…and honoring those who lost so much, as well as those who gave so much that day.
As intensely shocking as it all was from a distance of 3,000 miles away, I can’t even imagine the trauma experienced by those on the scene.
But I find comfort in the stories of people reaching out and helping strangers in a time of such tragedy. And I pray for the continued healing of this deep wound.
The essay below is by Karl Paulnack, a pianist and (at the time he wrote this) director of the music division at the Boston Conservatory. The essay was adapted from a welcome speech he gave to incoming freshmen and was originally published in the June7, 2009 issue of The Christian Science Monitor, p. 28.
I first encountered Karl’s writing when a musician friend-of-a-friend shared it on her Facebook profile. It resonated so deeply that I immediately searched for more of what he had to say.
I have have been deeply affected by the way he articulates ideas that I feel in every cell of my being are true. So, rather than try and condense or paraphrase, I’ve decided to share some of his writings in full. However, since it’s quite long, I’ve decided to highlight my favorite sections with different colored text.
I’ll be curious to know how it strikes you.
We need music to survive
Karl Paulnack – Music Division, The Boston Conservatory
One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not value me as a musician. I remember my mother’s reaction when I announced my decision to study music instead of medicine: “You’re wasting your SAT scores!” My parents love music, but at the time they were unclear about its value.
The confusion is understandable: We put music in the “arts & entertainment” section of the newspaper. But music often has little to do with entertainment. Quite the opposite.
The ancient Greeks had a fascinating way of articulating how music works. In their quadrivium—geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music—astronomy and music are two sides of the same coin. Astronomy describes relationships between observable, external, permanent objects.
Music illuminates relationships between invisible, internal, transient objects. I imagine us having internal planets, constellations of complicated thoughts and feelings. Music finds the invisible pieces inside our hearts and souls and helps describe the position of things inside us, like a telescope that looks in rather than out.
In June 1940, French composer Olivier Messiaen was captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. There, he finished a quartet for piano, cello, violin, and clarinet, and performed it, with three other imprisoned musicians, for the inmates and guards of that camp. The piece (“Quartet for the End of Time”) is arguably one of the greatest successes in the history of music.
Given what we have since learned about life under Nazi occupation, why would anyone write music there? If you’re just trying to stay alive, why bother with music? And yet—even from concentration camps themselves, we have surviving evidence of poetry, music, and visual art—many people made art. Why?
Art must be, somehow, essential for life. In fact, 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 Sept. 11, 2001, I was a resident of Manhattan. Later that day I reached a new understanding of my art. Given the day’s events, the idea of playing the piano seemed absurd, disrespectful, and pointless. Amid ambulances, firefighters, and fighter jets, I heard an inner voice ask: “Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment?”
Then I saw how we survived. The first group activity in my neighborhood that night was singing. People sang. They sang around firehouses; they sang “We Shall Overcome,” “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner”; they sang songs learned in elementary school, which some hadn’t sung since then. Within days, we gathered at Lincoln Center for the Brahms Requiem. Along with firefighters and fighter jets, artists were “first responders” in this disaster, too. The military secured our airspace, but musicians led the recovery. In measuring the revival of New York, the return of Broadway—another art form—was as significant a milestone as the reopening of the stock markets.
I now understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment.” It’s not a luxury, something we fund from budget leftovers. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of things, a way to express feelings when we have no words, a way to understand things with our hearts when we cannot grasp them with our minds. Music is the language we choose when we are speechless.
Imagine a graduation with absolutely no music—or a wedding, a presidential inauguration, or a service celebrating the life and death of a close friend—imagine these with no music whatsoever. What’s missing—entertainment? Hardly. What’s missing is the capacity to meaningfully experience these events, as though eating great food without tasting it. Music functions as a container for experience—it augments capacity to grasp complex things. Without music, the events of our lives slip like water through cupped hands. Music increases our capacity to hold life experiences, to celebrate them, to survive them.
The performance I think of as my most important concert took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town. I was playing with a dear friend of mine, a violinist. We began with Aaron Copland’s “Sonata,” which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young pilot who was shot down during the war.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. After we finished, we mentioned that the piece was dedicated to a downed pilot. The man became so disturbed he had to leave the auditorium, but showed up backstage afterward, tears and all, to explain himself.
He told us that during World War II, as a pilot, he was in an aerial combat situation where one of this team’s planes was hit. He watched his friend bail out and his parachute open. But the Japanese planes returned and machine-gunned across the parachute chords, separating the parachute from the pilot. He then watched his friend drop away into the ocean, lost. He said he had not thought about that for years, but during that first piece of music we played, this memory returned to him so vividly that it was as though he was reliving it. How did Copland manage to capture that picture of internal planets so clearly?
People walk into concert halls as they walk into emergency rooms, in need of healing. They may bring a broken body to a hospital, but they often bring with them to the concert a mind that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again depends partly on how well musicians do their craft.
A musician is more of a paramedic than an entertainer. I’m not interested in entertaining you; I’m interested in keeping you alive. Fully alive. We’re a lot like cardiac surgeons; we hold people’s hearts in our hands every day. We just use different instruments.
What should we expect from young people who choose a future in music? Frankly, I expect them to save the planet.
If there is a future wave of wellness, of harmony, of peace, an end to war, mutual understanding, equality, fairness, I don’t expect it to come from a government, a military force, or a corporation. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if we are to have 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 we did in Nazi camps and on the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.
I’ve reflected a lot on this quote, and today — the 26th birth/death anniversary of my stillborn son, Liam Andrew — seems the perfect time to share my personal conclusions.
Basically, I both agree and disagree with Rose Kennedy’s statement. Yes, the wounds remain — forever. Whether of the body, mind, or spirit, the injury doesn’t ever truly disappear. It will always be registered somewhere in your body and/or psyche. One doesn’t ever simply “forget” that it happened.
But…! The reality of time passing; scar tissue forming; and pain lessening IS — in fact — the healing! The experience of loving and losing Liam Andrew had a profound effect on me at every level of my being. And at the same time, I am healed and whole. Because time passed, scar tissue formed, and the pain lessened…then eventually went away.
So, I submit that the wound remains AND healing happens.
💞 I was in bed before midnight last night (whoohoo!); 💞 I’ve been meditating regularly; 💞 I’ve been keeping up my Egoscue exercises, self-myofascial release, and weekly massages, so my shoulder is definitely on the mend; 💞 I spontaneously started back to doing some important daily practices that fell by the wayside some time ago; AND 💞 I walked twice around the Rajarsi Park circle today!
Don’t tell, okay? And cross your fingers that I can keep it up! 😄
One can rejoice without gloating. And one can grieve without despairing. Don’t gloat and don’t despair; those behaviors will simply impede the healing this country so desperately needs.
It’s time for extra doses of kindness, empathy, compassion. And, of course, LOVE.
The big one for me right now…oh, who do I think I’m kidding? The big one for me right now and always is: “SLEEP like you love yourself.”
Which translates as: consistently going to bed early enough to get enough sleep that my body can heal and I can wake up nice and early without a lot of stress or strain.
Sounds like a fairy tale. I’m really starting to wonder If I’ll ever be able to make it happen.
So the first and foremost exercise for healing my shoulder is…resting. On my back. For as long as I can, as many times a day as I can. It’s an Egoscue exercise called Static Back and I’m beginning to see it as a metaphor for my life.
How often I’ve thought nothing would improve or heal unless I was doing something! And, hopefully,a lot of something! I’ve been thoroughly conditioned to that way of thinking and it’s driven me to accomplish a lot of things in my life, for sure.
But what about the flip side? I haven’t been very good at the “resting” part of the equation. And as I lay in static back, I have lots of time to reflect that pushing, pushing, and then pushing some more eventually results in imbalance, pain, injury, and dysfunction.
Sigh.
I’m finally ready to stop. To listen. To rest and release.
There are some good reasons why “race” and “racism” didn’t seem like a major factor in my life…
Though born in San Francisco, I grew up in the Sunnyhills neighborhood of Milpitas, which I only recently learned was the first successful integrated housing development in California.
Both my parents were college-educated and well-spoken.
My father was president of the school board throughout most of my school years; my mother was active in community leadership as well.
In 1966 Milpitas had California’s first black mayor.
I had friends of all races; loved school; and got good grades.
By high school, my aptitude for music led to opportunities to travel to the East Coast, Canada, and Europe.
My boyfriends and both husbands have been white.
Soooo….I was a good kid, living a good and happy life, secure in a community that knew and respected my parents and my entire family.
Except…there were subtle things that I avoided looking at closely…
I never completely fit in — I wasn’t “cool” and I didn’t sound “black”; I was a bookworm and a music nerd — so I didn’t fit in with with the black kids; all my best friends, who I had everything in common with, were white — so I stuck out there because I looked different.
When I started dating my first white boyfriend, some of the black guys took issue with him dating a black girl and beat him up.
When the jazz band I was in traveled to Washington D.C., there was a side trip to Virginia where the Filipino keyboard player and I sat on the bus while the rest of the group toured some historic monument in Virginia, where we weren’t welcome.
Then there was the concert we did at a school for developmentally disabled children in Germany, where one of the children became visibly agitated when she saw me. Between her disability and the language difference I had no way of understanding what she saying, but by the way she kept reaching out to touch my skin I could tell she had never seen a person of color before, which was a very strange feeling.
My father worked for Lockheed as a systems analyst and was offered a job at NASA, but due to some (racially-motivated) unpleasantness when they visited Houston they decided to stay put in California.
As a classical flutist, I freelanced with a number of orchestras throughout the greater SF Bay Area. I was somewhat bemused by how often, despite not being a contracted member, I just “happened” to be performing on the concert when they would take their promotional photos, so they had one person of color in the orchestra (the “token”).
Then there was the time I did a gig at a gated community in Danville with guitarist Eugene Rodriquez. It was a fundraiser for a private girls school, with students from the school doing the serving. At one point, Eugene and I were taking a break at the refreshment table — dressed in formal black and white because that’s what classical musicians wear to gigs(!) — and a woman tried to hand me her used plate! Now remember: the middle school girls are serving at this event. There are no waiters or waitresses in attendance. But this woman’s unconscious logic was obviously that, if a black woman/Latino man were in a mansion in Danville dressed in black and white clothing, they must be there to wait on her! That one rankles to this day…
Of course, I read this over and I think, “Oh come on! This stuff is hardly worth calling racism; I mean, what are you even complaining about?!?”
But that, I think, is what has kept me from allowing myself to acknowledge that I am affected by racism. And as I’ve been writing, more and more of these little memories resurface; none of them major or worth making a big fuss about, but when you add them all together…it makes for a pretty heavy weight.
I received a couple of emails today that triggered quite a deep inner process around questions of race and racism. The emails themselves were very positive and geared towards healing, but stuff definitely got stirred up inside me. I wanted to write about it, but I’ve been feeling like the above photo… turbulent, roiled up, agitated…
So I’m writing instead about the process. About choosing to wait, so the troubled waters can settle down. Hopefully I’ll feel much calmer about it all tomorrow, which will allow me to write from a place of clarity. The photo below helps me remember the goal of getting back to the stillness at the center of my being. Deep breath…aaahhhh!