Commencement Remarks
Douglas Lowry
Joan and Martin Messinger Dean
Eastman School of Music
20 May 2012
There’s an old adage in the conducting profession that goes something like this: just as every upbeat prepares a downbeat, every downbeat also prepares the next upbeat. This Commencement bears similar properties. Today, we commemorate your history, your upbeat, your academic accomplishments as symbolized by your received diploma. This has prepared you for your next downbeat, that place of possibility, your new frontier, what you are about to do next.
So today we seal your history with your possibility.
We celebrate this occasion in one of the world’s great performance spaces. For you students who have had the privilege of performing on this stage of Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, you know the feeling. This room is filled to the brim with so many inspiring musical memories. Every time you set foot here on stage, you came in loaded with history. You set out to achieve possibility, to hit music’s sweet spot with each performance.
I can think of no space that so richly melds both history and possibility. Surrounded by its Italian Renaissance décor, we bear witness to murals depicting so many different kinds of music – festival, lyric, religious, pastoral, dramatic – evidence of music’s diversity and its historical sources. Busts of Bach and Beethoven, bas-reliefs of famous musicians, all documents of some very spirited imaginations.
In conceiving this space, George Eastman surrounded us with rich and inspiring historical reminders. But it was perhaps his insight about what the future held that was particularly visionary. He wanted his Eastman Theatre to serve as a place for concert music, yes. But he was the consummate multi-media man. He sensed that somewhere down the line, visual media would influence our culture, our habits and tastes, the very substance of art, even our communities. So he built this place also for film, for music with film, for dance, opera and musical theater. In this room, we can almost feel the ambitious, restless spirit of Mr. Eastman walking the premises. He was one of the great imagineers of our time, someone who believed in the value and nature of creativity, of fantasy. In some respects, that’s what we do in the arts: we create fantasy, fantasy fashioned out of history, fueled by possibility. Yes, Mr. Eastman believed in history and possibility.
But history and creative possibility form only two legs of the tripod. For Mr. Eastman believed in community. He believed in bringing people together to share the power of the imagination. He believed in the power of the imagination to create community. He believed that every individual possesses creative potential; that there is in all of us a strong desire to engage and interact. From both a philosophical and business perspective, this was a brilliant perception. He knew that photographers had the great benefit of creating community with their pictures. But what would happen if everyone had the power of the photographer’s imagination … in their own hands? What would happen if everyone could create their own set design, create their own community with images?
So when George Eastman and Kodak came out with that little camera, in the late 1800s, it unleashed a torrent of pent-up public imagination, bonding families together via the photograph, creating whole new communities. You could now take a picture of your family at Niagara Falls or Yellowstone Park or Mount Rushmore, have it developed, and put those pictures on your mantel in your home in Fairport or Atlanta, Des Moines or Seattle, London or Tel Aviv.
There is a powerful historical link between Eastman’s creating a process whereby pretty much everybody could snap a photograph and share it – well over a hundred years ago – and you snapping photographs of today’s festivities with your smartphone and posting it … on Facebook. As you may know, this last week Facebook “went public,” generating billions in capital. I wondered if Mark Zuckerberg, one of Facebook’s founders, ever thought about whether Facebook would in fact exist without Mr. Eastman’s little Kodak invention. For us, yes, I believe there is a very real historical link between your legacy, as graduates of the school of music that bears Mr. Eastman’s name, and Facebook, a medium that allows you, among other things, to post pictures of yourself, friends, family and to create whole communities. Millions and millions of communities. History and possibility.
Somebody a couple of days ago asked me if I considered Mark Zuckerberg a potential friend of the Eastman School. I thought, fat chance. But then, when thinking about Facebook’s public offering and if it could have happened without George Eastman, I decided to write Mark Zuckerberg a letter. I put it in this very FedEx envelope, and I included a copy of Betsy Brayer’s book, the biography of George Eastman. My assistant, Barbara Brown, who can find needles in haystacks, couldn’t find Zuckerberg’s address, so I just wrote on the FedEx package, “Zuckerberg, Palo Alto, California.” In the letter, I said, “Yo, Mark, enclosed here is a copy of a biography of George Eastman. I think you would find some interesting parallels between Mr. Eastman and Facebook. Would love to sit down and chat with you about my school.” Do you think I ought to send the letter?
Communication is, of course, at the core of all this. Most of us agree that music communicates something, although we don’t really know what it communicates. This is one of music’s great beauties, though, and perhaps one of the great beauties of all art: to communicate that which cannot be explained. Given that we’re in the explanation business, we have a hard time coming to terms with that thought.
“Communicate” has a deeper, ancient meaning that transcends the mere transmission of knowledge or information. “Communicate” means to take part or participate. The Latin derivative, communicare, means to impart or make common. “Communitat,” or “common,” is the Latin root of the word “community.”
And so this is one of our solemn responsibilities: to create community with our imaginations.
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to do it the old fashioned way.
Recently I took back up some old-fashioned letter writing. By hand. With a fountain pen. In aquamarine ink. The source of this, the letters and the fountain pen and the aquamarine ink, stems in part from me attempting to preserve a memory. My grandfather, who was, from 1933 to 1962, the President of what is now Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota, was a notable man with a shock of white hair and a very balanced temperament, which served him well in dealing with my devoted but somewhat stern-tempered grandmother. My grandfather would send me mailing tubes inside of which were rolled-up issues of The Sporting News. And inside these issues of The Sporting News were letters … in aquamarine ink, on onionskin vellum. The notion of taking pen to some good paper recently perhaps forced me to slow down my progression of thoughts, maybe so I could create a more genuine sense of community with the person to whom I was writing, putting a different spin on my communicating, more authentic than if I were just tapping things out hastily on a computer in the form of an email.
When I read my grandfather’s letters, I sensed an organic imprint; hard, clear, personalized evidence of invested time and spirit. Thoughts written down personally on a sheet of paper bear a certain uniqueness of character. (That’s why there are handwriting analysts.) So maybe it was this character of community that my grandfather created, the ink, and the onionskin, that I remember.
Now I know that emails are frightfully efficient, but there is an Orwellian sameness about the way they all look, as if we all bought our letterhead from Microsoft Outlook. Yes, there are those who will say, it’s not what a letter looks or feels like, but what you say. But if that’s true, then why doesn’t every pianist or violinist just play a mass-produced instrument? After all, it’s how you play it, not what it sounds like. Welll, I’m not so sure.
While I remember vividly those letters from my grandfather, I remember less so the issues of The Sporting News. My grandfather knew I liked sports, although I never did particularly well in them. I was the kid who was always assigned to right field in little league. For those of you who played baseball at that age, you know what being assigned to right field means. Oh, I dabbled in baseball, wrestling, football. But inevitably, the humiliation is overpowering. Valuable perhaps as a life lesson.
Because there was golf, which really brought me to my knees.
This is, unfortunately, a true story. It was one of those hot, steamy August days at one of the courses at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, in my southern California days. I was what I call foursome fodder. This means that someone canceled at the last minute, and the consensus was, let’s call Doug. For a good thirteen holes I held up the rear. I think on one drive I actually hit the fairway. At the number fourteen tee, given that everything else had failed, I resorted to Zen. I figured if Chevy Chase could do it in Caddy Shack, why couldn’t I? I quietly hummed, Ohmmmm, ohmmmm. One of the gentlemen in the foursome, quite large, sweating, a shiny bald pate, was preparing to place his ball on his tee. Off to the side I decided to take a few practice shots. I chanted a couple more “Ohmmms,” then reared back and took what in the delusional cavern of my mind was a very righteous practice swing. Except for one small detail. It was one of those micro-seconds in which you say, oh no, because I had scooped up a divot the size of a large toupee that caromed through the air like a Frisbee and hit the gentlemen who was leaning over to place his ball on his tee right smack on his bald head … and stuck. With a mess of sod hanging down his forehead, he stood up and said, “Did you really have to do that?” One member of the foursome had fallen over backwards and lay spread-eagle on the ground, laughing so hard I thought we’d have to call 9-1-1.
My grandfather knew that I liked sports. I don’t think he knew that I shouldn’t come near them. But in all seriousness, it was my grandfather’s imagination, expressed in his letters, that created a communal bond between him and me.
For us, here and now, our urgent task as trustees of the music we love is to create more community. This is where I believe we’ve sometimes failed. Although we as musicians want community, some of us have lost the notion of what it takes to create one. Or, we have felt that just generating an audience constitutes “creating a community.” But that is a dim view of the audience, diminishing their purpose to simply a bunch of people gathered to pay us attention. The audience IS our community, like the community many of you graduates have developed over the last few years. These are people with whom you laughed, cried, melded strong friendships, and shared perhaps one of the most personal experiences ever invented: you’ve made music together. Because music is such a powerful conduit through which to create an authentic communal bond, you have a unique opportunity to build a powerful web of friendships.
Towards that end, I also urge you throughout your life to be a great listener to other people’s work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Marilynne Robinson, says, “Every writer I know, when asked how to become a writer, responds with one word: Read.” What she meant was, in order to be a great writer, you have to be a great reader. Likewise, I would encourage you, as teachers, scholars, performers or composers of music, to listen to music extensively, critically, habitually. It is not merely a matter of practicing lots, or of reading lots about music. It’s a matter of listening lots. This is what builds your history.
Bernie Ferrari, a member of the University of Rochester’s board of trustees, has written as book entitled Power Listening. His book targets the business audience, but in it he talks about invoking the “80/20 rule.” This means spending 80% of your time listening and 20% of your time talking. The principle in music is the same. You learn more from listening than you do talking. While the imagination is stronger than knowledge, the imagination is impotent without knowledge.
In closing, in the last couple of months, I’ve had some time to think about things. I am here to tell you that time is indeed precious. I urge you, from the bottom of my heart, to not take anything for granted. To raise your awareness to the height of revelation. Every moment in your life will be rendered much richer if the light of your attention burns brighter. It will also aid in learning perhaps one of the more interesting lessons in life: dealing with that which cannot be anticipated. Uncertainty is much more the norm than most of us would like to believe. Believe it or not, it is also a phenomenal source of inspiration.
As for possibility, if you are presented with a good one, act on it. Possibilities have this habit of going elsewhere if they are ignored.
Finally, feed your community. Keep in touch with us here at Eastman, and with those around you. There is great joy in maintaining a community of people devoted to music. But the Eastman community is like a quilt, and we need you to help us keep the threads of this delicate quilt in good repair.
By keeping in touch, and, if need be, writing letters … by hand.
Eastman grads, you are our history, and you are our possibility.
Thank you.