Music

(Left Picture: an attempt to draw treble clef)

I am one of those soldier that fought for Music to be part of my living in life.

A survivor, that struggle through the years.

My parents did not allow me to study music in my tertiary education. I was 18 years old then. After Form 6, I have never been more sure of what I wanted in life. My face beams when I browse through music schools brochures and the thought of me being a music major student. All this was crushed, I took on Communications as my second choice. One course that I did not regret taking after 3 years even though that was not what I wanted. 3 years was a torture at point where my soul starts battling on why am I studying something which I won't be venturing in my future career, I could be honing my skills in that 3 years.

8 years has passed, I still feel it sometimes. I still envy those that went for music and some have the nerve to still complain.

Well, the usual perspective, parents or in fact society do not understand how far and rewarding music could bring you forward. Not only music, in fact... Art on its own. Art is not a life of luxury, not many great artist makes it..but I believe..they were happy in their own hard way.

Here's an article about it. Take some time to read, it's quite long.
What I love most on this article is:

"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"

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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 heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio
for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the
background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about
the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the
ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you
didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s
really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music.
There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad
music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens
at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s
some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or
plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t
good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding
cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to
move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so
that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine
watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music?
What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the
softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if
you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way.
The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible
internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I
must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I
have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I
enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St.
Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of
major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire
life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we
often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and
dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during
the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play
rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we
began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the
program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of
the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—
even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general
demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little
bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that
particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we
went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about
both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the
Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the
front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I
honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage
afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial
combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail
out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us
returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the
parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean,
realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during
that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it
was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why
now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to
commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the
music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal
objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For
me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland,
and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and
mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I
welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and
daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing
appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine
that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and
you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is
going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart
that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will
depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The
truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a
product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a
paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist
for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone
who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come
into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to
save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of
peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t
expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer
even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have
brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for
humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things
should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.
As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who
might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”