Education or Inspiration

Recently I attended a play that was supposed to be "ground-breaking" and awesome. But I was disappointed to see that it was instead an historical diatribe about a political point of view. I left early, bored and restless.

Later that weekend, I attended the West Bay Opera production of La Forza del Destino. It was a three and one half hour production, so I expected to find it difficult to sit for so long. Of course the presence of Ragazzi singers was an enticing incentive and I was looking forward to seeing and hearing them.

Imagine my surprise when at the end of the opera I found my eyes watering up. I had been moved to tears by the beauty of the story and the powerful acting and music.

This led to my thoughts about art and what we at Ragazzi are trying to do. Yes, we are educating boys in the mores of different historical times, languages and cultures. Yes, we are learning to sing with correct technique. And yes, we are learning to read music, an almost forgotten language.

But fundamentally we are making connections. We want to feel what people who sang Latin chants felt. We want to understand the impetus for the rhythms of the great Latino songs. We want to understand the mysterious chants of the cathedral. We want to learn how music in the Renaissance played with words and melodies and rhythms. and then we want to communicate that to you. We want to connect with you, to share with you.

At the end of a Ragazzi concert, we want you to feel happy, sad, moved, amazed; we want you to feel something. We don't want you to only think, "My, they must have worked hard on this music. As Jon Carroll, after attending a performance in the East Bay, wrote in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle November 4, "...the music was beautiful; I still felt a lump in my throat. That's real art, I think--when the emotional moment transcends the plot..."

To this end we are working to help the boys connect to the texts, even when they sing in foreign languages. We are exploring different ways to showing the feelings of the text through our faces and bodies. We are reaching out to you, our audience, and asking you to connect with us to other times and places and to share our journey of exploration and excitement. We want to inspire you to experience a moment of transcendence, even if for just an hour.

Teamwork, Self-Reliance and Happiness

I have been reflecting on how Ragazzi contributes to the health and happiness of our boys and how this helps our society. I see Ragazzi building teamwork among our members and I see the boys responding with joy to music.

This summer it was my good fortune to immerse myself in the study of early American cultures. As we studied the ancient Native American cultures and then the world of the early Western pioneers, I was struck by a new insight.  We have always, in our society, cherished the concept of self reliance but when we look at the reality of those early times we see the huge role that is played by community. People got together to build barns, to put up vegetables and fruit, to plow the fields, to educate their children. What was truly important was the way these early people worked together.

I also read in the New Yorker a fascinating article about happiness, healing and the role of the body. Starting with Norman Cousins, who in the 80’s wrote famously about beating disease by watching comedies, there has been increasing interest in how physical manifestations of happiness (laughter, smiling, up-beat movement) cause internal changes in the body. I saw this Wednesday night in our first rehearsal of the new season. When we took out a bouncy, happy song, the boys began to move rhythmically as they smiled broadly to the music. Music not only expresses feelings, it can also create feelings and as the research is beginning to show, good feelings have a salutary effect on our body.

 So as we educate our boys, we celebrate the power of teamwork and community in raising responsible, self-reliant citizens. We celebrate the joy of making music in community and the healing benefits of happiness.

 Joyce Keil, Artistic Director

Ragazzi Boys Chorus

 

Fax:650-570-6233

 

 

The power of music to save the world

When I was a child imagining a career for myself, my father stressed to me that I had to do something which “helped people.” I wanted to be a writer or a singer but he didn’t think that was a good enough helping profession, so he encouraged me to go into psychology. In those days, psychology was focused on behaviorism, characterized by training rats. I got my Master’s degree and worked for Kaiser on psychotropic drugs, but I grew disenchanted; I longed to do what I loved.

When I had the opportunity to support myself, music jobs fell into my lap. With no formal training, somehow I found myself a choir director and a teacher. I have, over the years, tried to tell myself that I’m “helping people”, but was always unsure. I have constantly looked for reassurance that being an artist is a worthy profession.

I recently read an article by Dr. Karl Paulnack from his opening address to the Boston Convservatory parents in 2004 (reprinted in Music@Menlo 2010 Season Brochure). Highlights follow:

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician….On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was...” Paulnack then tells of Olivier Messiaen, who was captured by the Nazis in 1940, and was fortunate to have a guard who gave him pencil and paper. From that terrible time in prison emerged one of his most profound musical compositions, the Quartet for the End of Time. “Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music?... in a place where people are focused only on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life…”

After referring to the way our nation turned to music after September 2001, Paulnack goes on to tell the story of a concert he gave that moved a WW II pilot to help him connect with his deepest emotional memories. “From these experiences, I have come to understand that… music is a basic need for human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.”
……..

“If we were a medical school and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two a.m. someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at eight p.m. someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft…”

“Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force, or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that is what we do. As in the concentration camp and on the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible live



So, it seems I am living by my father’s ideal. In fact, all of us involved with Ragazzi are “helping people:” our boys and those who are touched by our music.