Eliot Fisk’s Notes

I will be introducing a new feature on my Web site. This will be called “The Eliot Fisk Guitar Archive.”

The Archive will consist of scholarly accurate and reliable transcriptions of masterpieces from 5 centuries of music history. The actual transcriptions will be put into Finale® or other computer generated notation by my most advanced students. Working under my direct supervision and guidance they will work with me to create an entire archive of otherwise hard-to-get but glorious music. The music will be downloadable free of charge from my Web site.

I then want to place a link to the students’ individual Web sites and ultimately to have the students record this material on their Web sites so that they will be able to get a bit of a start in their individual careers at the same time as contributing to creating a big library of great material.

The first entry in the Eliot Fisk Guitar Archive will be 6 pieces from Alonso Mudarra’s Tres Libros de Music en Cifra published in Sevilla in 1546 and including the famous Fantasia Which imitates the Harp in the Manner of Ludovico and 5 other gems from the fertile imagination of Mudarra. This edition was prepared together with NEC Masters degree candidate Scott Wolf.

Future editions are planned spanning every epoch of the guitar and including also new works of chamber music with guitar. This is an ongoing project in which Eliot Fisk and members of his two classes, at the New England Conservatory in Boston, and at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg, will attempt to create a lasting legacy of creative and reliable editions for guitarists all over the planet.

I have received trademark protection for a new concept in guitar instruction which will ultimately result in a method. The two major aspects of this program are summed up in the titles: Guitar Aerobics™ and the Poetry of Technique™.

Boston Guitar Fest 2006 will include a group session open to guitarists of all levels introducing some of the concepts embodied in these new trademarked studies.

I want to take the liberty of abusing your patience with another idea that has been percolating in my mind and which I think has great potential for NEC and for the art of music in general.

We are well aware that art music can have wonderful effects when it becomes part of the daily life of people living in disadvantaged areas. We are all concerned with this very noble part of our great common crusade.

However, there is an interesting corollary to “outreaching” the economically disadvantaged and that is educating those presumably well educated who know little or nothing about art music and its many salutary effects on the human organism.

The hypothesis I want to suggest has several parts:

1) I suggest that there are many people graduating from out best schools and universities who have little or no knowledge of, or sensitivity to, art music. I am willing to bet that the same people who would be embarrassed to admit that they knew nothing of Shakespeare, for example, do in fact know little or nothing about the towering creations of the Western imagination represented in the works of our pantheon of great composers.

2) In other words, despite some minimal lip service to the contrary, art music is NOT in any meaningful way considered part of the core education of a well educated person even in the highest echelons of academia.

3) In my own personal experience I have been amazed at how many otherwise well versed friends and acquaintances know so little about art music.

4) I suggest that this is a further reason why we have to work so hard later in life to find funding for our arts institutions.

5) Were we able to capture the imagination of the people who later become the real decision makers in our society while these people are still young and impressionable, not only would our society would be more humane, these people would have considerably richer lives and be more inclined later in life to support arts institutions. The entire process of integrating art music in every department of the great universities would set in motion a powerful windmill of positive forces, resulting in a self perpetuating cycle of welcome side effects.

6) I further suggest that, while the written word has evolved quite dramatically since Shakespeare’s day, the automatic, visceral, human response to sound has evolved much more slowly or not at all. For example, how we hear a harmony written by Shakepeare’s great contemporary, John Dowland (described by the great Bard himself as “Dowland, whose touch upon the lute doth ravish human sense”) has changed less than the actual meaning of many 16th century English texts, which, as we all remember, require a separate glossary to be understood today.

7) Given that there is so little known about previous eras, the best “snapshot” we may have of what life was like in Elizabethan England may well be the music of that epoch. The same might be said of 16th century Spain, where the glorious music of the siglo de oro composers opens up vistas that could be useful not just to literature professors but to history professors as well.

8) In fact, we can extrapolate connections between art music and almost every department of any university on earth.

Therefore, I am urging those students in my class who have appropriate music in their repertoire to contact all the leading universities in the Boston area in search of the rare professors in various fields who may have interest in testing my hypothesis, that the full integration of art music into every aspect of the Academy is a worthwhile and intriguing endeavor.

Imagine Machaut and Josquin in medieval history class; Dowland in Shakespeare class; Bach in religious studies class; Beethoven and Schubert in German literature class; Schoenberg in art history class; Boulez and Stockhausen in math class, Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong in African American history class — or any of the above in any number of philosophy classes. The possibilities are endless.

Obviously, I am at the beginning of this latest charge at another of the world’s many windmills. However, I am convinced that making the effort will yield some wonderful, mutually enriching discoveries.

From Roger (no relation – really!) Fisk, a guitarist and aide to Sen. John Kerry (D – Mass.):

“I am thrilled that the New England Conservatory and Artistic Director Eliot Fisk will be hosting Boston GuitarFest 2006. This series of performances and workshops will highlight both the exceptional musical talent we have right here in Boston as well as host musicians from all over the world. Boston GuitarFest is a perfect example of music‚s ability to traverse geographic, cultural and ethnic boundaries, and as a confirmed amateur guitarist I know it will also be a lot of fun. I encourage musicians and everyone who appreciates their work to become involved in this important cultural celebration, and I thank the NEC and Eliot for making Boston Guitarfest 2006 a reality.”

Feb. 25, 2006

Mr. Daniel Steiner

President
New England Conservatory of Music
290 Huntington Av.
Boston, Mass. 02115

Dear Dan,

First of all, I want to express the immense gratitude that all of us feel for the literally unbelievable job you have done as President of NEC. One would have to look far and wide to find a second example of an administrator in any walk of life who has done so much good in so short a space of time. (If only we had this kind of leadership at the upper levels of power in our society!) Well you already know how I feel. In fact, I gave vent to these feelings once in a little essay called “The Philosopher – King” that I put on the blog at my website.

It is said that scientists are advised to discipline themselves to one idea per published paper, and I will try to do the same here.

For many years I have been frustrated by the fact that, despite many efforts on the part of many good hearted people to offset the legacy of a cruel history beyond our immediate control, those of us involved in art music are still mostly condemned to perform for audiences that are de facto segregated. Despite the important role that music has always played in the African American or Latino communities, our music does not reach these communities as it should. NEC probably does more to try to redress this state of affairs than any school on the planet. Still the problem is a big one, inseparably wedded to deeper problems of institutional racism still endemic to our society.

The passing of Coretta Scott King, perhaps the most famous alumna of NEC in history, gives us a golden opportunity to rededicate ourselves to “that task for which (she and her husband) gave the last full measure of devotion.”

I want to suggest that we as a community link to our $100,000,000 endowment goal an equally important goal of perhaps even greater moral merit: suppose we made it a declared goal of our institution to identify, nurture and cultivate a significant minority audience for art music in the minority communities of our city? This would entail actively linking the work of the prominent studio teachers with our numerous ground breaking pioneers in the MIE, outreach and Extension divisions in a great coordinated effort to transform life in the Boston area in the spirit of the great Credo of our “holde Kunst” as it is expressed in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Such a public declaration, like Kennedy’s famous claim that America would land a man on the moon, might seem improbable at first, but the attempt to mobilize our resources to this end would not only be the morally right thing to do and a great way to honor the legacy of Coretta Scott King, it would also help NEC along the road to its other great goal of creating a secure financial future for this uniquely special institution.

My recent discussions with leading faculty members suggest that there is now a critical mass of colleagues who with some minor prompting from the administration would throw their hearts and souls into such an endeavor and who would recognize that, far from diluting our central goal of nurturing and educating young musicians, such an effort would only enhance and further enrich our already wonderful institution.

Love to you and your magnificent wife, who always makes such lovely holes in my very great ignorance,

Sincerely,

Eliot Fisk

P. S. I have been in touch with our great mutual friend, Prof. Ogletree, who, if I understand him correctly, is also all for this proposal!

Preface: This article is a very personal recollection of my good friend Peter Segal. Following this reminiscence there will be a much more complete obituary and familial remembrance composed by his daughter.

On Thursday last our beloved instrument lost one of its great personalities, the irrepressible, omnivorously-interested-in- everything Philadelphia based guitarist, Peter Segal.

I was only a boy when I first met Peter, but the first impression has lasted my entire life. For a few brief years we studied with the same teacher, a survivor of Segovia’s severe Siena master class years named Peter Colonna. At the time I never practiced at all, but Peter Segal was already a well known guitarist. In fact, I remember him barging into Colonna’s house one afternoon…Peter would have been a teenager and I a boy of 8 or 9… I remember being quite shocked as Peter without any further formalities literally grabbed Colonna’s own guitar from the dining room table it was resting on and dived right in, playing on it with that same unstoppable verve that so characterized his temperament later in life: “Peter Segal is my name; friendship is my game!”

Peter was part of the small brotherhood centered around Oscar Ghiglia’s summer master classes at the Aspen Music School in the 1970’s. There was a core group of us: Peter, Phil de Fremery, Bruce Holzman, Sharon Isbin, Tom Johnson, Larry Munson, John Scammon and myself, who never missed a summer with Oscar. I think that I speak for all of us in saying that the entire year was just a preparation for those few short weeks in the summer when we could be together in the thin mountain air of Aspen, eating, sleeping and drinking guitar under Oscar’s guidance.

Peter was an indispensable leader of this gang of miscreants. His joy in life and insatiable curiosity nourished and stimulated us all. Later Peter lead the way to Alirio Diaz’s summer course in Banff, Canada, where a number of us continued our Gradus ad Parnassum in the summer of 1973. In addition, Peter, whose Spanish was perfect, often served as Maestro Diaz’s unofficial interpreter.

In addition to being a brilliant solo performer, Peter was one of the first guitarists to concertize widely in chamber music settings. With his flutist partner, Janet Ketchum, he played countless duo recitals and introduced numerous new works. He also delved into musicology, translating and publishing a set of controversial letters from Segovia to Ponce and writing widely on many topics related to the guitar. He even started his own engraving business and engraved among many other projects, my editions of two huge works of George Rochberg: the Caprice Variations (after Paganini) and the American Bouquet. During the labyrinthine process of preparing these works for publication, Peter’s patience, tact and loving attention to detail bordered on the saintly.

Meanwhile, he had accumulated an extraordinary battery of achievements on stage (he performed world wide as soloist and member of various chamber music ensembles), as a scholar (he earned both a Master’s degree and a Doctorate in Music History (!) from Temple university), educator and as a general one man-resource-for-the-arts. Later his fiscal wisdom and humanity contributed mightily to the development of the distinguished community-based Settlement Music School in Philadelphia.

The final two decades of his life were immeasurably enriched by his adored wife, the distinguished Professor of Spanish literature, Concha Alborg whose strength, beauty and grace impressed all who met her. The two traveled widely and could pop up in unexpected places.

I once played in a summer outdoor concert in the Retiro in Madrid, Spain, under the most difficult of conditions. I had finished playing and was just getting ready to depart when booming out of the darkness came the total surprise of Peter’s unmistakable voice, announcing his presence and support. He was in every way a great colleague.

Peter’s numerous contributions to the field have been eloquently summarized by his daughter in the tribute that follows this, but it is Peter’s big, embracing personality that subsumes even these remarkable achievements to those who knew him over the course of a lifetime. He was a unique and lovable character, immune to snobbery, delighting in life and all of its many pleasures. Indeed, he was a throwback to an earlier and more innocent age. For those of us who knew him early on it seemed that he simply loved to play the guitar, and his joy in playing was contagious. His sense of humor was also omnipresent, and after a long winter and spring in our respective diasporas Peter never failed to delight us each summer with a new set of jokes delivered with inimitable segalian zest. “Peter Segal’s the name; friendship is my game!” Indeed!

The Complete Published Obituary for Prof. Peter Segal

Peter Segal, 56, a concert guitarist and professor who helped shape the direction of the classical guitar community in Philadelphia, died at his home on January 26, 2006 of complications from esophageal cancer.

Segal was a member of the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society since its foundation in 1967 and he served as its President, Treasurer and Director of Programming. Additionally, as Director of Guitar Studies at Temple University from 1973 to 1993, Segal mentored over 200 graduate and undergraduate students in preparation for careers in the musical arts.

During his 30-year performance career, Segal made well over 600 national and international symphony, recital and solo appearances. He played in nearly every state in the Union, including Alaska, frequently appearing in Philadelphia with the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Orchestra, at the Academy of Music and the Mann Music Center. Segal was also a featured musician with local Philadelphia ensembles, including the Concerto Soloists, the Amerita String Orchestra, the Davidsbund Chamber Ensemble, The Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia and the new music ensemble Relâche, as well as several Delaware Valley orchestras.

Internationally, Segal made his European debut in London in 1969. He also performed in Italy and Canada, XX and XX. Most recently, Segal made recital appearances in Spain, Hong Kong and the Russian Far East.

Segal was a master of five centuries of guitar music. In his recitals he would often play historical instruments, such as the four string renaissance guitar and the four course renaissance guitar, in order to best represent the music of different time periods. His repertoire included solo works from the early 16th century, the baroque and 19th century masters, to contemporary composers including Britten, Villa-Lobos, Ginastera, Rodrigo and Michael White. A notable accomplishment is the dedication to Peter Segal of Vincent Persichetti Parable for Solo Guitar.

Segal was known for creating ambitious, thematically unified programs such as an all-Jewish program of music for solo guitar and a program dedicated to 20th century guitar sonatas. In 1993, Segal commissioned composer Robert Capanna to create The Blue Guitar, a large-scale, multi-media work featuring narrator, flute, viola, cello and guitar with David Hockney’s images. The work was inspired by the Picasso painting and the Wallace Stevens poem, both entitled Man With the Blue Guitar.

One of the accomplishments that Segal was most proud of was his development of an extensive repertoire for flute and guitar, which he performed with Janet Ketchum for over twenty years nationally and abroad.

Among Segal’s many awards was a Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society, Segal also belonged to Pi Kappa Lambda, the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, the American String Teachers Association and the Guitar Foundation of America.

Segal began playing the guitar at age 7 encouraged by his mother, Margret Segal. He begun his formal studies in Philadelphia with Peter Colonna. He received diplomas from the Accademia Chigiana and Conservatorio Antonio Vivaldi (Italy) and University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Dr. Segal earned a Master’s in Music History and a Doctorate of Musical Arts, both from Temple University.

In addition to twenty years of service at Temple University as Director of Guitar Studies, Segal was also lecturer and visiting professor in music history at the University of the Arts from 1973 to 1991. He also guest lectured at many other schools and universities, including Julliard School of Music.

In 1993, Segal cut back on his performing schedule and began working in the non-profit business sector. As Administrative Director of Settlement Music School, he oversaw the school’s budget and managed human resources. In 2000, Segal served as budget director for Resources for Human Development, which sponsors social services in Philadelphia and other locations along the East Coast. For RHD, Segal used his substantial interest and skill with computers to develop Ant Farm, a database used to track the fiscal health of over 150 programs within the organization.

Even while working for Settlement and RHD, Segal continued to be active in the professional music community by publishing and performing. Among works published are compositions by Vivaldi, Schubert, Giuliani, Rodrigo and Michael White. One of his last recitals was a collaboration with Agustín León Ara, performing Segal’s edition for guitar and violin of the Canciones Valencianas by Joaquín Rodrigo.

Segal was born in 1949 in Philadelphia and lived in Drexel Hill until he graduated from Upper Darby High School in 1967. He attended Temple University as an accounting major and graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1971.

A true renaissance man, Peter Segal enjoyed playing tennis and softball. He liked cooking as much as eating. He was an avid radio listener and believer in public radio. He loved traveling with his wife, Concha, and he managed to scale Machu Pichu in Perú after having been diagnosed with cancer. He treasured times spent in his home in Ocean City. During the last three years of his life, he was smitten by his new grandchildren, Jake and twins Dinah and Djuna.

In 1985 Segal married Concha Alborg, an author and Spanish Literature professor at St. Joseph’s University. The couple made their home in Narberth, PA for 15 years and relocated to Society Hill in 2000.

In addition to his wife, Segal is survived by siblings Stephan, David and Elise; two step-daughters, Diana Day and Jane Day Rasmussen; three grandchildren; and several nieces and nephews.

A memorial concert is being planned for this spring. In lieu of flowers, please send donations in his name to the Philadelphia Guitar Society: 2038 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103

Obituary for Matthew Fisk (1957 – 2005)

On December 24, Matthew Fisk of Jamesville departed this earth. He was 48 years old. Although afflicted with Down’s Syndrome, Matthew was an unforgettable personality who touched the lives of many. His loving hugs and limitless sense of humor will never be forgotten by those who knew him. He was a resident of the Jamesville Community Residence for nearly a quarter of a century and was attended by a marvelous staff who watched over him in a way far exceeding the mere duty of professional care giving. In particular Ms. Vicki Sass, almost a second mother to him; his long time advocate, Ms. Carlise Nesby; Ms.Linda Szatanek; Ms.Cathy Procopio and his personal physician, Dr. James Traver, contributed immeasurably to his quality of life. Indeed he was for them and they for him, family. Matthew is survived by his father, Dr. George Fisk, and his brother, Eliot Fisk, a concert guitarist who has performed frequently in the Syracuse area.

Agnus Dei: Matthew Hamilton Fisk (Sept. 5, 1957 – Dec. 24, 2005)

My dear little brother, Matthew, died yesterday afternoon around 4:30 P. M. East Coast Time.

One of the nice people who cared for him at the marvelous group home outside of Syracuse where he lived so many years of his life with a fairly stable community of other Down’s Syndrome people, called me and said, “Your brother has just had an episode whereby he stopped breathing for ten minutes. They have done all the possible resusticatory procedures to keep him alive. At the moment he’s not responding to anyone so there’d be no point in your jumping in the car and coming to Syracuse.. He is still with us. He’s in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. We will call you immediately if there is any change in his condition. We spoke to your father, and he thought it would be best if we called you directly.” 15 minutes later, a second phone call… me still expecting to hear “He’s stabilized and should be OK.” After all this is Christmas Eve! Instead, the same kind voice, “I’m so sorry to tell you that your brother has died. I’m so very sorry…”

My dear little brother, so pure and so sweet, gone from this life forever.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi. “Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.”

Matthew!! My beloved little brother. Mommy always told me your name meant, “Gift of God.” That is what you were for us and for so many others whose lives you touched.

You are my first memory of anything, you coming home from the hospital in that little sky-blue baby outfit. How cute you were as a baby, that indescribable sweetness, innocence personified and touchable…

I remember how we got up in the mornings in the house at Herford Place, dew on the grass, sun shining and how I pretended to race you across the lawn to the swing set. I’d let you win, and then how you’d laugh! We’d be at the swing set for quite a while, and then we’d play in the sand box until I got bored. Then I’d bring you back to Mommy, all my good intentions of taking care of you for the whole day exhausted.

You died on Christmas Eve, just as I was going to call you. Why didn’t I just call a little earlier? I could have tried to speak to you one last time.

How you loved Christmas time, hanging the tree, opening the presents! Mom always killed herself for us. Come Christmas morning she would have fetched dozens of gorgeously wrapped little individual presents out of unsuspected crannies, and when we woke up on Christmas day, there they’d be beckoning to us in a great mound of color and light from under the tree.

We always tried to make your presents the most numerous because you loved opening them so much. And sometimes you’d take other people’s presents and open them too. But that was later, at the house in Syracuse…

In the early years in Philadelphia we faced the challenge of finding a school for you. “Mrs. Corbin’s”, a mile or so down Lansdowne Avenue was a first alternative. It gave Mom a small break for a while. But this couldn’t work for long. You were growing up, and the difference between you and normal kids was starting to become more and more apparent. There were no local facilities for people like you.

Sometimes when I was walking in the street with you, holding your hand, the other kids would stare at us and giggle. I wanted to kill them all, the lousy pigs, staring at you with condescension when they were the inferior ones! I would glare back trying to look just as arrogant as they did, but it hurt to think they could look at you like that. They didn’t know how soft you were, how much love was in your sweet, goodnight hug.

One time you escaped from the house and walked the whole half a mile through the woods all the way to that dangerous road that used to scare me to cross when I’d walk back from school trailing my too-heavy book bag. That one time you got out, some neighbor we hardly knew brought you back, and we all sighed with relief that no car had run you over because at that point the path out of the woods lead right onto the middle point of that awful road.

So we had to find a school for you. Even Mommy with her inexhaustible energy was simply worn out. The anxiety, the sheer physical demands of having to watch you every waking minute of every waking day was wearing her down. You had the strength of a 6–year-old without the instinct for self preservation. Daddy had to work, I had to go to school… we just couldn’t take care of you any more ourselves. Mommy and Daddy came to the agonizing decision to send you away to school. You were still so young…

So you started at Pennhurst State School a good hour’s drive from home. We would pick you up on Friday and take you back on Sunday afternoon. That drive back to Pennhurst always felt like a drive to the gallows.

When Mommy and Daddy first took you there, a man came in to get you, to take you to your new home, sleeping in a big room with a lot of other kids. As we discovered over time, many of the residents had to be sedated so that the overworked staff could have half a chance. That must have been an awful change for you. You always had all the repertoire of human emotion, all that without any of the cognitive faculty to make sense of the inexplicable and think up a way out. I often wondered how you survived it. Did your heart want to break with loneliness, bewilderment? What did you think on those first nights in that new place?

That first time Mommy and Daddy had to leave you there, you were so trusting, so innocent, a lamb about to enter, without any way to prepare for it, a strange new world. Mommy told me later how the man from Pennhurst came in and led you away by the hand and you, trusting as ever, went away with him and walked right out of daily family life as we had known it. And Mommy and Daddy, left behind, burst into tears in each other’s arms.

Years later, when in a totally different context they came to wheel Mommy down to the 24-hour care unit at Pennswood , Daddy watched again as she slowly disappeared down the corridors of another institution and was rolled the first part of her own “transition into eternity.” Now you’re where she is – wherever “there” is, if it is, too.

But you were also so funny! Right from the beginning you had a sense of humor. Later in life you could imitate people in the family or outside of it with the gift of a stand-up comedian. You’d even wait to laugh until everyone else had laughed, just like a good comic allowing himself a little laugh at the end of one part of a routine before launching into the next episode. Around the dinner table at Uncle Ross and Aunt Fran’s you turned Aunt Fran trying to teach her daughters the French “magnifique” into “fantastifique” and had us all on the floor laughing.

When you were going through adolescence and would have those occasional violent episodes, I’d try to take you out for long walks to get you tired out. Do you remember that once we came to the end of one such walk in front of a beautiful sunset? You called it, “the red sky and the blue sky.” Thereafter if I wanted to take you out I’d say, “Hey, Maffie, want to go out and see ‘the red sky and the blue sky?’”

You touched the lives of so many people. No one ever forgot the pure, sweet, and simple way you could give a hug. But you knew how to put the insufficiently respectful in their place as well. Once you were in the hospital with one of those frequent pneumonias you used to get from inhaling your food instead of chewing it! Once when we visited you there, a doctor came in to check on you. He was obviously uncomfortable checking a Down’s Syndrome person. You allowed yourself to be checked but ignored him completely at the same time. Your expression was, “OK, Doc, go ahead and check me out! We both know who’s the boss here!”

And how you loved to eat! Phoebe’s Garden Café’ is where we took you in Syracuse. “And remember, Just one pastry!! No seconds on Carrot Cake!!” And of course after the meal recounting that we had given you thirds on soup, thirds, on salad, thirds on chicken, thirds on pastry!! Of course all these extra helpings were little tiny bites that Mom or I would “sneak” you (“Shhhhhhh!! Don’t tell!!”) And you would echo putting your finger to your lips as well, “Shh!! Don’t tell.!” And how you would giggle when the successful “secret” operation had been completed!

And the records!! 24 hours a day those same records, until there were holes worn through them practically: Johnny Cash, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, Michael Jackson, the Beatles, and above all “The Union” songs from the Civil War arranged into a cantata.

With all that sitting around listening to records your weight got out of hand at times and then the staff at your home would try to get you to swim and exercise and keep the weight down. We were blessed that my beloved high school friend, Jamie Traver, became your personal doctor, one of the many people who adopted you, brought you home for holiday meals, and just basically treated you like family.

There were so many who worked with you over the years who did this: Vicki Sass, who became your second mother, Clarisse, your wonderful advocate; Linda Szatanek who a few years before you died took a hit from a boom box that you threw at her. Because of the injury you gave her she’ll never raise her right arm again above shoulder height. But do you know what she said about you, “I still love him the best. He’s still my baby!” That ‘s the kind of love you could inspire. There were many others I never really got to know who made a difference in your life in the group home where Mommy managed to place you after a long battle with the bureaucracy. That group home was a blessing, a stable refuge despite the budget cuts, where you could live out your life with dignity.

Now you’re with the angels. As Raquel would say, now you’re with Dr. King in heaven. I am so happy we got to see you… all of us, Daddy, Zaira and Raquel… one last time over Thanksgiving. I was thinking of you so strongly on Christmas Eve. Several times I almost picked up the phone to call you, but some trivial thing stopped me from calling.

Until the kind voice (Joan Chistiana) called me at 4 in the afternoon. At first I was so happy. I thought, “Isn’t that nice! They’re calling to say “Merry Christmas’!” Now I look out the window at a slate grey winter sky on the grey day after Christmas and miss you and tears come into my eyes and I know I can never hug you again and try to show you how much I loved you.

So I will try to put the love into music and into life and try still to be a worthy brother to you, remembering all you gave and all you were always, my beloved little brother, always there with me, part of me like my own heart beat, along the journey of our life.

To the group home staff who took such loving care of my brother:

January 1, 2006

Dear Friends,

Thank you all for being here. And thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for having “been there” for my beloved brother Matthew in so many ways emotional and practical over such a long period of time. For us you are all family.

All of us who have lived with Down’s Syndrome people know that what they give to us is more than we can ever give back to them. Although they are handicapped in so many ways, their eternal innocence, their capacity to show love is a continual example of what it means to be truly human. It is they who help to make us civilized, not the other way around. They teach us empathy, patience, and the great wisdom of small steps taken patiently over the slow arc of a lifetime.

I wish it were possible to thank all of you personally once again, to put my arms around each of you individually to express the eternal gratitude my father and I will always feel for all you did to make the last 24 years of my brother’s life such good and happy ones.

Having endured the horrors of a state with low taxes, we are also grateful to the State of New York for having provided a truly compassionate system that does indeed take care of the defenseless even at a time of shrinking public funds. There are no words to describe the agony of being forced to entrust your child, your brother, to a state system that is under-funded and therefore necessarily incapable of giving the kind of care that any civilized society should give to the less fortunate.

But our debt of gratitude goes way beyond the material. The gift of love, unquestioning, all-forgiving, all-generous love, such as all who have come today gave to my beautiful brother cannot be willed. You all serve nobly. You all do your duty even in the most difficult of cases. But what you have given to my brother is truly the greatest gift any human being can give to another; it is perhaps the only gift that human beings can give that matters at all measured against the infinite expanse of eternity. Truly everything else is “as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal”…

Although this is a sad occasion, we must never forget that my brother was naturally one of the funniest people on the planet. All of us have enjoyed his talent as a mimic, his stand-up comic’s sense of timing, his impish joy at crossing the boundary of the forbidden (“DON”T TAKE OTHER KIDS’ PIZZA!!”). How many times did he have us all rolling on the floor with laugher!

And his music! Oh my God, didn’t he love those records and CD’s? In his hey day he could listen for hours. In fact, it seems that that is what he was doing when he stopped breathing last Christmas Eve.

It is practically certain that if I had never had Matthew as a brother I would never have become a musician at all. Certainly I would have been much less of a musician. From the day he entered my life, the first memory of anything I have at all, he touched my heart, caused me to feel things I would never have known, contributed more than any other person except my parents to anything that is good in me. So in a way in my musical career I have been his ambassador to the world.

For all of us Matthew’s passing leaves a great void. He was an unforgettable, an absolutely unique character. Although I saw him far too infrequently, he was always with me, and my love for him never wavered. He was a given in my life, like the sun coming up in the morning. Now that he has gone, there is that great emptiness where his hug used to be. But viewed another way, he will never leave us. His sweetness and grace will be with us forever reminding us of the better place that he came from and to which he has now returned.

Eliot

I remember the year of Ralph’s passing because it was also the year I lost my other “foster grandfather,” an amazing, elderly Scotsman named Thomas Robertson, who briefly owned the guitar store where I had my first decent guitar instruction – in fact my only ever regular guitar instruction of any significance. More on the wonderful and incorrigibly independently-minded Robertson at a later date. Now to the matter of Ralph Kirkpatrick, another one who as he himself put it “Must have been exposed to Emerson’s Essay on Self Reliance much too early!”

Ralph was my musical mentor during my years as a student at Yale in the middle 1970’s, but more importantly he was also one of the most important musicians of the entire 20th century, one whose life and work still have powerful and invigorating messages for all of us today.

No student of music at Yale in my era could be unaware of the great eminence that was Ralph Kirkpatrick, world famous harpsichordist, first cataloguer of the complete Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, author of a universally lauded monograph on Scarlatti, editor of countless authentic editions of early music, and author of numerous scholarly articles. Almost single-handedly Ralph had pored through all the sources and identified, ordered and catalogued all the then known 550+ binary -form sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Ralph’s last name initial K now replaced the largely irrelevant Longo or L numbers previously affixed to Scarlatti’s sonatas. This K was for Kirkpatrick, not the Koechel of Mozart’s catalogue. Ralph’s numerous recordings for DGG were in all the record stores, particularly the complete Bach ,Wohl Tempiertes Clavier.

Ralph was rumored to be frightening to play for. People spoke of him with a kind of hushed awe. Yet, as he was also a fellow of my residential college, Jonathan Edwards, he occasionally graced us with free solo recitals in the same Great Hall (our dining area, but actually possessed of a very decent acoustic) where I gave a number of my own little recitals during my undergraduate years.

Finally in February of 1974, midway through my sophomore year at Yale, through the good offices of Phillip Nelson, then Dean of the Yale School of Music, it was arranged for me to play for Ralph. Having walked across half of the Yale campus on a blustery winter day in February of 1974 with my extremely heavy traveling guitar case, I reached Ralph’s office in the still decrepit Stoeckal Hall, then seat of the Yale School of Music. Climbing up creaking stair cases I arrived at Ralph’s domain in the inner sanctum.

My first impression was that he was much more massive than he seemed in the DGG cover photos. There he was invariably pictured seated at the harpsichord surrounded by antiques with his long, sculpted, tapered fingers poised in frozen ballet over the harpsichord keyboards about to transfer messages from the Great Beyond to the rest of us mortals. By the time I met him, later in life, Ralph resembled more and more the figure of George Washington carved into Mt. Rushmore, his hair worn long, despite the slightly receding hairline, still a great white lion’s mane framing a face with all the power and wisdom of the years written on it in heroic dimensions.

I sat down to play for this imposing presence, but first there was a whole verbal minefield to be negotiated. We immediately engaged in the antler testing that was part of any pedagogical encounter with Ralph. Finally, having first withstood this intellectual artillery barrage, I played my Bach Suite for him (BWV 995) and later my transcriptions of some Scarlatti Sonatas, the latter experiment pronounced “fascinating.” Ralph’s famous monumental one volume biography of Scarlatti was one of the first ito call attention – in passages of poetic prose! – to the relation of the Spanish guitar to Scarlatti’s music. Perhaps his positive reaction (I didn’t yet realize what a compliment such a one word reaction from Ralph actually was!) owed something to my transcriptions being a partial confirmation of some of his own hypotheses offered in the book.

After the Scarlatti he said, “Now you’ve got what you came for,” a sentence recalling the tendency of the musical world to pigeon-hole him as merely the “re-discoverer” of Scarlatti. Even the celebrated virtuoso pianist, Vladimir Horowitz, who certainly suffered form no lack of self-confidence, had famously sought Ralph out before making his own spectacularly successful all -Scarlatti LP!

It was not until some months after this first encounter that I dared to try to have regular lessons with Ralph, a decision that was to affect the rest of my life in music in the most profound way. Indeed, Ralph became a kind of second grandfather to me, or a sometimes severe “Dutch uncle” as he termed it.

The sessions derived a unique intensity from the fact that Ralph was losing his sight. I would sit across from him in the study in his house out in Guilford, Connecticut, a house built in part with his own hands and perched back from the edge of a cliff looking down into some of the world’s most beautiful and wild seascape. As the sun set slowly through the large picture window behind him, our sessions continued into the early evening hours. Ralph sat behind his huge and atypical desk, itself a 4- inch thick, curving slab, the entire expanse of some ancient, monstruously huge tree trunk from prehistory,

Once Ralph asked me to check his progress in reading Braille as his fingers traced the words and his melodious voice recited as if from the Great Beyond Shakespeare’s Sonnet, #73:

“That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang…
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,”

(How powerfully I remember him pronouncing the word “fire”!)

“That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by…”

By experiences such as this highlights of the thousand years of Western culture with which Ralph was intimately familiar entered into the heart and soul of a young man, to remain there forever.

But it’s important to state that studying with Ralph was not some sort of unstructured, abstract cloud gazing! No! It was very direct, very tough, very nuts and bolts. We demystified complex, musical structures, reducing them to their simplest components like a couple of chemists working in the lab. Then we put these structures back together little by little, which, to borrow a metaphor from physics, was sort of like projecting the birth of multiple universes. This never-routine process involved not just discerning intellectually the fundamental structure beneath the elaborate surface ornamentation of the great Baroque masterpieces, but even walking and singing bass rhythms while the guitar rested in its case.

For example, Ralph once had me walk and sing the four bar, fundamental bass of the famous Bach Ciaccona for solo violin from the Partita in D minor, BWV 1004, for 40 minutes straight! My footsteps were to be proportionate to the bass intervals: a short step for a minor second, a larger one for a major third etc. The distance between scale degrees was to be proportionate to my physical steps when walking the bass line. Above all I was never to lose balance as I choreographed the structural pillars of a 15 minute long masterpiece. I was to correlate physical movement with an intact, intellectual conception of the entire shape of the line. The line was to remain convex, never to collapse into the concave or meandering.

By the time of this particular lesson Ralph was completely blind, so he was just relying on his instinct to tell if I had indeed made the connection between intellect and solar plexus that was the basis of all his musical thought and instruction. It is a testament to his efficacy as a teacher that I am still learning from this and other lessons he gave me almost 30 years after the fact.

From the time of that first encounter in Stoeckal Hall until his death ten years later, I was never long out of touch with Ralph. His insistence on the highest and most pure standards of musical aspiration, his utter indifference to the “cry of the madding crowd,” to the callow temptations of the “music business” remained a North Star by which I tried to navigate the course of a career in music. Although it is often hard to find it amidst the ecological devastation of the current musical ecosystem, I try still to sail by Ralph’s pure and beckoning light. And in the many moments of soul-searching doubt that necessarily assail anyone trying to live a decent and upright existence in- or outside-of the musical realm, I often pray that I haven’t gone too far off the noble course he charted so socratically on those many magical evenings long ago.

This rather Wagnerian prelude is necessary or those who didn’t know Ralph in order to make sense of the dream that follows!

Dream of RK from night of 22-23 Dec.

I dreamt of Ralph (Kirkpatrick) last night. He came into my dream as a benevolent and smiling presence…with all the gruffness and the sometimes scary side of his personality just evaporated away… He was tanned as usual and had draped over his shoulders the slate-grey suit jacket I remember him in… also matching slate-grey light summer suit slacks. Draping the jacket over the shoulders reinforced the legere aspect of the atmosphere of this dream. Shoes were those dark blue canvas and straw soled ones he favored on the hot summer days, his massive bronzed feet bare inside them as usual…

He was smiling the whole time benevolently, warmly, exuding a view-from-the other-side kind of wisdom and love for mankind. He was peaceful, joyous, calm.

He called out to me, and I wondered how he could have seen me as he was in the years I knew him, almost completely blind. Somehow he gave me to understand that he could still recognize shapes enough to recognize me. He was extremely cordial, smiling still, gentle…

Somehow it was clear that he had become so sweet that you didn’t have to fear any more that side of him that could wound you so deeply… I think even in life it always surprised him to find out that he had hurt anyone…I don’t think he meant to hurt…he just lived on a such a high plane he couldn’t imagine other people not also being on that level with him. Toward the end of Ralph’s life the then young, fellow harpsichordist, Andy Appell said to him, “If you don’t watch it, you’re going to turn into a nice old man!”

In my dream Ralph showed understanding for the state of my life, like a benevolent grandfatherly figure. In the dream he was still lithe enough to camper around the keyboard with both hands flying like a young stripling…

He was more than accepting of the fact that I had formed a family. This is significant in the dream because it is not like his reaction to his one time student, Lola Odiaga, after he learned she was expecting a child with her husband, Richard Rephann, another former student of his. According to Olga Ralph had said to her then, “Now you have a problem!” Olga said to me, “But I said to him, ‘What do you mean? A child is not a problem!’” At the same time, once he had accepted this reality (again according to Lola) he was also capable of sending solicitous messages back from the European tour he was then on asking when the child was to be born and expressing a truly fatherly concern and “Fuersorge”.…

At one point in my dream Ralph was playing the little Bach Prelude BWV 999, originally for lute, the same one he so often played as an encore. He once said to me, “I stole your encore!” For some reason in the dream someone was needing to turn a page for him to read it…although it is a very short piece, and Ralph would never have read this in real life in any concert…

Maybe in the strange terms of the dream Ralph’s indifference to playing with music rather than by memory was one more sign of his accepting easily, joyously a new found humanity …It didn’t seem to bother him at all that he was reading the piece, nor that the page turner was sitting in front of him on his right side and blocking the audience’s view of him.

But considerably more strange than this: why would a blind man be reading music at all? This must be chalked up to the blithe indifference of dreams to life in the world as we know it.

Instantly it became clear that in fact Ralph was not playing a public concert but just entertaining a few friends at home on Old Quarry Road, in the house where he himself famously helped to lay the 3,000+ bricks. Again it was a matter of sublime indifference to Ralph that he was just playing for a few friends rather than on stage before a big audience. His manner seemed to say,

“It’s all one… It doesn’t matter where you play…It is all the same great endeavor! Be of good cheer and ‘If music be the food of love, play on, play on!’”

As luck would have it, Ralph’s page turner immediately lost his place. It became clear that the poor guy had no idea where Ralph was, simply couldn’t keep up with him…Was it now suddenly indeed a public concert again? No matter, Ralph was also supremely confident that the page turner would eventually figure out where he was. So he charged ahead out of the starting block like thoroughbred in a race. Yes, the little Bach Prelude was going by at a terrific clip, like a real virtuoso show piece, yet it sounded fabulous: bursting with vitality and thrilling, as if this were the only way to play it…

Again even this seemed perfectly normal until we noticed around bar 2 or so that Ralph’s right hand was somehow completely prevented from playing by the page turner sitting to his right (!) and being in the way…We realized belatedly that Ralph that all that exhilarating speed had been achieved using only the left hand. He had re-fingered everything effortlessly and on the spot for the left hand alone, really quite a feat if you know that piece! But we just looked knowingly at each other and said, “Of course Ralph can do this!” Then the scene fast-forwarded and somehow he was also playing the magical Barricades Misterieuses of Couperin, another of his favorite encores, which sounded as deep and rich as ever…

I awoke from the dream jetlagged and dried-out in the middle of the night, too tired to write it down, but notate it here in the middle of the following afternoon with most of its details still intact although I usually forget all my dreams (except the erotic ones!) instantly!

Basically the dream gave me a sense of surprised relief at Ralph’s transformation…This was now his new permanent way of being!! I also marveled that Ralph should have come back to us with such ease. Yet to him in the dream it was as if he were surprised that we should have been surprised to see him come back from the dead or to have been surprised by his spiritual transformation…

To him in the dream the transformation was so “selbstverstaendlich” that he was surprised that we should be surprised… It was as if he were saying to us, “But I was always this way!! Why are you surprised?? I haven’t changed a bit! Didn’t you know, this is how I always was? This is what I always meant, how I always wanted you to know me!”

I have no idea why Ralph should have suddenly appeared to me in a dream so memorable and after so much time has passed. It is certainly interesting that he should have come back in such a relaxed guise. I can’t quite follow the symbolism of the dream nor quite figure what it is trying to tell me, although the entire scene has the indisputable ring of the unavoidable truth-telling of the unconscious mind…

Any ideas, anyone?

I grew up in a “Quaker cocoon” inside a Philadelphia suburb in the 1960’s. We were a small community of people very much influenced by the philosophy and practice of the Society of Friends (also known as the Quakers). In fact, the word “quaker” was originally an insult, used by contemptuous Englishmen to disparage the religious ecstasies of the original Quakers, many of them simple but devout people who in their meetings for worship sought to let God speak through the agency of each individual person. Frequently these original Quakers fell into a shaking and trembling religious trance reminiscent of modern revival meetings…hence the disparaging sobriquet: “quakers”.

In a manner somewhat reminiscent of the rappers of today, who have turned the oversized, baggy clothes, once a shameful sign of poverty, into a status symbol and have even transformed the obscenity, “nigger”, into an in- your- face self assignation, the word “quaker” has also been transformed by history.

The Quakers are still an appealing group. Historically they were among the first groups in America to ban slavery among their members (this by unanimous vote and already by the 1680’s). Quakers were active participants in the Underground Railroad and abolitionist movement. They also have been vocal advocates for peace and freedom throughout American history and can be proud of a long legacy of pacifism and resistance to violence of all sorts, a tradition continued to this day.

Active members of the Lansdowne, Pa., chapter of the Society of Friends, my parents during my childhood years rented the huge loft of a converted barn in the middle of a 16 acre estate belonging to the heirs of the Fleer Double Bubble Gum (chewing gum) family. This family, the Mustins, who became lifelong friends, was our enlightened neighbor and to this day feel like family.

Our little community living on the grounds of a 16 acre estate that had once been a farm, included 6 households in total: one English family, one Italian American family, two African American families, the Mustins and us. My best friend, Rickie Thomas, was the son of an African American surgeon, Dr. John Thomas (according to my parents) the first African American surgeon to have graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Rickie lived in a huge stone house, which his family owned, just a minute or two up the hill from us

I grew up in that house almost as much as in my own. Through Rickie, I became aware of sports (we spent hours playing football, basketball and baseball together) as well as all the hot African American music stars of the time: Ray Charles, the Temptations, the Supremes etc. I adored and revered his parents: Dr. Thomas, vigorous, handsome, and hard- working and his wife, Irma, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. In addition to Rickie and his twin sister, Janice, the Thomas family included two other older girls: Vickie and Vivian. I had a special soft spot for Vivian.

Our landlords, the Mustins, had a huge outdoor stone swimming pool which every spring all of us worked to clean up so that water could be run into it and it could be enjoyed by all the families in our block during the long, hot, humid Philadelphia summers. The Harrison boys, the sons of the other African American family up the street, all enough older than me that we never actually played together, became one after another the lifeguards of our community pool.

As I said above, this was a safe cocoon, insulated from many of the harsh realities of the world outside. Most of us kids attended the little Quaker elementary school about a mile down the road. Then as now Lansdowne Friends School stood for a racially and socially integrated America.

Nonetheless, I remember that I became aware of American racism early. Perhaps because of the feeling for the underdog I inherited from having a brother with Down’s Syndrome, I was always from my earliest years on the side of the African American freedom movement. As much as I was fired by the great ideals of our American Revolution, I was revolted by the hypocrisy of “separate and far from equal” and appalled and profoundly humiliated by the long legacy of slavery.

Years later, while on tour in some part of America or other I happened to watch a segment on C–Span television that electrified me. A dynamic professor of law from Harvard University, Charles Ogletree by name, was moderating a discussion on the ethics of war. Dr. Ogletree resembled a fusion of the famous actor Richard Roundtree and Socrates. Physically he had the charisma of a Hollywood actor, but his mind was so sharp, so fast, so stunningly to the point that it knocked you off your feet.

With effortless command he steered the discussion through a multiple counterpoint worthy of Bach. His mind performed triple back flips, jumps and leaps at breathtaking speeds while at the same time threading the huge panel of military, intellectual and journalistic luminaries he had convened through a labyrinth of philosophical and moral minefields. The issue at hand was revealed from a thousand sparkling perspectives. In short, it was one of the greatest displays of intellectual athleticism I have ever witnessed.

After that I saw Dr. Ogletree on various other C–Span broadcasts over the years. He was always in the forefront of the great battles from the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the burning issues of prison reform. Finally a few years ago I was privileged to sit in his office at Harvard and begin a dialogue that is still going on about how we may be able to make art music an important part of the liberation struggle still going on in America and the world today.

So I was overjoyed to read a few weeks back that our terrific President (see Blog Entry # 4) at the New England Conservatory, Dan Steiner, had managed to convince Dr. Ogletree to give one of our Presidential Lecture Series talks at NEC. This series of lectures is to my knowledge completely unparalleled at any other music school in the world. Thanks to Dan Steiner’s good offices leading figures from outside the music profession come into the school to address us in an informal setting on issues of national and international significance on a wide array of topics.

As Dan noted in his eloquent introduction, Dr. Ogletree is an activist professor whose life and work embody what academia needs more of. Dr. Ogletree is a great and serious scholar passionately concerned with translating his analytical expertise and enormously wide ranging knowledge into results in the here and now. Like me, Charles Ogletree dreams of transforming the world. Unlike me, he already has.

Dr. Ogletree’s defined topic at NEC was “President Bush and the Supreme Court”, but of course his real message concerned the more timeless dilemma of how our nation can come to terms with the many egregious offenses of its bloody past. His presentation opened by recalling a pogrom carried out against a prosperous African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. In a typical tale of the times a rumored advance on the part of a Black man against a White woman resulted in vigilante violence and the torching and destruction of what had been a thriving, if segregated, African American community. Typically there has never been any compensation for any of the victims or their progeny, an issue that Dr. Ogletree is still battling in the courts.

We can compare the Tulsa race riots of 1921—by no means an atypical instance of brutality and unfettered mob violence in our own country—with anti-Jewish pogroms in the old Russia or the infamous “Kristallnacht” in Nazi Germany. Like these atrocities the Tulsa event was state sponsored, condoned violence against a minority already denied the most fundamental rights of citizenship in their own country.

So many “Rivers of blood, years of darkness” (Bobby Kennedy’s words in the aftermath of the Watts riots of the mid sixties) mark our history. How are we ever to come to terms with this?

Having lived in German speaking Europe for many years and having read my history, it seems that there is only rarely any successful bringing to justice of evil doers…Even the vaunted Nürnberg trials only caught a fraction of the true Nazi criminals. Even then justice was meted out in a way that wasn’t always appropriate… some mere Wehrmacht officers were punished more severely than some concentration camp villains for example. The worst of the bunch, the perverse Auschwitz “Doctor” Mengele, drowned at a ripe old age in the sea in an apparently innocent accident off the coast of Brazil after hiding out for decades. Everyone there thought he was some benevolent, old grandfather living out a quiet retirement!

Nürnberg failed to catch Mengele. Still it was an attempt to address the unspeakable.

On the other hand not only was justice incomplete at the end of World War II the problems of reconstructing German society after the War in a country where so many of the men had been killed necessitated the skills of the some of the very same criminals who had brought the world such unspeakable horror. Even America was quick to sign up as many ex-Nazi spies as possible to collect information on the new enemy, the Soviet Union. Some of the same scientists who had worked on Hitler’s WMDs were soon helping the USA to compete with the Soviets.

The same impossibility of reckoning with the past haunts so many African or Latin American countries trying to make their way forward. So many times war criminals have eventually been pardoned or their crimes forgotten because it has been felt that reopening the old wounds would lead back down the slippery slope into civil war.

Even the most noble attempt to achieve a reckoning with the past, the vaunted South African “Truth and Reconciliation” process, in a way accepted the impossibility of appropriate punishment for crimes against humanity and contented itself with simply bringing victims and victimizers face to face in a formal setting in front of a community of their peers.

“So how can we ever hope to right the unspeakable wrongs of the American past? They are so many and so unspeakable that there is no end to them. Where do we even begin?” I asked Dr. Ogletree. He at first thought I was suggesting that since the crimes were so numerous and awful, we should just give up on the whole idea of reparations or compensation of any sort. “That wasn’t my idea at all!!,” I said, “In fact, quite the opposite!”

But thinking harder about the “Rivers of blood, years of darkness” idea it occurred to me that perhaps we are overlooking one great possible source of healing, of bridging the great divide. Perhaps music has a role to play here in building bridges across the social and economic disparities that still separate our country into its own version of apartheid Bantustans and whites- only areas.

Despite its many questionable actions Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela offers an example of the successful utilization of government supported youth orchestras to lure kids away from the drugs and violence of the streets while creating art organizations that enrich the entire world. It’s a famously “win-win” scenario, the kind of scenario we intellectuals need to spend more time actively pursuing.

Why can’t an American version of the Venezuelan model work, perhaps with corporate support, right here in the (supposedly!) greatest country in the world?? Let’s at least use the living laboratory of our music schools to look for solutions along the model of Roberta Tsavaras’s famous Project 118 initiative that has achieved so many wonders in Harlem!

Let’s make this an issue of patriotism! Let’s convince corporate American that this is one of the best investments they can ever make! Let’s make some of the big scholarships at our music schools dependent on the students receiving those scholarships becoming experts in liberation work! Let’s help and encourage them to practice this difficult trade while they are still in school!

Let’s bring the classroom into the streets and the streets into the classroom! Let’s create a whole new concept of musical stardom that links societal change and the creation of cultural infrastructure with musical excellence! Let’s make good live music a part of daily life in America once again! Let’s really embrace the dream articulated by Beethoven in the final movement of this Ninth Symphony! Let’s embrace the universalism of Beethoven, his ecstatic vision, and Schiller’s!! Let‘s really live by the great credo of all musicians of all ages, let’s work so that “Alle Menschen werden Brüder”!

In the words of our great American prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as he stood at the steps the Lincoln Memorial 42 years ago:

“Let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
“Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
“Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
“Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
“Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California….
“Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.

“And when we allow freedom to ring… we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’”

November 11, 2005 (Armistice Day)