All I really want to say is thank you.
Thank all of you students who, against all odds and against all the pressures to do otherwise, have chosen to have a life in the arts. You’ve set yourselves apart from… a nation that has become such a hostage to distraction that it can’t absorb a single complex thought without having it reduced to a sound byte.
A life in the arts means loving complexity and ambiguity, of enjoying the fact that there are no single, absolute solutions. And it means that you value communicating about matters of the spirit over the baser forms of human interaction, because you know that life is not just a transaction, not simply a game about winning someone’s confidence purely for purposes of material gain.
So if I can leave you with some words of wisdom… never consider yourself sufficiently educated. If you’re playing or dancing and acting something for the umpteenth time, stop and ask yourself “how can I make it fresh? What have I been missing in this? How can I avoid going on autopilot?” And don’t be afraid to take baby steps. Simon Rattle was already a world-famous conductor nearing the peak of his professional achievement when he went off to study performance practice with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and become a sort of apprentice-groupie to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. During the last year of his life Schubert sought out a counterpoint teacher and took lessons. And of course we all know how throughout his life Stravinsky painstakingly learned completely new and unfamiliar musical techniques, even at an advanced age, and we know how what he absorbed gave new life and energy to each new phase of his creative life.
Be bold, be humble, don’t mind being difficult, and don’t ever feel that what you’re doing in this attention-deficit disorder country of ours is marginal or unimportant. You are in fact the heart and the soul of its very being.
For awhile, I thought you had written that! I was going to say that you'd really expanded some of your musings lately! Until I got to the words "baser communication," and laughed, realizing it couldn't be you, because you're still on Facebook. ;)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though - this is thought-provoking.
My word verification is dewshlog. That can't be good.
Yes, I was going to write an elegant intro, but was becoming hostilely homicidal with the granola-chomp idiot beside me. You're lucky there was an image!
ReplyDelete