We just finished a lovely Next Wave satsang with Jyotish and Devi.
The main topic of discussion was sharing how we’ve all weathered the challenges of these past two difficult years. The stories and insights were all very inspiring.
At some point Devi brought up the time a team of us spent in LA with Swamiji, and how he gave so much energy to the music there.
It reminded me of what a special time that was, despite a myriad of challenges and difficulties. And doesn’t that pretty much describe life itself?!?
Anyways, thinking about LA days made me want to share this photo. I have no idea what Ramesha was whispering in my ear, but I’m thankful somebody snapped the photo with Swamiji’s blessings in the background!
Another deeply moving essay by Karl Paulnack; I’m inspired to add my thanks to his…
Thank you, Mr. Fry, Miss Hall, and Mr. Lynch. Thank you, John Bringetto, Doc Patnoe, and Rich Bice. Thank you, Marsha Goodman, Paul Renzi, Lloyd Gowen, and Robin McKee. Thank you all for carrying your music practice and preparing me for a lifetime of carrying mine.
Karl Paulnack
January 27, 2019
I am writing a speech that I have to deliver later this week. I wanted to discuss how third-grade music teachers prepare their students for the rest of their lives, even though they have no idea how they are preparing them, do not know what those lives will look like, can’t imagine their future, and in some cases, wouldn’t want to.
On the night of September 11, 2001, one of the things happening on the west side of Manhattan where I lived was that people were gathering around firehouses, holding candles, bringing flowers, and singing songs of inspiration and support. I remember many people who looked like they might be finance or business people, mostly men, people in suits which were rumpled from an entire day of frantically trying to get home but who were now stuck on the island, guys with briefcases who were used to being in control and calling the shots who looked as though they had been struck by lightening. Some of these men were awkwardly holding hands with the rest of the crowd and we were singing “My Country Tis of thee, sweet land of liberty…..”
I knew the words and music to that song because it was taught to me by my third-grade teacher whose name was Betty Jean Kilgore in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And I remember her teaching us that song because she was standing at an upright piano wearing these high heels that seemed to me as a boy RIDICULOUSLY too high, and managing to stand and operate the damper pedal in this heel, which looked incredibly difficult to me, and I remember thinking in my third grade voice inside my head, “wow, that looks painful! That’s a dedicated woman.” She diligently taught us that song.
Mrs. Kilgore had no idea she was preparing me for 9/11. She had no possible way of even imagining what that would be. The world trade center wasn’t built yet when I was in third grade. She was being faithful to her practice as a musician. There were probably some people in that room who were thinking “why are we learning this dumb song”…. And 30 years later there I was, singing in the wreckage.
And you know when we were holding hands singing around the fire station I didn’t know who the music majors were and who they weren’t; it didn’t matter. I was not musically prepared for 9/11 by Eastman or USC or any of my college teachers and it wasn’t my advanced degrees in music and it didn’t involve Brahms. It was Betty Jean Kilgore on a badly tuned upright piano in dangerous shoes, and it was everyone else’s “Betty Jean Kilgore”, the music teachers of all the others who taught them that song, that allowed us to be together, in a very meaningful and powerful way, when we were speechless.
It wasn’t fancy and it didn’t need a budget and there was no conductor and FEMA didn’t support it. We were able to do it because enough of us had third grade teachers who taught us a song.
You will not be able to prepare your students for the future, because you can’t possibly imagine their future. It could be more beautiful or more wretched than we can fathom. If you carry your musical practice you will prepare your students for their lives. Period. If you carry your practice faithfully, they will have everything they need musically.
I happened to be curious about where Mrs. Kilgore is now, and I googled her. I found an obituary. She passed away 20 days ago. Perhaps the timing isn’t coincidental—fifty years ago she taught me that song, and now she’s helping me prepare for a talk. I guess she’s “teaching remotely” these days.
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.
During my walk today, I found myself remembering a few of the extremely varied places I’ve worked in my time. And as I thought about it more, I decided it would be fun to try and list all the jobs I held over the years.
Considering that the very first job I ever did for pay (besides babysitting) was when I was 15, this list covers fifty years of working. Yikes! (I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few.)
Orchard (I was 15 when I cut apricots for two or three weeks one summer)
Educational research firm (coding questionnaires)
Fabric store (retail clerk)
Pizza parlor (took orders and made pizzas)
J Paul Leonard Library at SF State University (shelved books)
SFSU campus bookstore (shelved and stocked books)
Dixon Landings; El Torito’s; The Cliff House; Joanne’s; The Courtyard; downtown SF espresso bar; etc. (food/cocktail waitress; bartender; barista)
Development office at SF Conservatory of Music (data entry & administrative)
Coordinator of volunteers (Unity Church)
Manufacturing plant (side door attendant)
Working for temp agencies (administrative assistant)
Music stores, private schools, home studio (flute instructor)
Bookbuyers used bookstore (clerk)
Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto (school secretary; music teacher)
Conversational English lessons (while living in Lugano)
Development office at Ananda Village (clerical)
Human resources at Ananda Village (assistant)
Reiki Blessings Academy (administrative assistant)
Of course, there were years in there that I was doing music, or serving the music of Ananda in various places and ways, for very little or no compensation (otherwise known as “paying your dues”).
But it’s all good, because it all brought me to where I am now, getting paid to do the only thing I really want to do: promoting, championing, strengthening, performing, teaching, organizing, thinking about, directing, and pretty much living and breathing Ananda Music!
Reading this brought to mind the profound experience I had while visiting Wales on spiritual pilgrimage to the British Isles.
I had a deep connection with Ireland already, and with my love of PG Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer, and Jane Austen I fully expected to love England. But Wales was a surprise. I felt a profound draw to the forests, the mountains, and the castles.
And in several places — most notably Tintern Abbey on the River Wye — I quite literally felt an “echo of the lost places of my soul’s past.” It was rather disorienting, as if I was walking both in the present and in the past at the same moment.
I also relate to the “grief” mentioned in the definition above. For many years I would walk for hours along the coast feeling that I didn’t fully belong here but not knowing where I did belong. But it helped to be with the wind, and the rocks, and the waves.
Music awakens a similar spiritual longing in me. Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms, Puccini — all of them have repeatedly brought me to tears of such intense yearning for…. something. Something that’s indefinable and beyond words, yet ineffably beautiful.
My theory is that these great composers were in touch with the divine, and that their music awakened and then fanned the flames of my spiritual longing — my inner yearning to seek, to know, to experience the divine for myself.
I’m convinced this was a big part of what set me on my spiritual path and helped determine my ministry.
We met through our spiritual community, so a love for God was what we shared before we even became acquainted.
We laughed a lot as our friendship grew. In fact, the first gift I ever gave him was a favorite photo of Swami Kriyananda laughing uproariously.
But I’m pretty sure love started to grow the first time we rehearsed together for a concert. It was like recognizing a kindred spirit (and, yes, we recently finished watching Anne of Green Gables!). 😄
The pictures above are from the weekend of our wedding at Ananda Assisi (we had two ceremonies, in order to accommodate family on both continents).
I’m not sure how we missed the fact that this extravaganza was happening the evening of Inauguration Day, but we finally watched it tonight (only two days late🙄), and we’re really glad we did!
It was moving and uplifting and fun. I loved hearing stories and tributes honoring a diversity of “ordinary” Americans. I enjoyed the wide range of musical styles, performed by top notch entertainers of all descriptions, and the way the presentations cut back and forth across the country.
And as a performer and event organizer myself, I marveled at the complexity of the show and how flawlessly they pulled it all off. I can’t begin to imagine the planning that went into an event like this. As for the ending fireworks? Absolutely breathtaking!
