Enjoying Music: John Kuzma

When I arrived at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1975, I wanted to take music theory classes even though I was a biology major. I needed special permission from the department chair, to demonstrate that I was not just a student trying to get arts credit without being a serious musician. I brought in a pile of ignominious but serious compositions, and convinced him to let me in.

There were two choices for music theory: the established professor Roger Grove, and the young new organist John Kuzma. We were assigned at random to the two professors. At first, I ended up in Grove’s class. The class was utterly silent and the only way I can describe Roger Grove is that he was grim. How, I wondered, could anyone enjoy music in this kind of setting? Then the assistant discovered that I was in the wrong room and sent me downstairs to Kuzma’s class.

Then one morning we all heard that Roger Grove had been shot by his wife. All I can say is, it could have happened to a nicer guy.

What a difference to be in Kuzma’s class! He was really excited about all aspects of music. Though he taught us the basics of music, he was open to our creativity. I remember the whole class singing a song I had written for voice and piano. It was a horrible song (Carol Winston, you played piano while I sang it, and know what I mean) but nobody laughed at it. Kuzma pointed out some of its many flaws to me personally. I spent many hours composing bad music during my years at UCSB.

 

John Kuzma was particularly passionate about choral and organ music and conducting. He went on to compose some significant youth choral works. I got back in contact with him about 2008 and he sent me some of his CDs. He remembers me as smart (not, you will note, as a good musician).

John Kuzma took a whole quarter going through the songs of Schubert’s Die Winterreise and showing us how the Schubert’s music related, in detail, to Müller’s poetry. It was an experience that opened my eyes forever. I owe this dimension of my life to John Kuzma. I used many of his ideas in my novel Meet Me in Strasbourg. 

John Kuzma died recently from a slow degenerative nerve disease. He dictated his email to me through his wife. He was 75 years old. A good life. I’m glad I had a chance to thank him before it was too late. I encourage anyone reading this to thank someone in your life before it is too late.

Meet Me in Strasbourg: A Romance Novel from which You Can Learn a Lot about Music

I recently posted an essay about the Stan Rice novel Meet Me in Strasbourg.

 

 

To many people, music is just a pleasant background noise. Occasionally a good tune will stick in a person’s mind. But in this novel, Tony’s experiences will show you how the more you know about music, the more meaningful it becomes, until it encapsulates your life. Examples include:

• The novel is centered around Die Winterreise, a song cycle by Franz Schubert which, like other Schubert song cycles, is about a lovelorn wanderer mourning the rejection of his love. Die Winterreise begins with the wanderer going to his love’s house to bid farewell to it. Then he sings about one thing after another that reminds him of how miserable he is. At the end, he gives up and joins with a penniless organ-grinder (Der Leiermann) on the street. Only Schubert’s astonishing music can rescue this poetry from utter depression. As the principal characters Tony and Aimée develop their friendship and love, their direction is certainly not that of Schubert’s wanderer. They swear that there will be no Leiermann for them! Then circumstances beyond their control intervene and crash their comfortable love.
• Tony composes band music, just good enough to perform. Having composed wind ensemble music myself, rather indifferently, I can testify that it is a very difficult task.
• Tony plays the recorder, and this music plays an essential role in bringing him and Aimée together.
• In a concert, the band plays an arrangement of the medieval hymn Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, which has (as many of you can attest) an almost magical effect upon the mind. Its climax verse is “And the powers of Hell shall vanish as the darkness fades away.” Is this really true? The stirring music forces the question upon the minds of Tony and Aimée. I will write about this in my other blog, the one devoted to religion [https: christianagnostics.blogspot.com]. 

One could almost believe that, in Meet Me in Strasbourg, by Stan Rice, music is not a background but a character.

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's story

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Anna Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.

Comfort Ye: The Religious Power of Music

I can still remember where I was, in 1982, when the sound of Handel’s Messiah, the very beginning of it, flooded through my mind. Comfort ye! I was having difficulty in my graduate program, difficulties that only resolved years later, and what I needed was comfort. Comfort does not mean ease; it contains the root word fort, which means strength.

Here is the performance on YouTube. 

I did not need theology. I already had that, reinforced over and over at church. What I needed was something that would cut through the sticky web of theology and pierce my heart. Music did that.

It is easy to tear apart conservative theology and leave its chunks of flesh all over the floor. I have done it often enough in this very blog. But music contains no theology, just pure emotion. Music will make you say that it is all true, all of this religion stuff, simply because the music is so beautiful.

This can be traced back at least to cave man days. The men (or women) who made the magnificent cave paintings in Lascaux and Altamira painted them in the big rooms near the outside, where people would assemble. Down deep in the caves was where people went for spirit quests, and the paintings and etchings there are much simpler. But the cave paintings in the big sanctuary rooms were meant to be experienced by the light of torches, and accompanied by music that would reverberate from the walls, the music of bone flutes and of voices. It was the power of religion. They had myths, but what united the people together into a spirit of unity was the music. The priests used the power of music to manipulate the minds of the tribal members who would then work and fight very hard to make the tribe prevail over its enemies.

When I hear Handel’s Messiah, especially Behold the Lamb of God and Hallelujah, I am as helpless before religion as I would have been thirty thousand years ago, as if skeptical science and philosophy had never evolved.

Keep this in mind this Christmas season.

Music as Propaganda? The russian Example

I recently read the British novel The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, which is a fictionalized biography of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. I had heard much of this before, but I’ll bet most of you—even you readers of this blog, who are above average on issues of religion and society—have not. Read about Shostakovich and you will be amazed at what he endured as he spent a lifetime writing music, much of it sublime.

The early part of Shostakovich’s career was under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin. His responsibility as a composer was to write not what he thought was good music but what Stalin thought was good music, something that might change from one moment to the next. Composers whom Stalin had previously liked might find themselves blotted out, metaphorically or physically, shortly thereafter. Mediocre composers would literally lecture Shostakovich on the kind of music he should write—at least, until these mediocre composers themselves vanished into the Stalin nightmare.

When I went to a performance of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony—widely considered one of the best works of the twentieth century—the conductor gave a pre-concert lecture. (Karl Haas, the host of NPR’s Adventures in Good Music back in the day, considered the finale of the Fifth Symphony to be the best example of twentieth-century musical inspiration.) The conductor said that Shostakovich kept a suitcase packed at all times, for at least a period of his life, in case one of Stalin’s stooges came for him in the middle of the night. How Shostakovich could write inspired music under such conditions is beyond the capacity for most of us to understand.

So total was the power of Soviet control over people’s minds under Stalin that they were not even allowed to cry. How could comrades who lived in the best society the world had ever seen, under its infallible leader Stalin, ever be unhappy? It would be a crime. Literally. But during the first performance of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony, the third movement was slow and emotional. It included a portion the conductor explained was the bridge of sighs (Rehearsal number 84, if you have a score), which began as an oboe solo. He said that many in the audience began to cry, in perhaps the only place in which they could do so anonymously.

Of course, Stalin did not say that he was the sole arbiter of good music. He claimed that all Russian music should celebrate the spirit of the Russian people—that is, folk music. Music, he said, must be for the people. Composers such as Shostakovich were required to write music that people liked, that is, music that Stalin thought they liked.

As a general principle, I think that, indeed, artists (including writers such as myself, and composers) should produce works that uplift people, even though readers and listeners might have to endure a lot of pain to get to the conclusion. I do not write just whatever comes into my head, and claim freedom of expression. What I write should do something good for YOU, even if you don’t see it at first. That is my fundamental belief.

Soviet composers were supposed to write music that celebrated the Russian spirit. And this is what many of them, their names now mostly forgotten, did. Examples include Reinhold Glière (The Red Poppy, especially the Russian Sailor’s Dance) who, despite his name, was Soviet, and Aram Khatchatourian, composer of the Sabre Dance. Groups such as the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra and the Kalinka children’s dance troupe performed almost nothing else. But it is difficult for me to get upset about this. I absolutely love the performances of both of these groups. How can one not love this children’s dance performance?  Click on it and watch! Here, the children are dutiful little communists, but the result is spellbinding. It is my granddaughter’s favorite performance. I hesitate to write this, because we are now enemies of Russia. Of course, our enemy is Putin, not all Russians; just as in Shostakovich’s time, it was Stalin, not all Russians.

Many published writings of Shostakovich praise the Soviet empire. But the Soviet leaders wrote those things and required Shostakovich to sign them. People even today think that Shostakovich really believed that shit. The few Americans and Europeans who knew that Shostakovich was forced to sign his name to it wished that he would stand up and be a martyr for truth. But it was not just his life that was on the line, but all of his friends and family as well, who would vanish into labor camps and state orphanages. Worse yet were the American liberals who thought Stalin really had created a communist paradise. If you believe this, just consider the million Ukrainians who starved in a politically-determined famine commanded by Stalin, as explained by Roger Conquest in Harvest of Sorrow.

Was it possible that, deep inside the rough exterior of the communist dictators, there was a soft heart? In Barnes’s novel, the answer was no. As granite encloses yet more granite, there is no cave of conscience to be found. Many world leaders, from Stalin to Hitler to Trump, have no core of conscience. The best we can hope for, suggests Barnes, is that the noise of time results in the whisper of history.

I wrote three quatrains as I was finishing Barnes’s novel:

 

Defiant beauty

Even when Soviet boots crushed

His wildflower

Into the spring mud.

 

His message was a beam

Of deadly ultraviolet light

Invisible

To everyone, including himself.

 

He was a sunflower

Turning his wizened head

Toward a sunrise

That was no longer there.

Darwin Meets Albert Schweitzer

It is likely that few of you in the newer generation have heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was famous in the middle of the twentieth century. He lived a long time in the city I now call home, Strasbourg, France. I just posted a video about him.

Schweitzer was most famous for doing what almost nobody does anymore. He was a polymath, that is, a genius expert in what seems to most of us like unrelated fields. His fields were:

• Music: He was an expert at playing and building organs.
• Philosophy.
• Theology: He wrote about the historical Jesus and the mystical Paul.
• Medicine.

Unlike many of us, who are certified in one field (mine is plant ecology) but who know a lot about other fields because we have read a lot about them, Schweitzer actually had degrees in music, philosophy, theology, and medicine. Some examples of people who have thought broadly about more than one area of inquiry are:

• Isaac Asimov, the biochemist who wrote about science in general and even about theology; he even had a joke book;
• René Dubos, the microbiologist who wrote about human nature;
• Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who wrote about everything, even baseball;
• John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest.

Schweitzer felt called to be a medical missionary in Africa. He was criticized because his field hospital in what is now Gabon was not up to the medical standards even of the time. But in its first nine months the clinic had 2000 patients; some of them traveled for days and hundreds of kilometers to go there. Could somebody else have done a better job? Probably, but there was no one else.

He won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize not just for these things but also for his activism against colonialism and nuclear proliferation.

Was there a theme that tied all of these things together? I think it was reverence for life. The aspects of music, philosophy, theology, and medicine that he emphasized were those that made life better for humanity, which he loved.

Today it is difficult or even impossible for a scientist to be an expert in more than one major field of human thought, because every field of thought has grown exponentially; at least, science has. He was not trying to get people to know more scientific facts, but to celebrate how science (in this case medicine) can improve people’s lives (this is my message to the science blog readers). Nor was he trying to get people to believe certain doctrinal points. He was an evangelist, but not of doctrine; rather, of a reverence for life—this is my message to the religion blog readers.