Inspirational Speech

Inspirational Speech
Welcome address to freshman at Boston Conservatory, given
by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at
Boston Conservatory.

"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 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 heartwrenchingly
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."