its conclusion, both CF and DP were excited about the performance and were very happy to have spent the afternoon in this way.

I am not a critical listener.  That is, I am not listening for things that I might criticize.  I am there to experience the sound and see where it takes me.  With a larger than usual orchestra and the full chorus and two soloists, there were probably somewhere between 200 and 250 dedicated musicians, between those on stage and the horns, trumpets and percussion in two locations offstage.  Surely each one has spent thousands of hours learning their craft and practicing their instrument to master its use, in order to win the right to sit on that stage to play for us today.  For most, they did not do this in order to make a fortune or to become world famous.  They did it because of their love of music.  And to my mind they are doing God's work, elevating the consciousness of those who pay to see them perform.
                   

So I have tremendous respect for these world class musicians.  And in recent years, this orchestra  under the direction of MTT has recorded the full cycle of Mahler symphonic works and has gained a world-wide reputation for being an excellent Mahler orchestra.  We are very fortunate in the SF Bay Area to have this great symphony available for our listening pleasure.  So I considered it a great honor for me to be able to hear their performance of this work.

I am open to feeling whatever emotions and feelings the performance might bring my way.  Before they began to play, I was feeling nervous and anxious, just like I used to feel before I performed music in my childhood.  Perhaps I was reliving some of those feelings, or perhaps some of those feelings were coming from some of the performers or others in the hall, or both.   Whatever their origin,  those feelings went away as the music began to be performed, just as they used to do when I was a young performer.

Now understand that this work deals with the subject of death and resurrection.  Mahler originally called what eventually became the first movement Funeral Rites and the fourth and final movements specifically address death and resurrection in the words sung by the soloists and chorus.  In that way, this is serious music, dealing with a serious subject.  For me this had special meaning, as I have been going through the mourning process  after the loss of a love of my life, Marcia (RIP).  And it is this loss that has directly led me to this rejuvenation of my musical life and the series of concerts that I will be attending during these next few months.

In preparing for the concert I had read the chapter on the Second Symphony in a Mahler biography I own.  And I had listened to a number of performances of the symphony, both on CD and with You Tube videos.  The latter mostly consisted of performances by the NY Philharmonic directed by Leonard Bernstein and an 8/30/98 performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Simon Battle.  The latter videos have excellent video quality, as well as subtitles with the English translation of the singing in the final two movements.     

On three separate occasions during the final days leading up to the performance today, I had burst into tears while watching the last eight minutes of the Rattle/CBSO performance.  In each case I was watching the video with a great deal of interest, but not in any sort of morose state, and each time my tears had simply burst out unexpectedly as I watched.  Each time this grief was accompanied by thoughts about Marcia.  And each time it felt like a healing experience.

                                  

                      

Perhaps part of my nervousness before this performance was over wondering whether I might find myself bursting into tears during this performance as well.  Our seats were in the middle of the second row, less than ten feet from the edge of the stage.  I didn't want to cause a scene.  So before it started, I warned both CF and DP about this possibility, so that they would not be thrown off by it, if it should come to pass.

Well it did not happen that way.  But the music did move me in significant ways at many points during the performance and at three different points (not the same point as when I watched the videos) tears began rolling down my cheeks.  I just let them roll.  I didn't even wipe them off, not wanting to direct any of my attention off of the performance.  And once again these felt like healing moments.

As I thought about all this on the drive home, I realized the point I wanted to make in writing about this experience.  And that is that far too many people these days are missing out on these experiences.  There was one empty seat in the first row right in front of us, but mostly the concert looked to be sold out.  But I had been able to buy my tickets only six weeks before the concert.  For such a large metropolitan area, this tells me there are a huge number of people who don't have the slightest idea what they are missing by not attending concerts by this world class symphony orchestra.

Perhaps I should keep this incredible secret to myself, as it certainly makes it easier for me to get tickets.  But how does this affect our culture and the overall well-being of our population?  As Dr. Karl Paulnack has said, attending a performance of Mahler's Second "...can be a very deep transformative life saving experience."   And as he said in his Welcome Address to new students at The Boston Conservatory, "music is a basic need of human survival."

He concludes his Welcome Address by saying the following. 
                         

"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."

When one first reads his statement, perhaps it seems like hyperbole, wishful thinking.  But when you  directly experience the majestic power of great music performed by a great symphony orchestra, his statement begins to feel both plausible and right.  Surely this is God's work.

                                                                              

The Role of the Audience

                                     

A week ago I wrote about the Welcome Address to new music students given by Dr. Karl Paulnack,  In that speech, Paulnack discussed how "Music is a basic need of human survival." The speech was given in 2004 and Paulnack went on to expand on this discussion in 2008 and 2009.

On August 24, 2008 he gave a sermon at his church in Boston in which he discussed his ideas, but extended them to also consider the role of the audience in live performance.  The audio of that sermon is still available at the website of the church.  In it, he says the following.

"What matters more than the type of music that you like, is that we submit ourselves to it.  That we enter into a partnership with music where we recognize its potential as a therapeutic agent.  And live music is much much better for this than recorded music. . . With live music, the specific energy that you bring as an audience member affects the performers in subtle, but real, ways. And you influence what is being created.  In effect, you co-create the performance.  And music ends up being created with you in mind." 

Does that sound familiar?  If you've read my article on The Sound of Silence, you may recall I wrote that at the end of the performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony "the audience had become performers along with the orchestra! We all helped to create that effect."  And when I talked to the orchestra members afterward about the magnificent performance, one of them commented that "it was very unusual for an audience to remain that still, not just at the very end, but throughout the final movement."  Clearly he was saying that the actions of the audience had had a positive effect on the performance by the orchestra.  This is just the sort of thing Paulnack was discussing in his sermon.

On April 25, 2009 Paulnack expanded upon this role of the audience in a telephone interview with Janice Harris published as a podcast on her Music Therapy website.  In that interview, he states the following.

". . . if you go to a performance and you sit there quietly with your gaze on the musicians, giving your whole heart and soul and attention into that performance, focusing on those musicians, supporting them, in a way; if you go with that kind of devotion, musicians thrive on that.  We can feel - we can actually feel which members  of the audience we have.  Who's with us?  And we usually play to those people.  We play to those people who are riveted on us, who are focused on us. . . They don't recognize how much of a positive impact they have on performance by sharing it.  And really, the performances are shaped half by the people in the audiences and their states of receptiveness, just as much as they're shaped by the people on the stage."

So the role of an audience member is not a passive role.  The more we engage with the performance, the more it will enhance the performance for us, as well as for everyone else.

And in that same podcast he discusses the power of some musical performances.

"Going out to Mahler's Second - that's not 'entertainment' - that's not what that's about.  It's a very deep and transformative - it can be a very deep transformative life saving experience.  So I think one of my intentions here is not to put down in any way people who do music as entertainment, or the use of music as entertainment.  There's nothing wrong with entertainment.  It's not a bad thing.  But to assume that all music somehow is entertainment or has a function of distracting us or carrying us away from the deeper aspects of life, is I think, a misconception in our society.  Music can actually carry us very very deeply into our lives and into a deeper experience and a deeper connection with our lives.  Which I see as a different function from entertainment."

Wow, he has set a high standard here!  This comment made an immediate connection with me when I heard it a couple of weeks ago, as I had just purchased tickets to the 3/14/10 performance of the Mahler Second Symphony by the San Francisco Symphony.  I will be taking both my Chiro Friend and the Dancing Cellist to this concert.  I bought three tickets to this one, as I didn't want to have to make a choice about which of the two of them would get to go to this one.  So I got tickets for both.  We're all really looking forward to this performance!