Lecture


 The New School in New York City
February 21, 2023

Mannes School of Music “Socially Conscious Artistry: Faculty Leadership”

by Elliot Cole



By accident, and to my surprise, it's turned out that the most fulfilling and most fun experiences I've had in my life as a teacher and as a musician have been in prisons. It's work I love and it's changed my life.

Thank you Steve and to COPA for giving me this invitation. What happens in prisons is hard to share. It's private. It's ephemeral. It's hard to document. Hard to have visitors. Hard to get cameras in. So it's nice to get a chance to talk about it.


I have a few goals today. First, I just want to paint a picture for you, so you can imagine some of what it's like. People are usually curious. So I want to help you picture yourself there, maybe picture yourself doing something like this. Maybe get this institution imagining doing something like this.

Second, I want to brag about our students. They're amazing. And part of this work is about justice, and justice requires awareness, and I want people to be aware that there are kind, talented, hardworking, and goodhearted people in prison. People I wish you could meet.

Last, doing this work has changed how I think about music. We all know music is a light in the world but let's face it, our world is maybe too bright. There are a lot of shiny things. It's hard to see a flashlight beam in the daytime. Prison is a place where you can really see all the light that music is. Seeing it has changed how I think about it and I'll share that with you.


Let's start with a birds eye view:


Musicambia

Ten years ago I joined a brand-new non-profit called Musicambia. My friend Nathan Schram started it. He hired me to teach theory and I started visiting a group of men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, about an hour north of here on the Hudson River.

Today we're running two regular programs in NY state, where we run workshops a couple of times a month, and we have occasional programs, where we send teachers farther away a few times a year.  Our program at Sing Sing is regular, and we're also in women's facility called Bedford Hills. And we have had a number of occasional programs over the years. Currently we're going to San Quentin in California, and to Lansing Correctional Facility near Kansas City. Over the years I've also traveled to do a few week-long workshops in South Carolina and Indiana. Our model for occasional programs is to partner with a local music school. For San Quentin, we work with San Francisco Conservatory, and in Kansas we have partners at the University of Missouri. Our teachers go out a few times a year and work with the students in the prison, and the students at the university, to help college students, usually music-ed or music therapy students, get some unconventional teaching and life experience.

I only mention that to plant the seed in some of my colleagues minds that maybe the New School might want to get in this business.

After a few years I became the Program Director at Sing Sing, and I've also been out to Kansas a lot and manage that program too. I've led over a hundred workshops, and helped produce maybe twenty-five concerts. I also write our teaching materials, including an extensive music composition curriculum, I orient new teachers, and work with our alumni to produce concerts and fundraisers.

We're supported by grants and private donors. Our main expense is paying our teachers. Our biggest challenge is fundraising.


Sing Sing

That's the birds eye view. Let's zoom in on Sing Sing. Any given Saturday we have between 15-25 participants. We have a stable roster, so we know everybody who shows up. Some we've known for a long time. A few of our original students from ten years ago still come.

I wish you could meet them.

There's Hector, who lost access to his trumpet due to a COVID restriction, so he took up the bass guitar. But man it felt good to see him play his trumpet again at our last concert. He had learned an Irish folk tune. No idea where he got ahold of that. 

There's Yoshi. Yoshi turned himself formidable jazz guitar player over the last five or six years. Like, for real. I wish I could play half of what he plays. He's also been composing more and more. Our teaching artist Brad Balliett has been championing his music out in the city — he's now had work performed by the chamber orchestra Decoda and the Novus new music ensemble at Trinity Church.

There's Moe, who started out quite good at the electric guitar, got bored, took up the clarinet and got into Jazz Manouche. He's amazing. He works for the college there, called Hudson Link, and has access to the computer lab. He's taught himself full-stack development, MySQL, Python, JavaScript, Rust. I like programming too so we always have something to nerd out about. But get this — I was in yesterday and I saw him and he told me he's so impatient to get notation software, that he started writing his own. I asked him if he had any messages he'd want me to share in my talk, and this is what he said:

"When you're an artist behind bars, your catharsis of expression is so important. It's so important that if you're denied that, it's like you lose your ultimate freedom."

This is why we never censor our students, or clean up their language, or anything.

There's Alex, a shy, soft spoken, bespeckled bodybuilder who plays the cello. Here's my favorite story about Alex. We bought a cello for him to use. When it arrived, something had happened in the package room, and it had been partly smashed. So here's what he did. He and a friend got their hands on a book about instrument repair. They learned what they needed to know. They got some wood glue and they rigged up some kind of jig to get the tension right and they fixed it (!!) He studies the cello with the same stubborn sense of possibility. He's memorized and performed several movements of Bach suites, and most recently the Philip Glass piece Orbit. Intonation is still a big challenge for him. It may always be. But his performances are powerful — very physical, pure rhythm, energy, grit, sweat, like a set of push ups that just keeps going, and going, and you can't believe it's still going.

There's Cortez. He showed up in our program just a couple of years ago. He plays guitar. But one day he showed me a piece he was composing. His penmanship was beautiful. He had the right number of beats in every bar. His piano writing was - too much, so we worked on that - but I asked him where did he learn how to do this? Did he do this growing up? No, he learned it that year, from books we'd brought in. I had no idea. We were able to get his piece performed last year at Trinity Church. I saw him yesterday too, and asked him if there's anything he'd want me to share with you. He talked about that experience:

"When you're in prison, and your music is played in the outside world, it's like a part of you is free. It gives meaning to your life. I got to hear the concert over the phone. Because my dad was there, and he called me. I've been here 18 years, and in all that time, that was the most proud my dad has been of me."

We miss Joseph, who was transferred last year. We taught him notation and theory, and then he taught everybody else. He's been drafting and rewriting opera scenes for years. We finally were able to produce a few scenes last year at the Weill Institute at Carnegie, and at Trinity Church. I got to be Frightened Inmate #2. 

We miss MJ, electric guitarist and singer, whose passion was the blues.

We miss Sanchez, who died suddenly.

We really miss Papi. He was the MC for all of our concerts. He is brilliant — put him on stage with no script and no plan and he'll hold the audiences attention in suspense and delight as long as he wants. He's an old Jamaican guy who fell in love with Nashville country music. He and I wrote a bunch of songs together, with lyrics by his sister. He was released and the other guys think he's out but he actually had to go do a federal bid. He's working on a wrongful conviction petition. I wrote a letter of support for his file. I wonder if I'll ever see him again.

We miss Ali. He started out a scowling, silent guy in the back of the class. As soon as we started letting him skip theory class to just play the saxophone, he turned into happiest guy in the building. His smile was so bright it lifted the room. But had really bad stage fright. When we'd do concerts the audience would cheer for him like crazy to help get his confidence up. A few years later he stopped coming. I heard that an officer accused him of running into his foot with a meal cart and he did a month in the box. Who knows what happened. I don't know where he is now.

We have a lot of good stories too. Kenyatta is out and is an Artist in Residence at Columbia Law School. I play bass in his band. Ivan got an MSW at Columbia. Shedrick's out, Rob is out, Fox is out but I haven't seen him. Robbie runs the Prison Writing Program at PEN America. I ran into Yusef in a cafe in Ossining last month. That made me really, really happy. He used to come to our workshops, but he was very shy and it was hard to get a conversation going. I have no idea how he got into this, but his thing was writing two part inventions in the style of Bach. Counterpoint was the only thing I ever could really get him to talk about. I ran into him in a cafe last month, and he seems like a different person. He looks great, and he's easy to talk with. He got his realty license, just sold his first house, and bought himself a car.

We have a formal Alumni Program that they can be a part of if they want to keep in touch, and we continue offering music lessons if they want it. A few times a year we get the band back together and rehearse up a few songs for a fundraiser or holiday party. If you're interested in coming to any of these let me know.

Looking back, these are some of the more long term relationships I've had in my life.




A workshop

Here's what our workshops look like.

We have our own roster of 12 teachers who trade off visits, 2 or 3 at a time. Our students are learning instruments — guitars, bass, drums, violin, viola, cello, keyboard, saxophones, trumpet. Everybody has an instrument. Either they own their own, or we buy them and they can keep them on a permanent loan. And yes they can keep them in their cells. This is pretty lucky. At Lansing in Kansas all the instruments are locked in a closet off the gym. Who knows if they get to use them.

They're also all songwriters, in one way or another. We're doing a concert next week, and every person who showed up to our last workshop is leading a song. That's pretty amazing to me. It wasn't always that way. We used to have a couple of real superstars doing most of the songs. I'm really happy to see that our community has developed in such a way where there's room for everyone, and everyone's developed enough as musicians to take center stage and lead their own band either in a song that they wrote or a cover that they chose.

We arrive at 8am. Security takes a while. We warm up, then we split up for individual and group lessons. There's usually quiet instruments in one room and loud instruments in another. Even in the quiet room it gets pretty loud. If we're preparing for a concert, we'll run rehearsals and work out arrangements. Sometimes we'll lead classroom style lessons on different topics.

We used to try to do a lot more classroom style stuff. We taught notation and theory and I'd give lectures on the Lament Bass Line or Lou Harrison's Mosaic Technique. But structure kind of falls apart when you try to push it too hard there. And something else emerged. A different model of education. It's changed how I think about education. What we have instead is a beautiful example of what education theorists call a Community of Practice. Learning as social participation.

A definition: "A Community of Practice is a group of people participating in communal activity, and experiencing/continuously creating their shared identity through engaging in and contributing to the practices of their community."

This is education before classrooms, before teachers. 

We've taught them a lot, but often I don't know how they know what they know. They're teaching each other. They share some books. They write together, help each other. Sometimes someone will show up with a fully-written out lead sheet, or a notated arrangement, or a song transcribed from the radio, and I'm just baffled. How did they learn how to do this? We cannot take credit for it. As Jorge Luis Borges says about writing poetry: "Only our errors are our own."

This comes from the magic of a Community of Practice. Rather than keeping the Freshman in one lane and the Seniors in another lane and the Grad Students in another, everybody works together all the time. Skills and ideas we taught one group years ago keep trickling down. Everybody is learning different things at a different rate, but it's always just what they need to be learning right then, against whatever challenge they're facing. Beginners can participate on the periphery and grow into central roles over time. Everybody finds a role that lets them contribute what they can, and get experience and learn and grow.

It's made me a better teacher, or a different kind of teacher. I have to be very flexible, and very present. I have to listen and improvise. I have to access my whole range of musical skills and knowledge. And I have to build relationships constantly, because without good relationships there is no belonging, with no belonging, no community. This is very, very different from what's demanded of me by a lecture class in a university. And it's really fun.

The core practice that drives this is the Concert. We have between 2-4 concerts a year. There's a chapel they let us use. The men have concert production down. I used to get in on a concert day at 1:30pm, and frantically direct equipment set-up, troubleshoot gear, and sound check and we'd always barely pull off last minute rehearsals before showtime. Now we arrive and they've already set up and tested everything. They make a stage plot, set chairs and microphones, set up PA and monitors, it's beautiful. Some of the equipment belongs to the facility, some belongs to us, some belongs to Carnegie Hall who also runs a music program there.

The audience is the general population, a euphemism for the other guys in their blocks. We can get somewhere between 80 and 100 people in there. A prison audience — man, if you ever get a chance to play for one, do it. The best audiences. So joyful, so supportive. Emotional. When beginners struggle through songs, they get roars of encouragement from the crowd. There's a lot of respect for people being brave and taking risks on stage. There's a lot of celebration. They sing along, they stand up, they dance. Most of my peak performance experiences — in terms of energy and joy and audience connection and sense of deep meaning and pride — have happened in that chapel.

Our concert programs are totally driven by the community. They decide the set list. It's usually a mix of styles — some gospel, some rock and blues, some hip hop, some classical. Some covers, lots of original work. Some solo performances, lots of bands. Our teaching artists play in the bands as equals.

Just a word about Classical music. For historical reasons our teaching staff skews Classical but we learned a long time ago that we didn't want it to be our agenda. That said, some men are really interested in it, more than you'd think.

Preparing for concerts gives focus and direction to our workshop sessions. The men develop songs, and we support that however we can. This requires a lot of one-on-one work. You find yourself in a whole continuum of roles. Some men can write a song, make a chart, and run their own rehearsal. Some can play it for you and you help them make a chart. Some just sing a melody and you write it down and write the chords. Some just have lyrics, or a lick on the bass, or a couple of chords, and you work together to get to a song. We never have enough time, so I've had to get good at sitting down with one person at a time, and learn where they are, learn their song, on whatever instrument is at hand, and help them move the next step forward, in just ten or fifteen minutes, back to back.

We have a concert next week. It's only our second concert since Covid. People are amped. The set list includes Ryan's new rock song about love, title pending. Moe and Yoshi have written something for clarinet and jazz guitar. Somebody's doing Nature Boy but I forgot to write down who. Wilson's new song is also a love song, in Spanish, called Pensé. JK is going to sing Can't Help Falling in Love With You with our teaching artist Sarah Goldfeather. Alex is playing the Rachmaninoff Vocalise (and I need to practice the piano part). The artist known as Memnon will perform a new spoken word piece called Forgiveness, with a string quartet written by Yoshi. Shane and I will sing a heartbreaking song we wrote together, called Take My Hand. And Joe wrote his own arrangement, for himself and the other string players, of none other than Pachelbel's Canon. Wish us luck!

This ends Part 1 of this talk, a portrait of musical life at Sing Sing. Does anyone have any questions?


Why do we do this?

So what's going on here? Why do we do this? Is it good? If it's good, why is it good? Maybe it's not good. Not everyone thinks it's good. Is it about ethics? Or ministry? Or is it about politics? Is any of this supposed to change anything?

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. These people are criminals!

Sing Sing is a maximum security prison. Most people are there for violent crime. Murder is probably the norm. This is something you'd think about a lot the first time you go in. You might wonder if you'll be able to feel it. Feel some kind of chill of evil, some echo of their crime, or sense their capability for crime. You might have friends or family members who challenge you — why should a murderer get your time and talents? What would the victim's family say? There are a lot of needy people: why don't we help people who are more "deserving"?

And probably after a few visits you'd stop thinking about it altogether. I don't think about it. Or when I do, like right now, it's a fact that doesn't have any mass. There's nothing there. It's just words.

I don't think I'm in denial. (Which is just what someone in denial would say.) But I think everybody I've known in this work would say the same thing. When you get to know someone as a person, the reality of that personhood in the present completely outshines your imagination of their past. They're not a bad person or a good person. The person you know in the present, the person trying to cross their thumb under in the right place playing a scale, is too real for your fantasies and your fear about right and wrong. If you want one, this is a spiritual teaching.

I recently re-wrote our orientation materials for new teachers. This is what we tell them: 


Crimes

Obviously our students have committed crimes in the past. Often very serious crimes. For our work, their pasts are irrelevant. We are focused on the present and the future. And we are focused on music. Everything else about their life defines them in terms of their crime, so we don’t have to. We don’t ask them. Criminality or reform are not themes we push on them.

Most of us don’t know their crimes or seek to. This makes it easy to focus on what’s real for our community in the present. You are (mostly) in charge of managing your own knowledge (i.e. don’t google them if you don't want to). However sometimes this information is revealed, either by a student themselves, or by the press, or by accident. If this happens, don’t worry. It can be difficult to process at first, but we’ve all been able to continue the work without it complicating our experience, or relationships long-term.

We also commit to using human centered language. More from the handbook:

We don’t call our participants ‘inmates’ or ‘convicts.’ They’re ‘students’ or ‘musicians’ or ‘participants.’ In this and in all our speech, a core value: we respect our students. Our default is to be encouraging and supportive. We start from a place of unconditional positive regard.

And just to expand on that for a moment — this isn't because I like euphemisms. I kind of hate euphemisms. It's way more important. We want our students to have the opportunity to create a new beginning. To think about themselves in a new way. Taking the identity of a musician or a student opens a path for our lives that I believe is a good one. It's something you can build a good story of your life on. We are there to affirm that identity, only, period.

So I wouldn't say that we live in denial. But we do live in some dissonance. I know some of their crimes. And I trust them. And I like them. And I hope you can meet them. The dissonance is like a chord with a lot of notes in it. At first it seems like an object with irreconcilable elements — but if you spend time with it, it transforms into a whole in its own right, something you can relate to, and live with.

There's an obvious lesson here about prejudice. Prejudice is in the mind. Labels and categories and definitions are in the mind. Reality can win — if we have an opportunity to spend some time in it. And it turns out that music is a great way to spend some time with people, in the present, in reality.

But there's another dissonance we feel. And this is one with a lot more emotional weight for all of us. That's the dissonance between the way we see our students, and the way the rest of the world sees our students. It can be very sad to see humans in a dehumanizing place. Even if we still believe that prisons should exist, and people should be in them, in the case of Moe, or Bartholomew, or any of our students, we hate prison.

So this brings us to the political. If we hate prison, what are we doing about it? Does this work contribute in any tangible way to efforts to reform or abolish the carceral state?

We're a very small organization, so it's easy to feel like we can't possibly be doing anything. But think about it at scale. Imagine there are musicians all over the country using music to get into prisons, have transformative experiences, and build relationships. That's a world where there are a lot of people who care about justice. You can't not care when you do it. It's very powerful to be there and have a personal connection and investment. If everyone had that experience, things would change. I don't think we'd accept the system we have if we had to really live with it.

Another way we can help is to share our students' music. Help them be seen for who they are now and who they aspire to be. This is a project that we're starting to work harder on. I'm working on a songbook and some recordings of their music. Scale that up and we could have cultural influence coming from the best qualities of people in prisons, rather than the worst. This can dispel stereotypes and change how the public thinks and feels about our prison system.

Another way we can help is rehabilitation. Studies are very clear that education of any kind dramatically reduces someone's likelihood of returning to prison. That's a very tangible benefit programs like ours give. A benefit both to our students and to society. Now it's very interesting. The study of why people stop committing crimes is called desistance theory. Social scientists who study this model change, personal change, in three layers: actions, identity, belonging. I love this because it's exactly what a life in music offers. I'll talk more about that later.

If you're thinking big picture about society, you don't have to even get into the weeds about what is justice for such and such a crime, or whether prison is right or wrong. You can also come at it pragmatically. The way we do prison isn't just sad, it's counterproductive. We want people to be able to re-enter society and fit in with it. We want them to adjust in our culture, our civic culture of following the law, but also our general culture of trusting each other and playing by the rules. Instead, we make them adjust to prison culture. This is stupid. Prison culture is a terrible education. It teaches people to live in fear, that violence is necessary for safety, that vulnerability is dangerous, that you can't trust each other, you can't trust authority, that world hates you. And that's the culture educating 2 million people in America. This is dumb.

But — I confess — for me, all these are abstractions. What's real real and what matters to me is the personal.

This is the heart and the heat of it.

Our first impulse might be something like charity. Maybe at the beginning we say 'oh these poor people, we have to help' but once you are actually doing it it turns into something else, it turns into 'man, I can't wait to hear that song Ryan is working on' and 'if Lingo will just get his thumb under in the right place his piano playing is going to take off'. Real people. That's my motivation.

Healing brokenness — when we identify with other humans, we feel the pain of separation. If we just identify with ourselves, we feel nothing. But if we identify with others, we feel the breaks. Like a break in a bone. Prisons are the worst breaks in our bones. So building relationships across these breaks is like making a splint. If brokenness is bad, then this is good.

I'm not naive enough to say that musicians are somehow more ethical than other people. But I think music does call us to be, and give us a way to be.

If there is an ethical force, an ethical direction, in music, I suggest it lives on the axis of disharmony and harmony. With an arrow pointing towards harmony. Music invites us to find disharmony, and put it into harmony. This is our highest calling.


Music

Maybe the real reason I love doing this is because I love music. When you love something, you want it to find its highest calling. You want to see it in all its glory. You want to find it's best and highest use. I hate seeing music trapped in the celebrity industry, in the fashion industry, in the Spotify-streams industry. It's such a waste.

And I want to live up to my own potential in music, and find my own best and highest use.

One thing I really love about this work is that I get to be exactly the musician that I am.

Out here in New York nobody is going to ask me to play guitar. Nobody even knows that I can sort of play the drums. There are a million people to call first. Out here, most of what I've learned, and learned how to do, most of the efforts of my life, can seem pretty useless. But in there every one of my skills is useful, exactly whatever it is that I can do.

I'm someone who can teach you a Shape Note Hymn, a Hindustani raga, or a Beatles song. I can learn the song that you're playing the first time I hear it. I know the fingering of a trumpet. I know the range of a clarinet. I can help you write a song, I can run a rehearsal, can teach you counterpoint and jazz harmony, I can help you understand Bartok or Charlie Parker. At Sing Sing I might do all that in a single day. In New York, maybe in a year. Out here nobody sees all these sides of me. Nobody needs me to be that person. I'm underchallenged. I'm diluted. In there I'm very concentrated.

A lot of you are teachers, so you can imagine how exciting this is. We carry around a lot of knowledge that rarely gets used. It takes the right situation to make the knowledge come alive, be useful, and empower another person. We find our purpose when we're in a situation where we're needed. The only place that's really needed me — needed all of me — is Sing Sing.

We all come alive when we actually get to use the skills we're most proud of. When we're challenged. When we're needed. So I get a lot out of working there. It's where my skills aren't wasted.

And what's cool is this: what I get out of it is exactly what we're offering our students. We come in and say to them: we need you. We need you to be a musician. We need you to use the skills that make you come alive.

That's why this isn't charity, by the way. I'm not saying — I have, they need, I will give to them, hooray for us. We need each other. To come alive in music.

Music! Music! I'm ready, finally, to talk about music.

Why music? Is music special? Am I just making other people do it because I happen to like it, or does it have objective qualities that are good, for people in prison, and for all of us?




What do we get from music?

  • We get to belong
    • In a deep way, belong in a rich, dynamic, purposeful community of practice
    • Music is good for a community of practice because
      • Everybody can participate in their own way, with their own set of skills and abilities
      • Everybody can build an identity based on their practice
      • Knowledge and experience circulates naturally
      • Communal life is defined by rituals: warming up, performing, rehearsal
    • Our students say they don't have a lot of spaces in their lives where they can feel safe, feel supported, practice being vulnerable, practice building trust. But they can in our community. That's belonging.
  • We get to compete
    • Music is peaceful, but competitive
      • We need competition in life. We all need ways to distinguish ourselves, impress each other, gain respect and status.
      • We need something to be proud of. Pride, dignity, self-love.
      • Hard to come by in prison.
      • If violence is the only game in town, we fight.
      • Music is a channel for our drive to earn respect and status that is peaceful
      • And it is empowering because you have the power to improve your status (by practicing)
  • We get to express ourselves.
    • That phrase is a bit washed out. I almost don't even hear it. What do we really mean by that?
    • We get to explore difficult emotions out loud in a safe way in front of other people
    • We get to define ourselves, which gives us power over our lives.
    • For us it's kind of no big deal. We're used to feeling safe to express ourselves. But the value is really clear in a culture where it's dangerous to be vulnerable, and where so much of your identity is defined externally, and you are crushed under a system designed to suppress you from living your best life.
    • I think it's better here to think of expressing not in the sense of communication but in the biological sense — the expression of genes forming a life, or the full expression of a flower in sunlight. It's part of living a full life.
  • We get to be beautiful
    • And define our own beauty
    • Why do we perform? Performance is a way to be seen & appreciated by others
      • In the way you want to be seen.
      • Being seen is really in right now, isn't it? We all need to feel seen. Instagram as therapy, right? So what :)
      • But imagine the power this gives you when you're used to the whole world seeing you only one way. Seeing you as the worst thing you ever did.
      • Music is a path where get to define what you do and how you do it
      • You get to "Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet"
      • To be seen how you want to be seen
      • When you perform, you share yourself in the light of your own aspirations
        • We've had students tell us how good it feels to have something in their life that they're proud of — to tell their families, so their families can start having a new idea about them. Like Cortez and his dad.
      • There's a lot of self-hatred in prison. And it's an ugly place.
      • Music gives us a way to be beautiful.
  • We get a shape and direction for our life
    • It's an endless quest. It is a calling. It is a purpose you can build a life around.
    • It can engage the whole person, your body, your mind. It can be spiritual if that's what you need. It can be intellectual, if that's what you need. It can be disciplined, if that's what you need. It can be wild and free and live, if that's what you need.
    • Challenges us to work and become our best
    • Challenges give us purpose, destination
    • Our students tell us that it feels really good to see yourself improving every day.
  • We get to amass a treasure
    • I feel like a dragon sometimes. Does anybody else feel this way? My modest stack of compositions and recordings are treasures in my life. No car or beach house can rival them. They are hard won, they mean a lot to me. They are my proof to myself that I am doing something with my life that I am proud of. And isn't it a kind of miracle that to get more treasures, all I need to do is go into my studio and work? I feel like Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into gold.
    • And when we find that we are Rumpelstiltskin — that the treasures we want the most are created by us, almost out of thin air — then we don't depend on others, or circumstances, as long as we can work on what we care about. When we get that,
  • We get freedom
    • Of course there are different kinds of freedom. There's no one way to measure it. Who is more free, someone who isn't worried about medical bills, or someone carrying a gun? Nobody has total freedom.
    • And I'm not saying it's okay to be in prison because all you really need in life is time to practice. But
    • Creativity & imagination gives you a zone of freedom in almost any circumstance.
    • We take this for granted. We're used to freedom. It takes being in a very unfree place to see how brightly this shines.


These are what we get from music: belonging, competition, pride, expression, beauty, purpose, direction, treasure, freedom — these are all just side effects. At the heart is the experience of music itself, especially making it with other people:
  • We get pleasure
  • We get time in a mentally healthy state
    • It's mindfulness meditation
    • It's time out of the cage of our verbal minds
    • It's dopamine and if you know how to do it, oxytocin
    • It's sacred time
    • It's joy
    • It's harmony, it's synchrony, it's unity with other people


And I want to come back to what Cortez told me yesterday about hearing his music from Trinity Church: it gives meaning to your life.


Music also is — appears — innocuous. Safe. And that's why it can be subversive.

This is my slightly mystical conviction — 

  • Tuning
    • Seeking harmony in sound
  • Tuning in
    • Listening, presence, emptiness
  • Attunement
    • A power of listening, presence, openness, sensitivity, connection
  • Atonement
    • Literally At-one-ment - union
    • Harmony with others
    • Harmony with yourself
  • Atonement
    • Reconciliation