Longing for the academy

Besides working with a variety of interesting and talented students (from whom I have often received as much as I have given) among the things I miss about teaching is the interaction with my colleagues.  It is radically different teaching in a college/university atmosphere than in a public school.  In the latter, informal gatherings with one's colleagues usually take place at lunch time, in a crowded room, with individuals discussing usually the matters of the day, problem students, the latest word about administrators or the teacher's union.  In the former, the topics can range from James Joyce to politics to one's view of his/her discipline relating to the micro and macro worlds.

Karl Paulnack

I long for people like Karl Paulnack, Director of the Music Division of the Boston Conservatory, who, in his welcome address spoke of the ancient Greek's view of music as "[having} 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."  This is obviously a more "big picture" view of our discipline and not one that we encounter in our day-to-day "grind" of teaching, rehearsing, studying, practicing.

Paulnack also spoke of two significant events:  the composition of Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time and his own personal reflection on the events of September 11, 2001.  The Messaien would still be a profound work without its contextual framework, but--knowing that it sprang from the composer's interment in a Nazi concentration camp--makes it even more so.  The composer took the tools that he had, four players: a violin, clarinet, cello and piano and--like many others in the camps--created art.  As Paulnack states, to those prisoners, "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.'"

Paulnack found that he was unable to play the piano on the morning of September 12; he even thought, "in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again."  But somehow, life did return to some sense of normalcy, but not without a public outpouring of grief:  in the form of a presentation of the Brahms Requiem, that was assembled in less than a week's time by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic.  Again to Mr. Paulnack, "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."

Paulnack shares several other tales, which must be read here.  As Charles Munch speaks of the sacred trust of the conductor, Paulnack likens musicians to therapists for the human soul, or a spiritual version of a chiropractor or 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."

As our society--both in the micro of our individual communities and the macro of the larger world around us--continues to debate the very necessity of the arts, it seem vital to remember Mr. Paulnack's admonition to his students.  "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."

These are the kinds of discussions I miss and people like Karl Paulnack are those that I miss discussing them with...