Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?'Birmingham, by latest census estimates, is about three-quarters black and astonishingly poor. Median household income in the city limits is $29,251 - $19,200 less than the nation's. Bessemer is just a little less segregated, while Fairfield - at 90 percent black - is a little more.Then there are the booming suburbs, the Mountain Brooks and Vestavias, the Trussvilles. All are at least 94 percent white. All have a median household income at least twice Birmingham's. Mountain Brook's is almost 3½ times higher.
It didn't take Jim Crow or Bull Connor to get us here. We did it on our own. We don't appreciate our past. We don't see a future together. . .
. . . the No. 1 Darkest Moment in Black History? Well that was in Birmingham 1963: The Four Angels, AOL called it, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
But beyond Persichetti's own music, which contains many other gems awaiting recording premieres, the whole issue of the neglect of his music raises even bigger questions about how music becomes part of history and how it gets disseminated to audiences. What causes a composer's music to come back into fashion after years of inactivity? What kind of thing can be done to make the listening audience more aware of the music of a lesser-known composer after his or her death? What other mid-century American composers are sorely in need of a revival?
Of course play is good for something; it is the essence of good. Watch children at play, and the benefits are so obvious: just look at those ecstatic faces, just listen to those joyful squeals. Stuart Brown alluded to it in his library talk last month. ‘‘Look at life without play, and it’s not much of a life,’’ he told the audience. ‘‘If you think of all the things we do that are playrelated and erase those, it’s pretty hard to keep going.’’ Without play, he said, ‘‘there’s a sense of dullness, lassitude and pessimism, which doesn’t work well in the world we live in.’’In the end, it comes down to a matter of trade-offs. There are only six hours in a school day, only another six or so till bedtime, and adults are forever trying to cram those hours with activities that are productive, educational and (almost as an afterthought) fun. Animal findings about how play influences brain growth suggest that playing, though it might look silly and purposeless, warrants a place in every child’s day. Not too overblown a place, not too sanctimonious a place, but a place that embraces all styles of play and that recognizes play as every bit as essential to healthful neurological development as test-taking drills, Spanish lessons or Suzuki violin.
In 2004, Kuijken commissioned a luthier to make him a viola da spalla, based on museum instruments. It's adorable: a pint-sized cello, or a large, tubby viola. A strap holds it around the neck - perfect for street musicians. It's tuned to the same pitches as a cello; when Kuijken played the opening of a Bach cello suite on it, the sound was lovely: sweet and round.
According to recent studies, the motor and auditory skills developed for musical performance may have a long-term influence on intelligence. In fact, brain mapping has revealed that professional musicians have more grey matter in their right auditory cortex than nonmusicians, as if practicing an instrument flexed a muscle in the brain. It seems increasingly likely that the long-term practice of playing music, rather than merely listening, can have the kind of impact suggested by the Mozart Effect. Einstein, after all, organized his mind by playing the violin, not listening to a recording.
Playing in the lot behind the house one day when he was still a little boy, Neruda discovered a hole in a fence board. "I looked out through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared--a tiny hand of a boy about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white toy sheep. . .
. . . I looked back through the hole but the boy had disappeared. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pine cone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. . .
. . . I never saw either the hand or the boy again. . ."
. . ." This exchange of gifts--mysterious--settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit," he once remarked in an interview. And he associates the exchange with his poetry. "I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses--that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
"That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all humanity is somehow together. . ."
Coming to Louisville has given me the chance to look back at Oz from the Kansas side of the rainbow. (Although Louisville is a gracious, almost Old World, city--quite different from Liberal, Kansas where Dorothy's House is. Not to knock Kansas, which has it's own charms.)Joshua is fifteen years old. He decided to play the viola when he was seven, even though he had never before heard of the viola. But now, as a tenth grader, he has learned to love it and often says things like “Playing music did something to me” and “Music made me smarter.”But I can see that reasonable, rational, practical people would think Nick and I are nuts. We will have to make the vision real before most people will believe in it half as fervently as we do.
One more way music is an essential element of life. Not just for humans, but for other entities in the universe.Over the years, I’ve come to think that animal sounds share more characteristics with music than with human language. Each phrase sung by birds, wolves, cicadas, or dolphins must be performed correctly to convey its message, but we humans can never translate exactly what is said. This has led me to believe that music might be a useful way to communicate with animals, and thus extend human art into the natural world, hoping for a connection, a response. I started testing this theory by playing with birds, and now I’m ready to try it with the most intricate musicians of the wild world: whales. Because they live underwater, there are additional challenges—such as how to do it without getting my clarinet all wet.
The greatest art offers us images by which to imagine our lives. And once the imagination has been awakened, it is procreative: through it we can give more than we were given, say more than we had to say.--Lewis Hyde, The Gift
that applies to Scrollworks in particular.The thing germinated and bred itself. It proceeded according to its own logic. What did I do? I followed the indications, I kept a sharp eye on the clues. . .
There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most . . . The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.
by Lewis Hyde:Perfect gift is like the blood pumped through its vessels by the heart. Our blood is a thing that distributes the breath throughout the body, a liquid that flows when it carries the inner air and hardens when it meets the outer air, a substance that moves freely to every part but is nonetheless contained, a healer that goes without restraint to any needy place in the body. It moves under pressure--the "obligation to return" that fascinated Marcel Mauss--and inside its vessels the blood, the gift, is neither bought nor sold and it comes back forever.
On the University of Louisville Belknap campus, about 70 students moved to other residence halls, their homes or hotels while windows in the Bettie Johnson Hall dormitory are replaced. About 100 windows were damaged when part of the roof of a neighboring building flew off and into the dormitory, said Cindy Hess, a university spokeswoman.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada
