The Economics of Musical Healing

 

In my Perfect Concert post, I described a profound hour of intimate music-making with the residents of the Jewish Home for the Aged. How much did I charge for it? Nothing.

 

In these next two weeks, I will sub at my old school and bring great music and happiness to children from 3 years old through 8^th grade. In the same room where I taught my first class 50 years ago! I believe my classes were joyful from the very beginning, but the 50 years of teaching far surpasses the 10,000 hours of practice that mastery requires. The substitute rate of $29 per hour times the 60 hours I will devote to the venture will earn me a paycheck of $1,740. Two weeks work, 60 hours of dedicated teaching. 

 

In his particular field of classical cello music, the great artist YoY o Ma has also more than paid his dues in practice, commitment, dedication and humanistic understanding of music’s power. He is performing in San Francisco soon and it would be lovely to go hear him. But here is what it would cost. 

 

In short, my 60 hours of similar work would equal more or less the cost of one “cheap” ticket in a far-away seat for a two-hour concert. If I want to sit close up, I would have to work 167 hours in some six weeks of teaching—before taxes. 

 

If I want to hear Jacob Collier at the Castro Theater this October, that will be between $300 and $500 per ticket. Wynton Marsalis at SF Jazz—between $200 and $290 per ticket. What’s going on?

 

Out of all the cliché’s my parents taught me, this one rings true:

 

“Life isn’t fair.”

 

Truth be told, I don’t need all that money—though it would be nice to buy a house for my daughter! But I’m thinking of all the people who will never hear Yo Yo, Wynton or Jacob live because they can’t afford it. At a time when we need musical healing and community gathering more than ever, only the privileged get to attend. And why exactly is that?

Reviving a Lost Art

According to statistics, there’s been a sharp decline in people reading books. But tell that to the 500 people on the library waiting list wanting to read Virginia Evans’ novel The Correspondent! My wife had the good fortune to score a copy and I am happily immersed in this unusual book whose story is told wholly through letters written and received by Sybil, the main character. It takes a while to figure out who’s who in her world, but if you’re patient, the larger picture slowly reveals itself like a jigsaw puzzle, one piece at a time. 

 

Being a library book, I can’t write in the margins, but there are many noteworthy passages that merit highlighting. One is an ode of sorts to the very notion of still writing handwritten letters, which none of us needs statistics to tell us, has just about wholly disappeared from our culture. Be honest. When was the last time you wrote one? When was the last time you received one?

And if we were equally honest, wouldn’t we all testify to the pleasure of writing by hand, perhaps seated at a table in low light with our drink of choice close at hand. Or under a tree listening to bird song and gazing out at Spring blossoms? Wouldn’t we admit that we equally treasured receiving such a letter, feeling the distant person’s presence both in the distinctive handwriting and their reflection so much deeper than an e-mail and certainly light years more profound than a text? 

 

Here's how Sybil describes it in a letter written to one Mick Watts, a man she met briefly who wonders why she writes so many letters:

 

“Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished! And one day, Mr. Watts, you yourself will be gone. Perhaps if you have children, they will remember you’ if you have grandchildren, they, God allowing, may also retain a few fragments of memory including you, but their grandchildren will not. …what will be left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake, a name plucked from the family tree that has come back in vogue after seventy-odd years as fashionable things tend to do and slapped on a newborn baby who will nothing of YOU. 

 

And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something even if it a very small thing, to someone?” (pp 45-46)

 

There’s some tasty food for thought. Don’t we all wish to make some kind of “Kilroy was here!” mark to tell the world, “We were here. We mattered. We meant something to somebody and we contributed in whatever small or big ways we could manage.” I’m sure this Blog is my love-letter to the world and I don’t really imagine anyone discovering it is going to read all 4, 875 posts (to date), but they’re there floating in cyberspace should anyone wish to see what I was up to just about any day in the past sixteen years. Then there are my handwritten journals, mostly a letter to my future selves and it is always interesting when I dip back in to visit one of my past selves captured on those pages. In my basement lies a trunk full of letters received and some I’ve written that people going through their basement have sent on to me. 

 

But it has been a long time since I’ve written a letter by hand or even a postcard. And I believe I’ve received one such letter in the past ten years or so. 

So in the midst of all my other writing—still the journals, this blog, articles, books—I’m determined to begin a ritual practice of writing letters to my daughters and grandchildren while my mind is still in one piece and my handwriting somewhat legible. Pick a day of the week for the grandchildren and another for my daughters and simply write to them. Of course, I would be delighted if any of them wrote back. Dialogues are always preferred to monologues, but I’m aware that it’s unlikely. We’ll see. 

 

And you? Can you imagine reviving the lost art of letter-writing? If so, write me a letter and tell me about it. 

  

The Post-Fascist Dictionary

There is so much work ahead to repair the damage when the tsunami of fascism’s threat finally passes. And it will! But alongside the big jobs, it will be time to reclaim things the ruling despots and their enablers, excusers, allies, made ugly, to restore words to their original and truer meaning. In that spirit, here is my post-fascist dictionary:

 

• The United States—each state endowed with natural beauty, inspired historical figures and contemporary citizens contributing to the common good, united in their commitment to “liberty and justice for all.”

• Patriotism— a loyalty to the founding vision of one’s country, as in Thomas Jefferson’s words: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

• Trump —a term used in the card game Bridge.

• Ice —a refreshing way to cool a drink. 

• Red — a color linked to values that include luck, prosperity, vitality, romantic love, safety (danger signals), happiness and roses. 

• Fox —an animal. 

• Drone —a musical term describing the 1^st and 5^th notes sounded to create a foundation for the melody above. Used extensively in Orff music classes, bagpipe and dulcimer music.

• Glock —short for the sweet dulcet-toned instrument, the “glockenspiel.”

• AI— a tasty steak sauce with a Roman numeral.

• WayMo—the quantity of love and truth-telling we currently need.

•  Empathy—a positive attribute. (Formerly thought a weakness).

• Truth —something we tell to the children, not hide it from them. And to each other. We return to expecting news media, elected officials, corporations and well—everybody— to do the same. If not, there are consequences.

• Socialism— what you should thank if you ever use public beaches, parks, libraries, schools, roads, Medicare or Medicaid, food programs, Social Security checks and 911. 

• Party— a group of people gathered together to have a good time while celebrating some worthy news. 

• Republican— a system of government by the people with no monarch (ie. No King!), focused on public interest and the commonwealth— a word which in turn means common well-being and shared prosperity for the benefit of all citizens. (Look it up! This is the truth!)

 

_______________  Add your own. 

 

Apologies to William Carlos Williams

Dear Janet, 

 

This is just to say,

your 1099 came through my mail slot today because

 it was sent to your old address and 

       your forwarding time to your new address

expired. 

 

Please forgive me, but I opened the envelope and took a photo

             of the form in case you needed this information soon.

After all, April 15th is right around the corner and as we know,

         so much depends upon the right numbers sent at the right time,

                        even more so than           

                                    the red wheelbarrow and the white chickens. 

 

Do inform me as to whether the attached is sufficient or

       you would like me to forward the paper copy. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter. 

 

           Now please return my plums.  

The Perfect Concert

I usually amend “practice makes perfect” to “practice makes better,” but today’s musical gathering at the Jewish Home for the Aged was as close to perfect as it gets. This week, I played at three different Senior Living places—the Sequoias in Portola Valley, the Redwoods in Mill Valley and my home base, the Jewish Home for the Aged in San Francisco, so I was somewhat “in the zone.” Each gathering was unique and memorable. 

 

But today, at the Jewish Home, it was a particularly rich mixture. Some of it was a once-in-a-blue-moon (and yes, we sang Blue Moon) experience, but some of it a prototype that anyone doing similar work might attend to. And the two were joined by a simple principle— tailor the event, as possible, to the particular group of people gathered in a particular place at a particular time. That requires knowing the people, paying attention to what lights them up, and folding it into the organic program that emerges amidst some planned songs, in the way that a jazz musician solos on the chord structure of a song. 

 

Today’s event promised to be special because my friend, Orff student and partner-in-crime performer Laura Ruppert was in town from Seattle for a weekend bar-mitzvah. When Laura lived in San Francisco, just pre-pandemic, she joined me every Friday at the Jewish Home for some two years straight. Trained in opera, interested in jazz ballads and able to sing just about anything, we romped our way through various styles, much to the delight of the listening residents. I missed her sorely when she moved to Seattle some four years ago and I believe she only visited one time to sing at the JH during all this time.

 

But here she was again! My wife Karen decided to join us, as she had just gone to Thursday’s sing at the Redwoods and enjoyed it, so why not? Especially since Laura said she’d sing the duet Wild Mountain Thyme with her, a song Karen has been doing in her weekly choir. 

 

We walked in and a young man came up to say hi. It was Max, a San Francisco School alum now a senior in high school doing some community service at the Home! He was in 6^th grade the year I retired so I didn’t get to be with him all the way through 8^th, but had been his music teacher since he was 3. 

 

So Laura, Karen and I sat down and began with me on guitar and the song Hey, Good Looking. Why that one? Because Helen, one of the residents, asked if I knew it last month. I didn’t exactly but learned it that week and sang it with her—she knew all the words. And so did Laura, so it was fun to sing her special song again with her. Then Karen and Laura did their folk song duet and that was well-received. I reviewed the quodlibet (partner) songs we had sung last week—I Love the Flowers, Blue Moon, Heart and Soul and with Karen, Laura and I leading, actually got the group to try them all at the same time. 

 

After taking care of something, Max came back and in his honor, we all sang the favorite SF School song, Side By Side. Then remembering that he had studied piano, I invited him to play and he sat down and played an impressive Liszt Etude— all by memory. Delicious!

 

Knowing my audience, I left out the song Easter Parade and went for Dayenu, a popular Passover song. From there, a short step to Hava Nagila. Then time for Spring songs ,so we all sang April Showers and then featured Laura on the lovely jazz ballad, Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most. From there, on to Moon River, a song meaningful both to my wife Karen and the resident Rosie. Laura then sang Alfie, the favorite song of a resident named Steve who already was in the Home back in 2008 when my Mom first came, a regular during the two years when Laura and I came together, and lasted (miraculously!) all the way until last year! So we performed Alfie to honor his memory.

 

Are you feeling the personal nature of this kind of programming? Inviting Laura, Max and Karen to share the music they knew and loved, choosing the music that Helen, Rosie and Steve liked? Not only does it give pleasure to the people who recognize their favorite songs but it tells them that I’m paying attention to them and honoring a bit of who they are. 

 

Now it was time to feature Laura’s considerable Opera skills and we did with an exquisite medley that included Bach-Gounod’s Ave Maria, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Offenbach’s Barcarolle, O Sole Mio and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sun’s Whose Rays. The power of her voice filled the atrium-space like a cathedral and enveloped everyone in its embrace. 

 

And then I pointed to the resident Jesse and invited her to sing Amazing Grace. Her voice couldn’t approach the volume of Laura’s, but there was so much Soul in each of the quiet notes perfectly sung that the room was hushed in that same kind of stopped-time way. At the end, I invited all to sing with her, then segued into America the Beautiful (a needed reminder amidst the current ugliness) and that was that. 

 

I’ve been coming regularly to this place for 18 years now and alongside the times I’ve brought my summer jazz class here and sometimes kids from school, today was one of the most memorable gatherings. Again, not to be packaged and sold and duplicated but certainly to be appreciated and praised and put out as a model of what can be when you pay attention to the right things.  

 

Blessings to all the performers, participants and listening residents. May the magic echo on.

  

The Hot Iron Ball

It has taken me a lifetime to understand this, but better late than never. I’m talking about the incontrovertible truth that there is not a single two-legged being on the planet who is not suffering in one form or another. If one is so fortunate as to avoid the big catastrophes— war, family abuse, political oppression, natural disasters, trauma, depression, addiction, etc. etc.— we are all without exception awash in loss. Friends, parents, loved ones, colleagues no longer available to talk to directly or touch or hold. Likewise, the loss of the selves we and our loved ones used to be— perfect children grown to sullen teenagers, our adult youthful energy fading, alongside muscle tone, hearing, sight, libido and such. We all of us have known disappointment, sometimes magnified to betrayal. You get the idea. And so did Buddha, whose First Noble Truth is “Life is suffering.”

 

As a young practicing Buddhist, I didn’t love that notion. “Come on, Buddha! Life is fun and laughter and beauty and Pepsi moments under the sun with perfect teeth when we smile. Don’t be such a downer!” It took me a long time to understand what Buddha meant and discover he knew what he was talking about. But the missing part that has finally become clear is that the road to the fun and laughter and beauty (forget the Pepsi moments) is through that dark forest path of personal loss and disappointment and betrayal , through our current collective cultural unravelling and treachery and confusion. 

 

As Michael Meade, that eloquent spokesperson for the Soul, reminds us: we all have a unique inner story struggling to blossom within each and every one of us. That “deep Self” is where the gold lies, but it demands a high price of the controlling ego before it reveals itself. It requires courageous vulnerability, willingness to look at difficulty straight on and put it all in a different context. It often requires, as Meade notes, “some kind of dramatic event, a loss, an accident, something that stops us in our tracks, before we are willing to look in exactly that place that we need to look, that otherwise we avoid. According to the old stories, it's necessary to go through some layers of confusion, trauma and pain.” (Robert Frost confirmed this in his line “the only way out is through.”)

 

In an essay titled “To Not Abandon Oneself: Living Myth Podcast, Episode 482,”  Meade says: “Whether through avoidance or over compliance or stubborn defiance, we repeatedly sabotage the true project of our deeper self and soul.” The idea that in times of crisis, we either grow larger souls or retreat to smaller selves, is everywhere around us in the news. We are witnessing literally millions of people awakening to the unacceptable political realities that also call in question the deep issues of character, kindness, caring, justice that have helped people awaken to what matters in ways that might not have happened in calmer times. Equally, we can see others doubling down and going deeper into their habits of heads-in-the-sand or hatred on full display. The real characters in this drama are not Democrats and Republicans, but larger selves and smaller selves. 

 

Avoidance, over-compliance and stubborn defiance are the forces at play when people refuse their soul’s invitation. Avoidance includes binge entertainment/ drink/ drugs, the futile effort to escape by rampant distraction, sensation, mindless trivia. Over-compliance means avoiding the hard work of consciously shaping one’s character and owning one’s own genius, giving your power over to those who do not wish you well in some fantasy of “Daddy knows best,” be it a priest, politician, or Fox News pundit. Stubborn defiance means outwardly projecting your own refusal to do the work of claiming your inner beauty and storming the Capitol or typecasting whole groups of fellow human beings as “other.”

 

But how does one grow a larger soul? Simply speaking—and it is never simple— we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we react to it, how we frame it, how we understand its purpose. As poet David Whyte notes in an essay on “disappointment:”

 

“The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of the world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further participation.”

 

So the question for all of life’s challenges is: Do we run toward it or away from it? Do we sit patiently with it and see what it has to say or bury it in distraction? Do we actively express the full dimension of the feelings in art or writing or talking to trees? It serves us to recognize that we’re all the walking wounded, but we all don’t walk those wounds the same way. How we respond, how we accept, how we express, how we enlarge the context, is the real question at hand.

 

My own personal story. When I experienced a grand disappointment that grew to the magnitude of betrayal in my beloved school where I taught for 45 years, I remember a moment when I felt wholly trapped and at a loss as to why this would happen and how I should react to it. Including in a lifetime of never once having suicidal thoughts, actually thinking about the Golden Gate Bridge. It felt like the Zen koan—“You have a hot iron ball lodged in your throat that you can neither swallow nor spit out. What do you do?”

 

Damned if I knew! I certainly could not swallow it and pretend it didn’t matter or I didn’t care. I chose not to spit it out and leave the school in a huff. I simply had to sit with it and see what it was trying to tell me. And the answer that finally came was far greater than the words that describe it. In short, my life’s work grew inside that mostly marvelous school, but the work itself was not dependent on the school. It was much larger and wholly independent of this place or that. As all my subsequent work in an extraordinary variety of settings with a grand variety of people in a remarkable variety of places has testified as truth. The story trying to speak through me was not to be pushed away by a few small-minded administrators and a mostly silently compliant community not wholly willing to step up on my behalf. The way to endure that hot iron ball of betrayal was to become so large that that it felt  like just a little tickle in the throat.

 

It took a poet (again, David Whyte) to speak the words that confirmed my insight in his poem Santiago:

 

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside

hiding, then revealing the way you should take,

the road dropping away from you as if leaving you

to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up, 

when you thought you would fall. 

 

Such an eloquent description of my experience! Class after class, the beckoning road suggesting the right path to take, then disappearing again, then holding me up. Until those moments of betrayal (never from kids, only adults) when I felt the road had wholly dropped away. But then:

 

The way forward always in the end

the way that you followed, the way that carried you

into your future, that brought you to this place,

 

By refusing to leave the path, it proved a true one that indeed carried me to exactly where I needed to be— and continues to do so. But it’s important to acknowledge the heartbreak as the dues paid to making a serious commitment to the Soul’s demands. 

 

No matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,

No matter that it had to break your heart along the way;

The sense of having walked from far inside yourself

out into the revelation, to have risked yourself

for something that seemed to stand both inside you

and far beyond you, that called you back

to the only road in the end you could follow, walking

as you did, in your rags of love…

 

The poem goes on with yet more deep insights, but for now, it is enough to describe the process of following your Soul’s calling, with the risk and vulnerability and heartbreak and feeling lost (and then found—and then lost again) that it requires. None of it is easy and of course, that’s why so few seem to undertake it. And yet it is what is wholly necessary to arrive at our own promise and to help heal our collective suffering. 

 

I’ve long ago forgiven (but never forgotten) those who betrayed me, but ultimately strangely thanked them for re-doubling my commitment to walking the path that fits my feet perfectly. And on I walk…

 

  

Resist!

Resistance is much on my mind these days. No mystery why! Since it is defining so much of our contemporary life, a major player come center stage, it’s worthwhile to examine that word in all its multiple meanings. A trip to the dictionary reveals at least five distinct definitions, all relevant:

 

1)   Withstand the action or effect of, like antibodies resisting infection. 

The air we breathe every time we tune into the news is indeed toxic and doing its darndest to lay us low, to make it hard for us to breathe, to make our head dizzy so we can’t think clearly, to jack up our stress and anxiety and blood pressure. Our antibodies are on overtime trying to fight it all off, often below the surface so we’re not consciously aware of how much of our physical, emotional and psychic energy is in defense mode trying to fight it all off. 

 

2)   Refrain from doing something terribly unwise, as in “I couldn’t resist buying a new i-Phone.”

Our devices and the media-blitz are shouting at us to turn them on and when we go down those rabbit holes, the darkness increases. So it takes great strength and courage to resist those purposefully-designed addictions and choose to stay informed with the micro-doses are system can handle. A radical self-care while still staying aware.

 

3)   To strive against, defy or oppose, as in a political resistance movement. 

 When we move our struggle from the unconscious survival mode of the antibodies to conscious resistance, we take control in ways that feel more productive. When we take to the streets with 8 million others committed to defying and opposing the fascist takeover, we feel more empowered yet. 

 

4)   Resistance: a measure of the opposition to the current in an electrical circuit. 

Different materials have different capacities for electric flow—high-resistance in material like rubber limits the flow while low resistance, like copper, allows it. With the barrage of atrocities passing through us like an overlit Las Vegas, we need to turn the lights down and sit a bit with the darkness, both to avoid the blinding amped-up overwhelm-ment and feel the grief of what lies at the bottom of it all. 

 

5)   A process for making designs on fabric, most notably used in batik.  It uses wax to prevent dye from penetrating the cloth, leaving "blank" areas in the dyed fabric. The process, wax resist, then dye, is repeated over and over to create complex multicolored designs. 

     The most intriguing of all the definitions! Making an artistic decision as to where to coat our daily lives with wax and where to colorfully dye them, and then repeat the process with wax in other places, finally creating a multi-colored exquisitely designed thing of beauty. And then wear it or hang it or spread it out as a tablecloth. Art as literally a form of resistance.

 

And so. Choose one or all of the above, but whatever you do, “Resist!!”