Music and Story

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ﾠ"I'm curious.

Do you believe that storytelling (more specifically, writing short stories and novels) can serve the same purpose as music? Or does it have a different purpose and, if so, what is that purpose?"

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Yes and no. All art flows from the same place within us, and serves similar purposes in our culture. But each specific art form has its own character. Art is communication of the deep Self, and helps to knit us together as a species. I wouldn't say it is exclusive to humanity, because we'd have to have conversations with animals, asking them which of their actions and songs and structures stem from survival needs, and which ones express their essence for the sake of expression alone. I suspect that some animals do indeed simply express themselves for the sheer joy of it.

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Self expression can take infinite forms: every breath can be a work of art, shared with the divine and a testament to the unity of mind, body, and universe. Every step. Every changing of a diaper, or throwing of a punch. The dissolution of the "I-Thou" relationship (a doorway to flow) is essential to the state of artistic or scientific creation.

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The question with art is: what is being expressed? If Jason scrawls crayon on the walls, is it art? I would suspect so, remembering my own early attempts to share my joy with the world. The CRAFT that one acquires along the way is a separate issue. Craft reminds me of language: that unless you can speak someone's language, they may not be able to hear what you are saying, even if it makes sense in your language. Craft enables you, through repetition and/or modification of accepted forms, to communicate with others who have studied the same forms.

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Storytelling. In my mind, there are only two things to write about:

1) What are human beings?

2) What is the world that they inhabit?

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Question #1 gives you all characterization, as well as stories that turn on romance, anger, psychological pathology, politics, family dynamics...whatever. Question #2 gives you much of science fiction, historical fiction, adventure stories (man versus the elements) and so forth.

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And at the core of the questions about human existence, or the existence of the world around them, is the question: What is true? Who am I?

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Music addresses this without words, through a pure sense of aesthetic connection between one note or series of notes and another, one voice and another, one instrument and another, one art form and another (ballet, opera). Music sans cultural context would be a fascinating thing indeed, and there must be schools of musical psychology that ask how the raw notes affect raw consciousness, without reference to the history of an individual's exposure to previous forms. What fun! Acres of academic speculation.

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The truth is that stories use patterns relating to human psychology and growth (characterization and epistomology) and the external world (plot and cosmology) to reveal truths about the way the writer sees existence. Does the world reward effort? Is love just another word for sex? Etc. etc.

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And at the core of it, the quest to understand the world, and the human beings that inhabit it. Leading to understanding ourselves, leading to dissolution of "self," leading to moments in which we forget ourselves and immerse fully in the experience.

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If we find the right things to connect to, they will guide us through the maze of life, through the physiologically and culturally programmed drives and needs, and to the core of existence. To me, all art aims at this, even if the artist is just trying to earn money, get laid, or share a "Hey Daddy! Look at what I can do!" moment.

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In fact, that last might be the purest artistic expression of all.

Music and the Invisible World

I am so blessed in the arena of friends. The following note came from an old college friend, R., an accomplished musician and once upon a time my boss at the audio visual department of Pepperdine University. This was an important job, because R., gave me plenty of free time between delivering projectors and such, and I used that time to write my first novel, DREAM PARK. Man oh man, was THAT a long time ago! Anyway, I got this note yesterday from R.:

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To My Friends and Family,

I suspect that it will come as no great surprise to you who have known me,
that there are times (during the past 8 years especially) that what I call
the "black dog" descends upon me. I goes by other names such as, the blues,
melancholia and more recently, clinical depression. During these times, what
with my various health struggles and such, the fear comes upon me that mine
has been a wasted life. You see, rather than choose to become a doctor, a
lawyer or an economist, etc., endeavors that seem to me to be of more
practical use to the world in these dark times, I chose to pursue as my
life's work MY passion: Music. Something that makes ME feel good to do, and
something I NEED to do, but really, I think, does it really help anyone?
Really? Maybe I've been selfish, I think. And, God knows, I certainly
haven't had anywhere near the career I envisioned in my youth. Not even
close ; )

Today I came across this on the net. It's an address to parents of students
entering the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. It's nothing new,
really. It's what I have always believed and thought and preached, but
sometimes, when the "black dog" is about, it's good to be reminded. It was a
great gift to me. I share it here with you.

Hope this finds all of you well.

Warmest Regards, R.

Welcome Address, by Karl Paulnack

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'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 cannot 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.

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Sex on a Stick

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I'm back home, and trying to get into my groove. Tons of work to do, and want to do it as efficiently as possible.

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I'm glad for the comments surrounding the "calories in, calories out" post. The trick is that of the three major areas: a good relationship, a good career path, and a healthy body, body is the easiest. I mean that in the sense that the other arenas require cooperation from other people: at least one other person for a relationship, and probably at least ten for the average career. Maybe more. If the simple physics of weight loss confuse people, no wonder trying to have a successful and rewarding career, or even having a deep and satisfying emotional/sexual relationship can seem like flying with concrete wings.

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As someone pointed out, we all have emotional damage. That is my precise point. I'm just saying that if you have issues in one of these three areas that cause you pain, and you aren't taking effective action to resolve it, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG. That you can use pain in one of these three areas to point out where the "knots" in your internal wiring are. By un-knotting them, you free up huge reserves of energy that can then be used to move you forward. How do you know if there is pain in one of the three?

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Well, I've known fat people who I believed to be totally happy. People who use or have no money who were astonishingly evolved. And folks who were celibate or single and deliriously happy. The trick is that YOU know if you are happy or not. If you are, you don't complain about the "negatives" associated with one of these three areas. If you don't, that's great, and I'd even love to hear from you. But I've known too many people who lied about it, and then years later confessed they were lying. As a result, I take an automatic position that, until proven otherwise, everyone wants all three. Then, if I get to know the person better, I modify the original opinion. I'll tell you one thing, though...if my statements about this stuff cause you to feel uncomfortable, I'm betting that there IS some unprocessed material. If there wasn't, you'd be more like Suzanne, and just chuckle at me.

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I was happy to find Dr. Demento's web site, where I can buy old shows of his. I really do miss him. My first wife and I used to cuddle up in the dorm room at Pepperdine on Sundays and listen every week. Intermittently. Ahem.

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I recently met a woman who gave me a giggle. She was complaining that men treated her like "sex on a stick", complaining that men were only reacting to her as a sexual being. Later in the conversation, I mentioned that as an adolescent, I was a "four-eyed, pot-bellied nerd." I had my elbows on the table as I said it. She was sitting next to me, and reached over under the table to feel my stomach, supposedly to check if the pot-belly was still there. And giggled that indeed, it was not. Wow. I wonder why guys react to her that way..?

In New York

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Been in New York, in fact am writing this from JFK airport, while Jason tumbles around the big bean-bag chair in the airport lounge. Tananarive is headed to Florida for a week with her parents. After she gets back, I take off for Norwescon (next week) and two weeks after that, I head to Atlanta and Grand Rapids, Michigan for various business and personal functions. In Atlanta I'll be training with my first karate instructor, Steve Mohammad. Seventy years old now, and still punchin'. Love him to death, and probably the last chance I'll have to really train with him. want to mak the most of it, so I'll be working out a little harder over the next few weeks.

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We were in New York for two things: a celebration of Octavia Butler's work at Medgar Evers college, and a celebration of somebody named Tananarive Due, held at a nice little theater in Harlem, organized by our "Tennyson" editor, Malaika Adero. Room was packed. Sold a lot of books, met some nice people, and heard from several of them how much they loved "Lion's Blood." I'm working on the proposal for the third book in that series, THE BRONZE NILE. For some reason, I want to deal a bit more with contact with India, even though the book deals with the Civil War. I have some loose ends to wrap up: the end of slavery, for instance, and Kai's relationships to Aidan, Babatunde, Lamiya and Nandi. I think I'm going to create a novella that details Kai and Aidan's journey down the Mississippi ("The Bronze Nile") and then weave it into the novel. For some odd reason, I want to re-read "Huckleberry Finn." Wonder why?