The Boys of Fall

This could be a bitter pill to swallow, so buckle up.

I want to shake you, I want you to think -- just give me two minutes of your time after this video. This video is going to stir up some tremendously deep and fond memories for many, some old emotions, feelings and memories of youth, yearning of days gone by -- herein lies part of the problem, we want those same things for our kids. We have made this game part of the American way, part of our families and lives --but, is it worth it ? Only you can decide, but, should it really be your decision?

When I feel that chill, smell that fresh cut grass
I'm back in my helmet, cleats, and shoulder pads
Standing in the huddle, listening to the call
Fans going crazy for the boys of fall.
They didn't let just anybody in that club
Took every ounce of heart and sweat and blood
To get to wear those game-day jerseys down the hall
The kings of the school, man, we're the boys of fall.    -Kenny Chesney
 

Do you like to take risks ? How about high percentage risks ?  What about high percentage risks with a part of your body that you cannot fix ? No, I am not talking about taking up juggling chainsaws or free soloing the 2500 foot shear cliff face of El Sendero Luminoso.  What if I asked you if you are willing to take on those high percentage risks, with a part of the body that one cannot fix, and put that part on your child? 

Here is the problem -- I see things.  On a weekly basis I would bet, I see people come in with actual physical problems that strongly appear to be related to a minimal traumatic brain injury weeks, months, years and sometimes decades ago. This sadly sometimes includes poor kids who clearly had a minor head injury in the past few weeks.  I see things, I see sad things, preventable things.  Mind you, not all things are preventable, we must move on through life and things happen in life that are out of our control, but we can at the very least control these higher percentage risks in our children.  However, the question that haunts me, the one I do not understand is, why are some taking on these known higher percentage risks -- with their kids.  I am not judging, I just do not understand. 

I think some of this story is about denial, a sort of cognitive dissonance. Let me share a story from Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" to explain this phenomenon a bit clearer.

"consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam's bursting, it's not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam's breaking is found to be highest, concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That's because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst."

I believe this denial is a little of what is going on today when it comes to head injuries in our children, in a day and age where we know more, we know better, we understand the tremendous risks. This is hard stuff to take in, it somehow rattles and challenges us because it puts cracks in the foundations of our life, in our memories, in our feelings and emotions of our youth -- the same good stuff we want for our children.  Humans make excuses for the choices that serve us best. It's human nature to dodge the hard painful things that once defined us

So lets get down to some facts.

From the Nauman Purdue football study:
“The worst hit we’ve seen was almost 300 Gs,” Nauman said in reference to the G- forces of a football tackle. A soccer player “heading” a ball experiences an impact of about 20 Gs.“  So, how many Gs would 20 headers create ? How about 30 sub-maximal football tackles, in a week of game and practice? You can do the math, the numbers are there.  How large do these numbers get through a week of games and practice?  What are they over a whole season? The latest facts of the matter are that it is no longer about a single event, it is about the constantly rising odometer of impacts such as the Purdue Football Study found. And, I will show you information in a moment that reveals that it doesn't even need to be head impacts to up the odometer.

Concussions have been now shown to cause abnormalities in brain and motor functioning. These issues can last long after perceived clinical recovery. "Recent work suggests subtle deficits in neurocognition may impair neuromuscular control and thus potentially increase risk of lower extremity musculoskeletal injury after concussion.”  This is just the tip of the iceberg. How about the more serious stuff, the seizures, inability to sleep, memory loss, difficulty thinking, dizziness, vision problems, vomiting, depression, headaches, anxiety, speech problems, coordination problems, and then what about the big one, CTE.  CTE stands for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease that some studies suggest begins ramping up about 10 years down the road if enough cumulative trauma has occurred. The problem lies with our inability to know how much, or how little, one needs to sustain to begin this terrifying brain degenerative disease. 

Some of our current society continues to ignore the immense long lasting effects of head injuries, even minimal ones. We continue to allow young developing brains to partake in football, soccer, and other jarring sports. Yes, we cannot live in a vacuum, but we can live in awareness and wise choices.

Facts: 
The 2 year Purdue Study of high school football players suggested that concussions are likely caused by many hits over time and not from a single blow to the head, as previously believed. “Over the two seasons we had six concussed players, but 17 of the players showed brain changes even though they did not have concussions,” Talavage said. “The most important implication of the new findings is the suggestion that a concussion is not just the result of a single blow, but it’s really the totality of blows that took place over the season,” said Eric Nauman. “Most clinicians would say that if you don’t have any concussion symptoms you have no problems,” said Larry Leverenz, an expert in athletic training and a clinical professor of health and kinesiology. “However, we are finding that there is actually a lot of change, even when you don’t have symptoms.”

“New research into the effects of repeated head impacts on high school football players has shown changes in brain chemistry and metabolism even in players who have not been diagnosed with concussions and suggest the brain may not fully heal during the offseason.” stated Emil Venere.  “We are finding that the more hits you take the more you change your brain chemistry, the more you change your brain’s ability to move blood to the right locations,” Nauman said.

By now there are those of you reading this with heavily sweating palms. You played football or hockey, soccer or lacrosse, or had a sport-unrelated concussion, maybe several. You remember it, kind of, or the many -- sort of.   You sweat now, wondering what your future will hold for you. Will you be as statistic ? How many more years do you have before that first "apparent senior moment"?  Will everything be alright ? Is it CTE or am I just getting older? One has to wonder, and that is no way to go through life. This is the chainsaw juggling act again, do we need to take on such risks ?   Why do we knowingly welcome our children into this potentially life changing brethren?  Why must we offer them that same wonderment and worry as their years go by ? No longer can we remain in denial and lean on cognitive dissonance as acceptable reasons for our avoidance to act and protect our children.  Our answer to our children cannot be, " sorry son, we didn't know any better" -- because now, we do.

- Shawn

These head injuries are complicated cases which I cannot take on yet, I am not smart enough yet, this is too complicated a problem.  I refer these cases out to my tribe of neuro specialists from The Carrick Institute who specialize in putting these brains back together. Watch this video, my mentors, my teachers. As a parent or patient, you do have options.

Biomechanical Correlates of Symptomatic and Asymptomatic Neurophysiological Impairment in High School Football
Evan L. Breedlove, BS1,Thomas M. Talavage, PhD2,3,Meghan Robinson, BS2, Katherine E. Morigaki, MS ATC4,Umit Yoruk, BS3, Larry J. Leverenz, PhD ATC4 , Jeffrey W. Gilger, PhD5, Eric A. Nauman, PhD1,2,6

'Deviant brain metabolism' found in high school football players

Frequent soccer ball 'heading' may lead to brain injury. Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University

Dear Gord: Silence's Ransom.

Late breaking story on the CBC
A nation whispers, "We always knew that he'd go free"
They add, "You can't be fond of living in the past
'Cause if you are then there's no way that you're going to last"

Wheat kings and pretty things
Let's just see what tomorrow brings

- lyrics from "Wheat Kings" by The Tragically Hip

You are not getting out of this alive. This is a very present reality for Gord. 

For about 32 years Gord Downie has been the frontman and primary songwriter of the famous Canadian band, the Tragically Hip. On May 24, 2016 Gord's life slammed head first into a blunt reality check, Gord had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he had a massive glioblastoma in his head. After near immediate brain surgery, chemo and radiation therapy Gord bravely decided that the show must go, honorably he wanted to continue with his mission and passion.  So, he and his blokes scheduled a final four week cross-Canada farewell tour which ended in a “Canada is closed” tour closing extravaganza which ended on August 20th, 2016 in his hometown of Kingston, Ontario.  Canada was offically closed that night, quite literally.  Gord decided to still share, give back, live, and carry on with his life's gifts.  Gord's life has always been about music from what I can tell, telling great stories and bringing people joy through his gift.  Ever the story teller, the songs hit home and get personal, one such song is about the Toronto Maple Leaf NHL defenseman who scored the 1951 Stanley Cup-winning goal shortly before dying in a plane crash. Another, the mood perfect haunting "Wheat Kings" tells the story of David Milgaard, a Canadian wrongfully accused of murder. Gord's song writing means something, it says something, and I suspect this gave his music deep meaning, his days greater meaning, and his life a clearer purpose.

We are all going to die. If you are not starting to get comfortable with that reality, things are going to get pretty painful as your time winds down. Avoidance of acceptance of your final guaranteed demise will not make it escapable. If you wait and avoid you are going to possibly feel pretty frantic in those last days trying to meet your goals, dreams, wishes, hopes and tell those you love how much they meant to you being in your life. You are going to likely wish for more time. You are going to want some "do overs". Again, let me be clear, if you are reading this in the evening, you are one more day closer to that moment.  It is coming, trust me. So, get busy. The problem is, we think we have time.

I spent the better part of three decades enjoying Gord and the rest of "The Hip’s” stories and music. Music touches something deep in us, and unlike many other forms of entertainment in this world, we can return to music over and over again and it only gets better. The memories stay and sometimes get richer. Repeatedly, an album can grow on us and take deeper meaning and a comforting place, marking moments in our life, time-stamping memories and events that usually live on forever while others merely fade away. This is what Gord and the boys did for me, and much of Canada. 

The fact of the matter now is that Gord might not have many years left, none of us may to be honest, but I sure hope that he is the exception and not the rule for this type of cancer, I think there is so much more music in that man's soul. The truth of the matter is that he would love the time we are all wasting doing frivolous nonsensical things like watching Youtube videos of foolish teenagers skateboard down handrails often snagging their dangling parts on the rails, or climbing on the edges of rooftop edges doing handstands while snapping selfies. Make no mistake, Gord is not wasting his time doing these kinds of foolish things causally risking what is preciously left his life.   He knows how short an hourglass can be on sand. He is likely packing it all in, loading the boat, loving hard and living openly and freely. He is likely sampling life slowly, richly, buying the good chocolates, and having deep meaningful experiences with friends. We, on the other hand, think we have time and that is our mistake.  We waste so much time in this short life. The fact of the matter is any day now we could get the same call from our doctor with the same gut wrenching news. We are all wasting time. We all think we have enough time, that we can "get to it tomorrow".  Do we have time ? Can we "get to it tomorrow” ? There is still plenty of time right? 

In your last breaths on this spinning rock on which we dwell, there will likely be silence. If you are lucky to be surrounded by your loved ones, it will be a silence of crushing sadness for them. Complete silence will undoubtedly mark the exact moment of your transcendence.  And in that silence those observers, if you are lucky to have a few, will once again be reminded as they have many times before of the brevity of this trip we call life. In the silence, during that nauseating punch in the gut moment, there will be a reminder to get busy doing more and loving more grandly. Sadly, in the noise of our lives, as the days and weeks march on, how soon we will forget this lesson in the silence. In Gord's words from the song A Beautiful Thing, there is brilliant stark wisdom to what that silence is screaming. Lets all try to better hear and remember these words, spoken from the silence. 

"In the ulcerating silence perspective comes,

the way it always does for it’s ransom."     -Gord Downie

Here is a final punch in the face.  Within the hour of reading this you will soon forget what I have written here. Snapchat, Youtube, Netflix, HBO, they all suck us into an oblivion of wasted time, distraction from the vein of life, a lull of immediate gratification.  How soon we will all forget how short this trip is, the weeks and months will march onward, until we are again faced with something more grave and agonizing that forces us to sit in the silence again. Hopefully that silence is not our own. 

In the mean time, I give thanks. Thank you Gord, thank you deeply for leaving beautiful scars on my life that are still vivid. You have been part of the soundtrack of my life, adding color and depth to the memories and locking them in, deep and permanent.  Keep the good stuff coming brother. Like a wedding or movie, memories are not the same when not time-stamped by music. My life has been enriched and imprinted by the bands that have drawn me in to their muse. Thank you again Gord, for finding your passion and for continuing to shout it out loud, in your own unique way, with flare and passion and  heart. Thank you for your time, it is one of the greatest most unselfish gifts in life, giving someone your time.

The problem is, we all think we have time.  From Gord's lips to your ears, in a haunting yet deeply loving whisper,  "you might not my friend, so get busy". 

Again,  . . . 

"In the ulcerating silence perspective comes, 

The way it always does for it’s ransom."  -Gord Downie,

Much love Gord, over the miles, . . . . .  always. Thank you.

- Shawn Allen

Tragically Hip: Canada says farewell to a National Treasure.  Rolling Stone Magazine

The death of the schoolyard fight: The great unravelling of our modern day social fabric.

I told him his mom wore army boots to church.

The next day he showed up on my front lawn mounted high in the saddle on his war horse, wearing a horned viking hat, fisting a battle axe, while sentencing me to be tar and feathered by his men.  Although filled with angst, I was relieved, I had heard that being drawn and quartered was on the menu that week. 

One has to be careful out there, boyhood summers are tough places in some parts of the land, when you are just 8 years old every neighborhood has its own Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.

There were valuable lessons at every corner of the neighborhood that summer. 

What are our kids missing these days?  Many things are missing, that is for certain, but a good walk is a good teacher, especially when you are a kid.  Sadly, for our kids to find a reason to take a good walk, there needs to be a Squirtle, Venemoth or Magmar somewhere down the street (if you are clueless, your kids have not found Pokemon Go, yet). Oy Vey. Run them over I say ! The Squirtles, not your kids.

As a young boy from a small town in Canada, one skirted by vineyards and orchards, everyone walked the mile to school in the morning, then home and back at lunch, and then again at day's end.  Four miles a day, not including playing in the neighborhood afterwards.  But, we did not just walk. We threw stones, spit, laughed, teased each other, kicked garbage cans when no one was looking, traded baseball cards -- or we fought.

The walk was educational on many levels I came to learn. Some of us got into fights on the way home from time to time. We did not call it bullying back then, we called it "establishing the social hierarchy". Alright, maybe that was foreign nomenclature at the time, but it is accurate none the less.  Perhaps more simply, it should have been called, "offering insights into possible future career opportunities".  This was our form of social media.

. . . learning to establish a dominant full mount position atop your foe, a place to better "educate and debate" from, and of course sound knowledge of a good old fashioned rear naked choke just might come in handy one day for your lippy kid, seriously

Every clan needs the focal warrior. Every clan also needs the next bloke down the line, one not afraid to challenge the local Odin, a man dreaming to wear the horned helmet and ride the lead war horse while bellowing "FREEDOM" from plague filled lungs and flea infested bear robes. Kids have grand dreams after all. 

Back in the day, every clan and every fight had the regular scoundrels, the passive observer, the cheerleader, the negotiator, the medic.  Any truly good childhood fight had the markings of the adult equivalent, the Friday night town watering hole midnight brawl. Every good clan, childhood or adult, had leaders and lilliputians. The main difference, other than age, was that our fisticuffs occurred behind the local church (how appropriate that our fighting began there, didn't someone once mention that religion is the centerpiece for all the worlds warmongering? Hmmm.)  Hell, even the town crier was needed during these clashes where the social problems were ironed out, how else did the headmaster find out about the lunchtime grappling event ? And, forget you not there were the lawyers and the jury, the judge and the executioner. . .  yes, most of us had parents. 

You see, perhaps childhood fights actually had a valid purpose, a crucial thread in the social fabric. Perhaps their purpose was to offer us visions and first hand experiences of future career opportunities, unlike our present day where it is looked down upon, this medieval barbaric act of kissing fists, of fat lips, of mud and muscle.  

A question haunts me. Did the halt of this occasional, arguably necessary, societal event mark the beginning of the end to our once healthy social structure, our peace and understanding ? Is this what has caused us all the unrest we feel as we look at our apparent crumbling world ?  Is this what we sense is missing in our children, that thing that seems undefinably absent in their being ? Is this what has led to the pussification of our children, as George Carlin so crassly put it ? I know many who would agree, and of course, some who would argue.  Some would also agree that the present day "anti-bullying" propaganda ever present in our child's lives is also a piece procuring the great unravelling of our social fabric. Speaking of fabric, what about the laundry houses, the seamstresses ?  I forgot about them, those torn clothes needed attention (thanks mom). And, what about the police, the correctional officers, the councilors, the parole officers, the coaches ? You can see where this is going -- perhaps childhood lunchtime fighting set us all on our paths, or at least offered some initial samplings and weeding out of future employment options. One really never knows where childhood inspiration might root.

So, what did walking teach us ? Hell, probably very little, but it was the bickering that lead to debating, that led to negotiations, that led to standing ground on principles (clearly founded on very little substance of course) that led to resolution through words, maybe written territorial agreements and boundaries, or to war.  It wasn't the walks that were important, it was what happened during the walks that was important. That was life, life occurred between the school and home.  Life did not happen in school, learning societies rules happened there --life happened in the shark infested waters, the deep dark Sleepy Hollow forests, those places between mom's lunchtime Macarroni and Cheese and Mrs. Wharthogs boring last period english class. There was however glimpses of real life during recess period, but that felt more like yard time at the prison, after all, that was when the best fights happened, minus the bloody shivs.

So, think about all that your sweet princess or your charming Little Lord Fauntleroy is missing out on next time you drive them to prison, I mean school, nose down in their socially and politically correct smart phone, hunting for Squirtles of course, or something slightly more "Snapchat naughty".  I urge you to notice a little more closely the kids that are walking, their grass stained elbows, their black eyes, their self-assured walk, open chests, confident strides, physical bodies -- their obvious grins. Why are those kids always smiling ? Fight Club, that is the answer -- most of us know the first rule of Fight Club. Google it.

Take the fighting, the debating, the verbal warfare where upwardly escalating attempts to use the first period "word of the day" and its synonyms all served a purpose, to define a child's views, beliefs and place within the tribe. Mind you, there was more to all of this than I have yet mentioned. This was not just a real time integrated and applied learning opportunity on one's lunch walk home, this was also about doing all of what I have examined here in a fixed period of time. You see, the lunch time walk was clearly an opportunity to experiment with time management skills, there clearly was much to fit into that hour.  There were court rooms to visit, battlefields to traverse, boundary lines to defend.  Hell, lunch time was arguably the most important period of the day, the adults and teachers were just too stupid to see its value, and I might argue nothing has changed in that respect.  There was so much skill building, negotiation tactics, social posturing and bonding, debating, athleticism, lawyering, coaching, and social reporting just to name just a few. Where would we all be without the childhood walks home and the occasional ring side fight ?  I hesitate to say we might be right were we are at this time, nose down in our smart phones, afraid to voice a politically incorrect view point, afraid to offend, afraid to stand up for our beliefs and passions, and brainwashed by the media.  We would all be, possibly where our kids are also headed, no where, fast.  

Life was different when I was a kid. I had lots of real time on the job life experience as a kid. Its what got me here today. It is what got some of here, at least those who knew the rules of Fight Club.

All things in jest, bullying in any form is not cool. This writing stemmed from a healthy verbal jousting of ideas and words with a passive, yet strongly opinionated, dad with pasty unscarred virgin skin -- clearly the childhood town crier turned adult lawyer.  My jousting point was that just because the occasional wrestling on old Mr. Jones lawn resulted from saying a guy's mom wears army boots to church happened in my life and had a positive result, doesn't mean it should or should not happen in another kid's life. However, I attempted to make valid points that it might actually serve a greater life lesson purpose if it did occur.  Thus, maybe consider teaching your kids jiu jitsu.  Teach them just in case the punk kid with a viking hat, and having similar views as above, shows up on your front lawn saddled upon a war horse and decides it's your kid's day to get tarred and feathered just for the sheer fun of disagreeing that Skittles are not superior to Sour Patch Kids. After all, that is what some kids do, every neighborhood has its own Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.

 . . . sometimes what starts on social media, doesn't end on social media

In this day and age, for the parent and child, realizing what starts on social media doesn't always have to end on social media might be prudent awareness.  After all, there will always be those kids who feel that a punch square in the nose to make one's point loud and clear is a more valid method of negotiating -- it is far more immediate and memorable.  These kinds of fools also walk amongst us as adults, so this is not exclusively advise for the young ones in our lives.  A silver tongued negotiator can go far in this world, in grade school and in the adult world, but some do not operate well with verbal language and we would be wise to take that fact to heart.  The streaming web cameras behind old Mr. Jones garage won't provide court room evidence of the precursors to this said "bullying", only the physical end result.  In those cases, waiting for an after-the-fact bullying protocol to kick in is too late, noses are already filled with bloody snot, eye sockets swollen shut, the taste iron and a mouthful of blood. In these cases, knowledge of some solid Brazilian Jiu Jitsu skills might come in darn handy, things like a good side control game, knowledge of how to establish a dominant full mount position to "educate and debate" from, and of course knowledge of a good old fashioned rear naked choke or arm bar just might come in handy for your kid.  Think about it, It is either that confident self-preservation action,  or a good old fashioned jolt of fear and adrenaline as the horse-riding warlord rears up on the hind legs ready to pounce on your kid. In those critical moments, warlords could care less who has an iPhone streaming onto Facebook. 

Sometimes a silver tongue will not save you in the battle fields of childhood, let alone at a corner pub at 2am after a Sex Pistols cover band gets kicked off the stage.  You may need to resort to some hand to hand skills to save your own skinny butt as well, perhaps skills you honed behind the church after school, when the days were longer and Gilligan's Island ruled after school.

Who knows, maybe trying to save your kids from these worldly experiences might rob them of vital worldly insights which might pay off in the future -- heck, what do I know ?  But, I might argue that without these experiences, perhaps your silver tongued kid won't come to realize that as an adult a 60 hour work week lawyering doesn't serve his DNA-given skills well -- because he or she did not have that childhood lunch time "education" and those alternate career exposures.  Gosh, what if they realize too late in life that flattening their buttocks with a chair for the rest of their life is not for them?  What if they someday realize that they would rather have been climbing Everest and hunting for Yeti's ? I will leave you with that as my final stand, but, know this, Bigfoot is really out there -- and it would serve your kids well to have some good grappling skills if they find themselves confronted out in the dark forests of life, just in case the fight with the big fella goes to the ground. 

- Shawn Allen (blue belt, Gracie Barra Brazilian Jiu Jitsu)  

Sidebar:  Yes, this was a sarcasm piece, mostly, sort of, kind of, well, maybe not, likely not. I will let you decide.  Welcome to my weapons of change.

PS:  Inform your kids not to mention their friend's mom's army boots.  It is not a friendship builder for the sensitive ones out there with a weak emotional hair trigger.  Oh, and ditch the feather pillows as well, go memory foam, because although your house might not have tar, I bet it has honey. Don't leave kids with options, they can be very creative.

Saving the world.

"IF THERE IS A FUTURE OF PEACE FOR HUMANKIND . . . I EXPECT IT WILL COME FROM THE ARTISTS."

"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.”-Karl Paulnack

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Karl Paulnack to the Boston Conservatory Freshman Class
Dr. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at The Boston Conservatory, gave this fantastic welcome address to theparents of incoming students at The Boston Conservatory on September 1, 2004:
“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.
One of the first cultures to articulate 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 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. 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 Nazi 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-even from the concentration 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.”
In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 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, on the very evening of September 11th, 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.
Very few of you have ever 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 with few exceptions there is 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 a small Midwestern town a few 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. The concert in the nursing home 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 cars. 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.”

by:  Karl Paulnack to the Boston Conservatory Freshman Class