ADVENTURES WITH BARBARA

It has come to my attention that my colleague, Barbara Hesser, at New York University before I retired, is retiring. This a monumental moment in the history of an institution and of our shared time. When Barbara Hesser came to NYU to run a music therapy program formed by Dr. Jerrold Ross, who serving as chair, brought brought me to NYU to implement innovative programs that would change the face of music at NYU.

I remember meeting Barbara at the September Steinhardt Faculty Meeting in 1970 held in what is now the Frederick Loewe Theatre. The name Steinhardt was not present, we were still a school of diverse practices gathered under the banner of School of Education, which quickly became the School of Education, Nursing, and Arts Professions, or SEHNAP.  Finally, a trustee of NYU and hedgefund billionaire, Michael Steinhardt, chose to help navigate the school through the many challenges facing the institution, and the School formally took on his name.  The saga of the School of Ed identity continues. Originally the School of Pedagogy in 1890, it became the School of Education in the early 1900s, and in the 1960s erupted into a multifaceted, diverse areas of expertise.

It was sad to see Arts Professions dropped from the name and identity of the School of Education, a betrayal of an agreement forged when the NYU College of Music merged with Music Education to become the conservatory of NYU.  Dean Mary Brabeck was the Dean who obscured the Arts Professions identity in the school by substituting Human Development for Arts Professions, relegating the functions of the NYU Art school, the Music Conservatory, and Theatre Production to the outskirts of Human Development.

This was the stormy context of Barbara Hesser's coming to the School to head a music therapy program geared to the creative music making and improvisation as advocated by the Nordoff-Robbins approach. Barbara had studied with Clive Robbins, and invited him to teach workshops in the summers. At that particular time, Dr, Ross had moved into the office of Dean of Education, and I became formally the Chair of what was becoming the most diverse music department in the country, consisting of music technology, music business, music education, music performance, and arts administration, and now, music therapy.

In England, Nordoff-Robbins music therapy was supported my the music industry, with major funding from the highly-profitable music industry of England. Readers of that program flew to the United States and confronted Ahmet Etergun, the highly successful music producer and songwriter, that the American Music Producers needed to bring Clive Robbins, who was teaching in Australia, to the United States. Ahmet Etegun agreed to enlist the aid of the US music industry in bringing Dr. Robbins to America.

Barbara came to me and told me of this initiative and that Ahmet Ertegun had been persuaded by the music industry in England to set up Dr. Robbins in New York City with a place to conduct his music therapy, from buying a building where he could live and also conduct his therapy, to funds for staffing and living.

I was livid. I said starting from scratch was such an impractical vision. I reminded her that she had been his advocate in this country, She had given him a university platform for teaching in the summer. Barbara and I agreed that "If Clive Robbins belongs anywhere in this country, it is NYU."

The evening we were to meet Ahmet Ertegun had the aura of a fairy-tale. Ahmet Ertegun was a legend in the world of popular music and recording stars. His office was at Rockefeller Center on a Wednesday evening in early Spring. Barbara and I took a taxi around 5:00 p.m. from NYU to 30 Rockefeller Plaza. As we were riding uptown, I reflected on my first time at Rockefeller Center when I worked in the newsroom of NBC while a student at Columbia University. I worked in the newsroom for more than a year and had to deliver an invitation to Russia's Premiere, Nikita Krushchev, who was visiting New York City to address the United Nations.

When we arrived at Ahmet's office in Rockefeller Center, we were told he was in conference and we should go down to the bar and they would let us know when he was available. It was nearer to n=9 p.m. when we finally sat down in Ahmet's office. It was a little awkward. Barbara broke the ice by saying how much we appreciated his interest in Clive Robbins and bringing him to NYU.

Mr. Ertegun was interested in the bottom line, and I replied that sometimes such arrangements are made through endowments that are in the range of a million dollars or more. Ahmet , however, had a plan based on the model that the music industry in England developed. So the Silver Clef Award fund raiser was developed for Clive Robbins, and we agreed that NYU would provide the appropriate space for a clinic, even though space in those days was not easily available.

SILVER CLEF AWARDS

The design was simple. A performer or composer was awarded the Silver Clef Award to individuals related to the music industry for their activities in helping others. The idea was to identify a same and throw a fundraising event at the Rose Garden. Seats at tables were $5000 to $10,000, so the event was designed to fund the clinic for the year. There was usually also an auction at the event of music memorabilia.  Outstanding Music Stars were awarded the Silver Clef Awards including such notables as Neil Young, The Who, Jon Bon Jovi, and David Foster. Perhaps the most famous visitor to the clinic was Princess Dianna.

The original space for the clinic was in the Press Annex, and in those days of severe demands for space, this proved to be workable space to provide the clinic with facilities for treatment and research.

 WORLD SYMPOSIUM

The World Symposium was an initiative Now Lorin Hollander's musicality and spirituality are inextricably linked, and his music connects with the world. Hollander's interests and commitments take him continually to new regions of experience which he shares at many levels through many venues.

At this particular symposium, the full group split into working groups to explore the state of music therapy and to make recommendations that would affect the profession and the public. The culmination of the Symposium was to be a press conference and Lorin Hollander agreed to a brief performance as part of the activities of the day. It was a day of excitement and high energy, with the promise of excellent and challenging outcomes from the interdisciplinary deliberations that had taken place over the week.

After the announcements and discussion, Lorin Hollander took his place at the piano and explained that he wanted to play the first movement of the Schubert Posthumous Sonata in B-Flat. As he took command of the piano and adjusted his seat, he tested the pedal. There was a squeak that came from the pedal, a slow, almost rhythmical sound as he pressed the sustain pedal. He tried the pedal a few times and the sound persisted. Instead of being annoyed, he looked at the audience and remarked "Oh, well...we'll just pretend we are on a cruise..."

After a silence, he began playing the first movement. He was fully engrossed in the music and I was struck by the sense of quiet celebration punctuated by mysterious, ominous interruptions in the lower register from time to time. His performance emerged as a journey, a personal reflection that took us with him through an extraordinary perception and realization of the work. He had somehow managed to transcend the piano's limitations and find the voice and spirit of Schubert as an ally. Schubert's genius flowed through the room, an inexhaustible imagination of musical ideas imbued with feeling and emotion.

As the first movement came to an end, Hollander paused and then began the second movement, even though he had intended to limit his performance to the single movement. Even now I can hear that silent pause and the opening figures of the second movement. As fine and inspired as the first movement was, Hollander's performance entered a new realm, a spiritual sensibility pervaded the room, an ineffable eloquence unlike anything I have ever experienced, sad and joyful, full of regret and hope, resigned and invincible. The journey had become a spiritual quest, a presencing of the human spirit that encompassed the room and united everyone in the moment. The first movement's ominous interruptions in the bass had been transformed into an underlying and reassuring presence. When the closing passages echoed and encapsulated the beauty and expressive power of the entire work, a fading musical farewell reverberated into silence so slowly that the sound seemed to linger and echo in the room even though it was absolutely silent.

No one moved. There was no applause. Everyone, including Lorin Hollander, was captured in that moment, that magical moment in time, when silent awe was the only appropriate response to an experience that transcended time and left us suspended in the ecstasy of a fulfilled inspiration. That was long ago, but that performance still resonates in the silence of my memory as vividly now as it did at that symposium in that remote and distant past.

 

PHONECIA

 During my tenure as Chair, Barbara Hesser, our new Music Therapy Program Director initiated retreats in the Catskill Mountains on Panther Mountain near Phonecia, New York. My first experience with the retreat in 2008 was so memorable that I composed an interactive ensemble piece based on the happening of that week together with so many creative artists.

I travelled to the retreat with colleague and philosopher, David Burrows, whose book Time and the Warm Body, remains one of the most original treatments of Time that I have encountered. I remember him saying, "John, these people know something about making music that most of us do not know or understand."

The Panther mountain facility was beautifully designed and we lived in dorm style rooms. We could make our own meals or purchase simply-prepared snacks or meals. We had to clean up after ourselves, and there were many rooms where we could separate in various configurations as needed and congregate together as a group. There was no set agenda, except to share and to have conversations and mini-sessions that were like informal workshops.

Deep in the forest was a Sanctuary shaped somewhat like a teepee. A large circular building narrowed like a funnel as you looked upward, culminating in an opening at the top where you could see the sky, or stars at night.

On the first night we gathered in the sanctuary. Those of us that had instruments brought them and put them in the center. We gathered into a large circle so that everyone could see each other and the instruments in front of us.

In the sanctuary, in the middle of the forest, underneath a starry sky, we sat in deep silence. After a while, Time became irrelevant. We no longer sat in silence... we communed in silence and communed with silence. I became deeply aware of our breathing. It was almost as though we were all drawing the same breath. After more than an hour I could hear a low voice intoning a sound as though breath had discovered tone. Gradually everyone joined.  Toning began to follow contours, and then melody emerged, almost as though this communion had summoned the power of music. For the next two hours there wonderful textures, melodies, emotions created as an ensemble, but punctuated with solos, duos, trios, and other configurations expressing full joy and utter despair, pain and gladness, anguish, and delight. The improvisation created its own form and after about two hours, it returned to silence. We sat again in the circle, silent, but somehow wholly fulfilled. After a few moments we began to talk and share our experience.

The retreat was all about making music together spontaneously and then sharing our work from the past year.  Everyone was exhausted from the demands of rigorous programs in the different parts of the world, so as we shared and interacted, we found that the process we were undergoing Became a profound healing experience.

 

LOSING SOMETHING

Our journey through the universe includes an ongoing struggle with loss, which is the translation of the Newton's second law of thermodynamics describing the process of the disintegration of the universe, "the measure of ongoing loss of heat which is irreversible." In short, the universe is running out of energy as losing heat perpetually as reality disintegrates. Our aging might be regarded as a form of entropy. Entropy is a measure of Time, and Time is running out. 

But Life itself stands as the reversal of entropy, and evolution the measure of progress toward achieving spiritual well-being. This dimension exists outside the realm of the physicists who can see only the eventual death of the universe burning out in silent disintegration. 

Losing something is a natural part of the process of aging. Most of us have experienced loss where we have been able to retrieve the lost item, but this is more about something being misplaced, rather than lost. True loss can be traumatic such as the passing of friends and love ones. True loss is irretrievable, and sometimes such losses can be so severe as to permanently scar our sensibility and sense of well-being.

I began writing when I was about eight years old. When I was nine I submitted an essay on astronomy to an International Newspaper sponsoring an essay contest. My parents were surprised, because they never knew I had entered the contest. 

By the time I was eighteen, I had become obsessed with Walt Whitman and took on the mantle of wandering around my hometown and stopping at bars and coffee houses to write poems. I wrote in blank tablets and small blank books. I had filled so many blank pads that I carried them around in a brown paper bag, to have them as references. I always carried them with me. 

When I went to New York City to study at Columbia University, I took the bag of poems with me. Now I had New York City as a catalyst for continuing my quest as a poet. I found a wonderful large green blank book that became the main canvas for my poetic wanderings. 

It happened on a summer afternoon on the subway in New York City. I always traveled with my bag of poems.There was no reason to do that, except from time to time, I liked to read from these books as I wandered around New York City. I exited from the subway at 116th street. It wasn't until I emerged onto the street on this bright day in early August, that I realized I had left the bag of poems on the subway seat beside me.

Losing those poems left a permanent scar. I lost part of who I had become, at least the evidence and mapping that had shaped my observations and awareness. I lost a connection with Time that I could never recover. For a while, I thought I could reconstruct the poems, but there was just too many, and they were born in the heat of the moment. Their existence extended the moment.

Losing my poems on the subway was traumatic and disfiguring, almost like losing a a hand or an arm. Those poems had been born in the heat of the moment, and in those lines, Time lingered in the words, asserting the moments of awareness of Now as permanent markers, retrievable and reassuring.

For a while, I wandered aimlessly as though I might come upon the lost works through some serendipitous gesture of magical calculation. "Keep looking forever"--- and you may find them in some twist of a moment on the dark side of the moon where chaos lapses into order.

But once I became reconciled that those poems were irretrievable, I thought there should be some way to acknowledge the loss, and like the fabled Phoenix, rise above the devastating experience by creating a new set of poems, Lost Works.  

These new poems would not be a requiem, but rather an affirmation, an echoing presence seeking the essence of those works that rattled off to oblivion in the New York subway. I knew I could not recreate the lost poems, but I could enter the creative space that served to discover the original poems. For me, poetry was and is, a way of Noticing. The value of the lost works were their testament to the moment and the act of uncovering beauty from the routine gaze of monotony to an intense awareness of the joy of life.

Even though the lost poems were gone forever, they remain a permanent part of my Being in Time, and they give place and revere my indiscretion, my negligence, and celebrate works created only because of the loss. I needed to acknowledge my destructive gesture, because in once sense it was a deliberate moment meant to break with the past.

It also came at a time when I had to reconcile the challenge of T. S. Eliot aimed at undermining Whitman as the dominant spirit of American Poetry. Into the tempest of uncertainty, T. S. Eliot journeyed to England to assume the authority and arbiter of poeticism in the English language. Eliot was a brilliant poet, and his passage to England eliminated him as the true arbiter of American poetry, but established him as the poet laureate of an era that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. I had to reconcile my creative process and work in an atmosphere dominated by Eliot. I think every poet revisits the spirit and essence of their own creative process and work. Poet's like Walt Whitman challenged the dominance of the English Giants, demanded a new cadence for expression. 

I think at the time, I regarded T. S. Eliot as the prophet for the renaissance of English Poetry. But I was a poet of the Texas plains and the New York terrain, alone with my blank books, creating my own sensibility of how the poet noticed an emerging world and recorded his encounters with Time. I did not see a waste land as in the eyes of Eliot's 1922 poetic critique of London in aftermath of World War I. I saw a world on an optimistic brink of technology to inspire human creativity. Technology was creating the link between science and the arts.

My new poems replacing the lost works are a celebration of the creative spirit and it's connection to the process of our perpetual becoming. It reminds me that I have always approached my work as "the best is yet to come."  Lost Works inspired me to share my work, at first anonymously as a website, Poet's Passage, which became my first publication, emphasizing the "noticed" rather than the "noticer." Thus the poems were launched into cyberspace as something to be discovered that in some sense was "permanently lost" in its anonymity, without benefit of fanfare or social media. Even the structure of the website was designed to enable to reader to discover where the poet's passage might lead.

Time smooths the rough edges of all that is lost. Even Poet's Passage will dissolve into cyberspace as that Domain eventually expires and we discover another realm not dependent on computer code. In some ways, all of our creations have their moment as flares lighting our conscious awareness. It is that awareness that fuels reality as a figment of human consciousness.

 

 

 

LOST WORKS

You wonder how these things begin. 

Maybe it goes back to the eighth grade when Mr. Johnson asked us to prepare a project that would reveal our career choice. I remember that I didn't go to school for two days while I worked on this project. By this time I had published The Weekly Laff,  the 205 Home Rumor, an ill-fated Boy Scouter, and the Nixon Whirlwind, the official publication of Nixon Junior High School. I would go on to be the editor of The Sandstorm, the official newspaper for Amarillo High School as well as work on the yearbook La Airosa.  In college, I switched to music, composing musicals and arranging for a vocal quartet. I had left the world of letters for a romantic stint with music and higher education.

Now, almost 70 years later, I return to the world of letters and publishing with a vengeance. I'm not sure why this has become so passionate. Maybe it's because I find myself returning to a road not taken with a measure of regret for what might have been. Is it too late? Evolution is always at the point of Now, a natural transforming energy that prepares us for an ever new, ever becoming, moment of Being.

We are each working on the technology of ourselves, which takes us through metamorphic moments where destiny is defined as a perpetually transformative horizon that pulls us to the edge of Being without tumbling into a turbulent Black Hole swallowing reality. The technology of ourselves is our Choga, our DoJo where we strive to connect with the destiny of who we are becoming.  Nothing changes this process---not even death.

There once was a prescient prophetess who was asked what would happen if she were suddenly shot to death while eating her apple pie. She replied that she would just go on eating her pie, and finishing it. Death only reveals the Truth of Being. It pulls back the curtains of deception so you can discover the permanent evolution of being yourself.

It is harder for me to pinpoint the exact year that I became a Whitman disciple. It is easier to remember when I became an O. Henry fan. My father collected books by buying them from estate sales liquidating the assets of deceased citizens. Consequently, he acquired a large amount of books. Among them was a best seller of 1906 entitled The Four Million, acquired from an estate of a Judge in 1944 when I was nine years old. Dad gave me that copy of short stories, and launched my fantasy of becoming an author. 

As an aside, I suffer from Limerance, a disorder of a compulsion which was not officially recognized until 1979 when Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term after interviews with more than 500 people on the subject of love. Limerance is a condition of profound romantic obsession and persistent fantasy longing for another person, which can last a lifetime. My obsession was so severe that I invented identities, George and Jerome, and sent cards to the distant beloved from both identities. Of course, George Gershwin and Jerome Kern were my heroes at the time. I also identified with Beethoven and "his distant beloved," celebrated in his song cycle An Die Ferne Geliebte.

I discovered Walt Whitman in my junior year of high school. I had already been writing poetry and lyrics to songs. But Whitman brought the heady power of language as a tool of observation and discovery. I filled many pads and blank notebooks with poems. In my senior year I purchased a large blank green covered book that became my constant companion. 

Every where I traveled my blank books were with me. I deliberately sought coffee houses, restaurants, and hangouts to write. Of course my distant personna played a role in how I observed and wrote. Feelings and experience became avenues for text, and I experimented and invented powered by inspirations of the moment. 

After almost a decade of writing, I took my poems, now residing in many pads, tablets and notebooks, with me to New York. One careless summer day, I left this bag of poems in the subway, the seventh avenue IRT. I never got them back. Fortunately, the Green Book was not in the bag, but about 15 different sized pads filled with my poems were lost forever. 

I knew I could only move forward as I continued my adventures in writing. I once spent an entire day walking from 125th Street to the South Ferry stopping in various coffee houses, taverns, and bars to write in several blank books. Most of the time I was on Broadway. At that time, I passed several haunts that had attracted Whitman, and I imagined him walking beside me as I hit the area once known as Printer's Square near City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge. Of course, the bridge was yet to be, and Whitman often crossed from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Ferry.

Losing works that had been a record of my travel through time was a severe blow. I was depressed for months as I realized so much I had created was lost forever. Yet, I think my work became stronger, more insightful and original as I continued journaling encounters of my "being there" in the moment.

 

KENNETH ATKINS: A POET FOR STARDUST

Kenneth Atkins recently (2022) published his epic review of his personal life journey as GOD IS MY CO-PILOT, a title borrowed from a 1945 film starring Dennis Morgan based on the 1943 autobiography by Robert Lee Scott, Jr. 

Scott's narrative unfolds as a vivid account of the Flying Tigers and the US Army Air Force in China and Burma during WWII. I remember the film well as I saw it when I was ten years old at the Paramount in Amarillo, Texas. The film affirmed that the fall of Japan signaled the end of World War II.

Atkins' narrative is a chronological account of his life anchored on three pillars: The Spiritual Realm, Family Love and Support, and a History of Academic and Scientific research, development, and implementation.The book sometimes becomes a somewhat dense read amid so many acronyms (more correctly, initialisms) such as NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics),  OAST  (Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology), SSEC (Solar System Exploration Committee), etc.

I met Kenny in high school. I was music and he was sports. He was a pitcher for Amarillo High School, but it was music that brought us together. We were in high school choir, and in a quartet. But somehow, a musical I was writing, Gotta Sing! was approved as an official school production even before it was finished.  I remember developing the music and rehearsing in an elegant basement with a grand piano belonging to a cast member on an idyllic tree-lined street. The show was still in development and although I usually did lyrics for my songs, I was feeling pressure of producing new songs quickly. As I was working on a song, Kenny Atkins suggested some lyrics and they fit perfectly. In our minds Gilbert and Atkins became the new song team in town, and we had a brief delusion of being Broadway bound. 

At the time, I recognized Ken's gift as a poet... He had a sense of substance and craft, and a poetic awareness that emerges in his extended autobiography filled with technical and scientific data. It is a rare combination: poet and engineer, maybe a bit like Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) who was a poet and engineer, supervising construction of buildings and the repair of the banks of the Thames river. He also wrote a treatise on astronomy. Chaucer was the first to publish in Middle English, a departure from England's  official languages of Latin and French. Kenny, like Chaucer, has that rare sensibility of knowing the cosmos as a poet and engineer.

But there was the secret Ken that I never knew. I never guessed his love of flight and his secret flying lessons near Palo Duro Canyon. 

Palo Duro Airport near Canyon, Texas was 19 miles from Amarillo on a two-lane highway that unfortunately killed many of our classmates in accidents who had overdosed on the freedom a driver's license brings to a teenager. It was a deadly drive, and I drove it several times a month because we printed the high school newspaper at a press in Canyon City. There is an alternate drive that goes more directly to the canyon, but it is very slow. Little did I know that Kenny was making the same trek to take flying lessons at Palo Duro Airport, which he picked so that no one would know he was learning to fly.

Palo Duro Canyon is a beautiful surprising landscape carved out of the Texas Plains, created during the last glacial retreat 20,000 years ago. It is a beautiful experience to visit the canyon as you see the flatlands dissolve into the panoramic vista of a canyon laced with vivid colors, 120 miles long, up to 20 miles wide, and 820 feet deep, with a few areas that are more than 1000 feet deep. No doubt seeing it from the air must have been a mystical experience for Ken in his first adventures skyward.

I am disappointed that I never knew of Kenny's first real love: flying. I might have pursued flying lessons to know the freedom and exhilaration of flight.

But as he headed for St. Louis for engineering and flight, I headed for Texas Tech for an inspiring arts encounter with my mentor Dr. Gene Hemmle. 

I was disappointed that we lost touch after high school. We led very different lives. His was disciplined and progressively grew in skills and reputation in the aviation field, leading to his engineering prowess in space flight research. Ultimately he achieved his pursuit of space research and the successful mission of Stardust, the rocket that literally returned to earth the dust from exploding stars --- Reality erupting into Being.

For Ken, Stardust was a mission into the heart of creation, a mission of discovery revealing the underlying motive of such an amazing quest is "Eternal Love." 

I have slightly short-changed his description of a growing family that formed the bedrock underlying his achievements. Without the enduring filaments of family growth, love, and support, there would be no meaning, no knowledge. Ultimately, all knowledge is personal.

Even though there are uses of the word stardust as early as 1400, "stardust" served as a timely poetic quest for existence in Hoagy Carmichael's lyrics for the song "Stardust:"

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we're apart

Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by

Ken, the engineer/poet in search of meaning, was at the helm of humanity's search for reality and meaning, an attempt to reconnect with origins of ourselves and the universe. Stardust is one of our ultimate quests in search of meaning. The frequencies of stars are our new music of years gone by...

For Ken, his record of Stardust reveals the Universe as Love, an infinite truth inviting us to consider a deeper awareness of who we are and where we are going.