2008 Commencement Address

Dean Douglas Lowry
May 18, 2008

This is a great day for our graduates. Surrounded by family and friends, faculty and staff, and students with whom you’ve shared concerts and classes, toils, and triumphs, now it’s time to chart your own course.

This moment’s always a little bittersweet, maybe even daunting. But transitions are, by and large, healthy and exciting, signs of real growth and emergence.

I believe you’re graduating at one of the most remarkable times in music history. I know we talk a lot about music’s uncertainty, about its shifting sands, but this very uncertainty may be your greatest single opportunity. Your charge now will be to take your impeccable standards and accomplishments in artistry and scholarship, your gathered knowledge and experience, and then combine all that with the blessing of youthful exuberance so you can go out and radically jolt music into its next great epoch.

As you leave us today, you’ll be called upon to exhibit a great spirit of aesthetic adventure, and at least two qualities that that this new age requires of its leaders. And you are, indeed, the leaders. You are … Eastman.

First, your ability and willingness to be collaborative. I’m not talking about your ability to get along, or to make great music with others in a string quartet or an orchestra or a chorus. The kind of collaboration I’m talking about is extra-musical collaboration. For your music will not only be inspired by, but will flourish and grow in the garden of real-world social and political upheaval, of human paradoxes, dramas and joys. Your music, our music, will be strong and vibrant because it is performing on that theatrical stage, collaborating, regenerating itself.

This issue of collaboration might not be such a big deal were it not for the way that we become musicians.  Music is a solitary profession, at least in its preparation and its working out. It’s a profession of sometimes excruciating solitary confinement. Be it the quiet and solitude that the scholars seek in order to read, think and write, or the violinists or pianists or composers who hone their craft during thousands upon thousands of hours of solitary sweat and toil.

But living in this new collaborative world has at its core one simple impulse: generosity.

This is a tricky and somewhat complicated issue, because we are, after all, an attention-seeking profession, although I don’t think we’re unusual in that regard. I once asked an educational psychologist this pesky question: “So, give me your take on the human dilemma.” His reply—he dealt with parents, children, artists, educators—“The human drama (he changed my word ‘dilemma’ to ‘drama’) is really quite simple. It’s about attention; about the getting, but also about the giving.”

Twyla Tharp, one of America’s most notable choreographers, wrote in her book, The Creative Habit, about how we artists and scholars and teachers and composers want to be lucky so that the good breaks can come our way, so that our work can get attention. Tharp said, “If you want to be lucky, be generous.” She went on: “I don’t use that word lightly. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you’re generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It’s like inviting yourself into the house of good fortune. Whenever I feel I‘m working in a groove it’s invariably because I feel I am being the benefactor in the situation rather than the beneficiary.”

This spirit of collaboration will be central to the survival and splendor of music’s next great era, as music tumbles about in the combustion chamber of the real world, the robust theatre of ideas; not just musical ideas inspired by somebody’s else’s musical ideas, but the mosh pit of literature, visual art, drama; of the sciences, of social friction, of politics; in short, in the mosh pit of the human condition, the human condition with which you must and will engage. Trust me, it needs you.

More specifically, this notion of vigorously connecting your music with other art forms is not a new idea. Stravinsky’s association with Diaghilev brought us Petrushka, Firebird, and Le Sacre du Printemps. He collaborated with Picasso on Pulcinella. With the French poet, Jean Cocteau, he produced Oedipus Rex. With the novelist Andre Gide, Perséphone. With W.H. Auden, The Rake’s Progress. For George Balanchine he wrote more than a dozen ballets. Dance gave Stravinsky a forum, [and he] gave his choreographers and the dance world some extraordinary music for dance,  creating a whole network of contacts that brought his music to life. Not to mention, of course, the fact that he gave us so much brilliant music that we appreciate completely on its own. It is great music because it is great theatre, and music is theatre in the broadest sense of the term.

To be sure, walking into that minefield of human paradoxes requires a good dose of courage, and perhaps a hint of giving up something of the context within which we’ve been trained, like Twyla Tharp said. Yet the process is liberating, that process of yielding a bit of your own self-importance. Maybe a lot.

There’s an interesting book by Mitchell Singer called The Untethered Soul. Singer begins Chapter Two with this shocker, something particularly radical for us in the performing arts. The musician knows he or she has to have an ego to survive, wants an audience to buy their tickets, and is someone who seems to be self-absorbed. But Singer says, “Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking about yourself.”

Another aspect this era will demand is a cutting-edge imagination. It’s widely acknowledged that we’re moving rapidly into a creative explosion, and that the creative imagination in all its guises will be paramount. The ground-breaking creative work will more than likely be done in groups, and will be quite improvisational in nature. This will require of the musician an improvisational spirit. [This is] counter-intuitive, when you think about it, since, except for jazz, most of us never really learned to improvise. But now, for our music to survive, we’ll have to improvise, and improvise artistically, and not just with musicians. This is, I believe, where the Eastman musician and scholar will excel, because it’s not just the intense music and scholarship, it’s the exposure, the deep exposure, to the arts and ideas that will fuel your creativity. True, to navigate this new world will entail a lot of risk, but the best creative work occurs when the best artistic minds risk being wrong, and wrong a lot of the time.  Joseph Clinton Pearce put it this way: “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”

In closing, I think making great music is not just a matter of great technique, of insightful rhythm, of emotional or intellectual insight and comprehension and musical communication, but of expressing all that music through the conduit of the true and authentic person ... Yourself.

Those in the audience listening to your music are, yes, looking for the poet in the human. But just as frequently, they’re looking for the human … in the poet.

Graduates of the Eastman class of 2008, I have every confidence that you’ll build and retain your individual musical identities as you compose some amazing musical collaborations. I also know that your core strength is your creative musical heat. You are, after all, the hottest school for music in America.

Thank you.