We Are Musicians.

Ever heard the statement "Music will never fail you"? It's true. I've learned that, throughout life, there are two things that have never, ever failed me. God and music. The former is most important in my life. The latter, a few spots down but still extremely important. I also believe in the statement "When words fail, music speaks." It's true. There hasn't been a time in my life where I haven't been able to express myself through music. Bad day? I go home and play my flute. Really bad day? I lay in bed with my iPod. Music makes people happy. Music helps people sort through emotions. Music helps people express feelings that they wouldn't let out otherwise. Music is going to be my career if things go as planned, and music is going to be what I teach throughout my life. 

Through music, there is one thing I admire most. People who use their music to show their love of God. Throwing talent away is a sad thing. I hate to see good singers and talented musicians do things such as drugs. Why throw something so beautiful away? If you have it, use it. Anyway, back to what I was saying. Talent used for God is a beautiful thing. I want to do that. I want him to be proud of me when it's all said and done. I want to use my talent to do something amazing. What if I could lead mentally challenged children to a more normal life through music? What if I could give teenagers with terrible home lives a second chance by giving them passion in their lives? What if I could help someone through whatever they are going through in their life just by teaching them a thing or two about playing an instrument?

I want to help people. I want people to see that music can make you happy. I want people to know that there are always second chances and things/people to help them. I want to be the person that these people look to and say "Hey. That woman made a difference in my life." And most of all, I want to do it for God. I want him to lead me wherever he may and use me however he may. I end this with an amazing song/video of some wonderful people who are using their talent for God. I love you, Tenth Avenue North. Over two million views on Youtube and they deserved every one of them.

-Kayla

Great Great Great Great Wonderful Message

Kayla's last post is just wonderful. I love the fact that no matter what, no matter who, or anything, life does go on. When you finally realize that, you'll be able to live life a lot happier. I love that fact. There's not really much more to say on it. I agree 100% with Kayla. I've tried and tried to make many people understand this. Anyway, it's good. Life is good. You just have to have the right attitude :) Here's some videos to help ya out
-Gotta love some Marley
-Well, I'm out of songs with this message. Kayla's a better blogger. Here's another video though....
-Oh, wait. If it's love that's bothering you, here ya go
-But I don't like that last one, so here's a better one
There we go. I've gone all over. All you need is love and life goes on. Two good messages. Be happy out there. Life's good. Till next time, stay angr.....happy :)
~Lucas

We'll All Float On.

Sometimes, things happen. I usually take a lot of things to heart. I know I shouldn't, but I do. I wish I didn't. Modest Mouse has a really good song that has an awesome positive message.


Bad things happen to everyone, every day. Sometimes, life is crap, but we have to remember... It will be okay.  Always. It always has been. Once more, music has put emotion into words. 

"I backed my car into a cop car the other day. Well, he drove off. Sometimes life's okay. I ran my mouth off a bit too much, oh what did I say? Well, you just laughed it off. It was all okay. And we'll all float on, okay."

 

I Have A Blog?

Wow. Been a long time, right? And I haven't even accomplished that much piano-wise. In my time of absence, I have only tabbed one song, two tops. I have done as I said in my last post, way back when. I learned how to play Aria by Giovanni Allevi Refresh your memory of it here. Hmmm, what to do now. Any ideas anyone of a song to tab? Please say you do. I need help with ideas. In my freetime I did, however, learn to play cello. Here's a video of my cello skills-
For those of you didn't figure it out, that's really not me playing cello ;) but I do plan on learning. This inspired me to. Any Metallica fans out there? Here's a video for you. This also inspired my urge to play cello. Apocalyptica is a pretty good band. I mean, who wouldn't like metal played on cellos? Anyway, this is me with a message, stay healthy, angry, whatever. Don't forget to leave your suggestions about songs I should tab. Till next time,
~Lucas

Why Are We Musicians?

Courtesy of Miss Sara Cole. :) Thanks for sharing this. Now I want to share it with others.



Why Are We Musicians?

This is beautifully written and highlights the significance of our passion for music- how music has the power to shape and manipulate, to nurture and satisfy the myriad emotions that flow acorss the world. Our instincts, our psychological archetypes, our needs for expression are God-given, divine, and powerful.
As musicians, we believe deeply in the importance of what we do, and the power of music to heal.

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 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 rec reation, 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 heartwrenchingly 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.
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.

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.”


-Kayla