At the Brussels Journal, a brilliant essay by frequent contributor Takuan Seiyo from more than a week ago now. I missed it then; we have a taste of it now.
From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 5: From Screeching Cats to SDG
From the desk of Takuan Seiyo on Fri, 2008-12-19 21:08
If I had the opportunity to counsel a person of lesser intellectual potential, domestic or imported but earnestly yearning to better his lot in life, this is what I would say in the context of China’s piano-playing
tsunami, though it can serve as a metaphor for the larger context: You may be just a minor cabinetmaker in a small, dinky shop. Your alcoholic father beat you when you were young, and your native
lower-class culture discouraged education.You will never be invited to the emperor’s gilded chambers like Mozart was. Beautiful women will not faint upon your entrance, as they did upon Liszt’s. Your name will vanish forever a few years after you are dead. You have no chance of being equal. Don’t let Body Snatchers propaganda fool you. Forget the self-esteem crap they teach you in school. Even if you had the means to buy yourself a piano and give up
your saws and chisels for the practice of music, even if you used your minority status to gain admittance to a prestigious conservatory under Body Snatcher rules, even if you practiced 12 hours a day, you will never be Mozart’s equal. And that’s not because of the mystery of his genius.
For Mozart was the son of a great musician and the brother of a great musician, and the grandson, on his mother’s side, of a talented amateur musician. And Clara Schumann, a giant among virtuoso pianists, was not only the wife of the composer Robert Schumann and the great love of composer Johannes Brahms, but also the daughter of Friedrich Wieck, perhaps the best piano teacher of the 19th century. And Beethoven was the son and grandson of professional musicians. And there were at least 60 individuals surnamed Bach in the annals of Western music.And it’s no different in our times. Krystian Zimerman is the son of musicians. Yo-yo Ma is the son of musicians. Ennio Morricone, a living legend, is the son of a trumpet player. But he also honed his native talent – as have all the others-- by decades of arduous study and
journeyman work. But with all the opportunities given, and with all your hard work, you still cannot be equal -- because your genes are not equal. You were not born a blank slate; banish Body Snatchers’ lying promises. They are lying to flatter you so that you vote for them, or to sell you stuff you don’t need.Life is unfair. It cannot be made fair by reengineering society, which is the Body Snatchers’ sacred project. It cannot be made fair by giving everyone a subhonest mortgage loan and putting a flat-panel import TV in every parlor. Both the left and what passes for the right lie about this.
----------------------------It’s Western Civilization that’s God’s equalizing gift. If you play Mozart’s music in your shop, you will make better cabinets. Even cows yield better milk with Mozart. So, first, chuck all those rap CDs. Forget about the stupid Associate degree the Snatchers will give you if you just enroll in their stupid Multicultural Studies program at their stupid Community College. Make cabinets. But make them the way JS Bach composed music: SDG [soli deo gloria]. Laborare est orare – to labor is to pray. And pipe in a bit of Bach or Schubert while you are working, for that will put you in touch with a higher power, a power that will infuse you.In time, you will have become the best cabinetmaker in town. You will make so much money that you will be able to hire a chamber orchestra for your daughter’s wedding. And that daughter will have spent her childhood helping you in tidying up your workshop at the end of the day. While Bach is on your portable CD player. And her son will get started on the violin when he is four years old, which will help him in becoming a successful engineer.By then, your seed will be in the pool of potential equals. And a hundred years later, perhaps a Mozart or a Galileo bearing your surname may be born.You are standing at the threshold of a magnificent cathedral, the edifice of Western Culture. Much of it was built SDG, for a glory greater than man’s glory. Even the side chapel of its science was built with a sense of that glory, and awe. It’s a capacious edifice too. It will take you in no matter where you live, no matter your race, religion or social background. It will reward you and your heirs a thousand times over, if you love it sincerely. But if you are foreign-born and live in the West, leave your other baggage outside, and enter in a spirit of reverence and humility.
Read it all at http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3700
2 comments:
I thought I would come by and drop a line. I read the article twice, and being the daughter of a musician and a musician of only passable talents myself, I can verify what he said in his article as true. He just says it better than I!
I am not a musician, nor can I find any in my ancestral tree. But somehow two of my sons are indeed musicians who understand what it is they are playing -- say, why a diminished seventh works in this particular passage...
The Muse scatters promise where it will. For example, Scott Joplin lived in a dirt floored cabin, the son of a desperately poor sharecropper. Somehow his parents scraped enough money together to buy him a piano. Joplin is not Bach, but his syncopated rhythms changed perceptions and brought (brings) joy to millions.
I often think of how it must have been in that leaky, humid cabin with papers stuffed between the cracks to keep out the cold, and in summer, how the humidity and mold must have attacked that piano, trying to return it to its original components.
No shoes, no floor, but by damn, he had a piano!
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