A friend (Josephine Gross from Networking Times) sent me this amazing speech that’s been kicking around the Internet. I wanted to post it here, so I wrote to the author, Dr. Karl Paulnack, Director of the Music Division at Boston Conservatory (where, as it happens, my grandmother went to school).

I told Dr. Paulnack that my dad was a conductor and musicologist; that while growing, up music was my whole life; and that even though right now my career is as a writer of words, music continues to mean a great deal to me. Here is what he wrote back.

“John, your late dad is legendary! I’ve known his name forever. It’s a real honor to hear from you.

“And thank you for your kind words regarding the welcome speech of mine you’ve seen circulating. Frankly, I’m amazed at the number of people this has reached (I gave it as a talk to the parents of incoming freshmen in 2004) but I’m glad that so many have found it useful.”

Karl graciously gave me a link to another talk of his, a “sermon” he recently gave at Arlington Street Church entitled “How Music Works.” This one is an audio (about 15 minutes long), so you can actually hear Karl delivering it.

Below is the full text of Karl’s address, given to parents of the incoming freshman class at Boston Conservatory on September 1, 2004. It’s long—and worth every reading minute.

One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, was 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 4,000 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 A.M. 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 pastime. 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 E.T. 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 seventies, 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 A.M. 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 p.m. 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 can 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.”

If you are as moved by this as I am, feel free to let Karl know by adding a comment below. I’ll forward them on.

My office is downstairs in our house; directly above me is the living room, at the edge of which is the location of the food and water dishes of our inimitable seven-pound poodle, Ben.

One night while focused on a manuscript at my desk, I heard the pat-pat-pat-pat-pat of Ben’s little feet upstairs as he trotted in from our bedroom (where he had been faithfully guarding Ana while she watched TV) through the kitchen and toward the location of the dishes. From the sound of it, he was popping in for a drink of water.

Cocking my ear, I heard that right-to-left pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat, followed by a brief pause — too brief for drinking and with no telltale clink-clink-clink-clink-clink of his dogtags against the dish signifying his lapping at the dish — and then an immediate about-face left-to-right pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat receding again toward the hallway, where the stairs are located.

Then about 20 seconds of silence.

And then my door slowly swung open. His nose and then face poked through. He looked at me. I looked back, and I said:

“What’s up, Ben? No water? Your dish empty?”

I will never forget the look on his face.

His is an awfully expressive face, but I don’t think I’d ever seen him register such an unmistakable expression before, and perhaps not since, either. He did a visible double-take and gaped at me with a look of absolute exuberance, a look of stunned revelation, and then he notched his head forward an inch to peer at me with intensity, a gaze that unambiguously said:

Yes! Yes! That’s exactly what I meant! How the heck did you know?!

I got up, went upstairs, him trotting excitedly at my heels, and found the water dish empty. Ever since that day, Ben has been more attached to me than he ever was before.

What an amazing thing it is, whether for dog or for human: to be seen, heard and understood by another.

P.S. Just so you can place the character, here is a recent picture of Ben, strategically situated for a cold winter’s walk:

(Click to enlarge)

People have been asking me, “What kind of impact is the state of the economy having on the publishing world? And what kind of impact does it have on writers?”

It’s a good news / bad news situation.

When the economic ax started falling on Wall Street last fall, the book publishing world felt the pain early on. (Just as the American film industry is anchored in southern California, the publishing industry basically lives in New York City.)

Still, in the midst of massive publishing layoffs and much hand-wringing about how impossible it was to sell new book deals, we sold a two-book deal just before Christmas. And in just the past few weeks, we sold two more major book projects.

Even in the worst of environments, there’s always a market for new books.

Wait — let’s make that statement more general:

Even in the worst of environments, there’s always a market for anything that provides genuine value. In that sense, it’s always possible to make yourself more or less recession-proof. (Perhaps even depression-proof.)

That’s the good news. Here’s the other side.

The day we were supposed to close on one of those two new book deals, 60 people were laid off at the publishing company we were in talks with — including the person whose job it was to okay our deal. (Incredibly, that deal still went through, but not without all of us first checking twice to make sure all our limbs were still intact.)

And this: I recently turned in the manuscript for another book, right on deadline, only to discover that the editor who was in charge of that very book, the one I had emailed with just the week before, no longer had a job at that publishing house. What will become of the book? Not sure yet.

[Note a few days later: the book is fine. Whew. It’ll be in book stores later this year.]

The moral? You can take steps to make yourself more or less recession-proof — but still, we’re all connected: the economy is one gigantic ecosystem, and what affects one of us, affects all of us. Which means that we each have enormous potential to change a lot of people’s lives.

Given all that, my aim for 2009 is the same as always, only perhaps with a tinge of greater urgency: to write books that help change people’s lives.

After our last post about A Deadly Misunderstanding, we got this note from our friend Hannah Ineson, who (along with her Episcopalian minister/folksinger/raconteur husband John) lives in Maine half the year and Florida the other half:

“Just to update you on one little way your work is changing lives: the Siljander book is making its way through the congregation down here.

“There are some ecumenical groups—apparently more or less officially—around the country that include people from Christian, Jewish and Moslem traditions, and we have one here. I gave them my copy of A Deadly Misunderstanding and they have ordered more.

“Ultimately it’s networking in one form or another that is the most successful way to change lives, as I’m sure you agree!”

She’s right: I do; it is!

This book is going to shake the world in a very big and very positive way. (That’s my story, anyhow, and I’m sticking to it!)

If you’re interested in staying up to date on doings with Mark’s book, you can a) check out the “News” section of the book’s official web site, and b) subscribe to Mark’s email list.

While you’re at it, there is a fantastic feature on the Deadly Misunderstanding web site: click here to find a complete set of short (two and a half minute) videos that give the essence of every single chapter in the book. Each video presents a brief live interview with Mark telling a story at the heart of that chapter. Here, for example, is Mark’s brief take on Chapter 8, “My Apology.”

My Apology Chapter 8 from Mark Siljander on Vimeo.

It’s like getting a YouTube Cliff Notes version of the book in a half hour of viewing.

Although it had a quiet start last fall, A Deadly Misunderstanding, the book I wrote with former Congressman and former U.S. ambassador Mark Siljander about building bridges between the Muslim and JudaeoChristian worlds, is starting to garner some notice in the world.

Here is an especially excellent recent interview, which discusses all sorts of fascinating topics (including Mark’s 2008 indictment) by blogger David Crumm on his web site “Read The Spirit.”

David is an author (Interfaith Heroes, Our Lent: Things We Carry, et al.) who also worked as a journalist covering religion-related topics for more than 20 years for the Detroit Free Press, Knight-Ridder newspapers and finally Gannett. Retired from newspapers for the past year, he now devotes his time to his web site ReadTheSpirit.com, which he describes as “a new online home for important voices in religion and spirituality.”

There is also an equally excellent audio interview here on Chicke Fitzgerald’s show on BlogTalk Radio. (Chicke had me on her show a week before Mark, and Bob Burg the week after.)

We recently learned that Don Gandy, a public high school principal in Valparaiso, Indiana, and his friend Randy Stelter, an athletic coach and English teacher, have decided to do a team-taught reading of The Go-Giver to their high school senior class and give out copies to every one of the school’s 145 seniors.

“We believe that this book will equip our seniors to deeply understand the principles of giving,” says Don, “and we want them to realize the importance of community. Every year the next senior class will read this book. It is our gift to them as they leave our school.”

Now that is the kind of feedback every author dreams about.

P.S. We’ve blogged about this in more detail here and here, and will be posting more updates about Don and Randy and the go-givers of Wheeler High at the Go-Giver blog in the days and weeks ahead.