Morning Thoughts: November 10, 2017

It’s funny how my mind works, or doesn’t as some would say. Far from a linear process, it more closely resembles a blackbird’s, that is to say that a current interest is easily abandoned when some other shiny object flies by.

Thus, it was almost by accident that, while searching for peace of mind early one morning, I came across a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. I haven’t fully re-established contact with terra firma yet.

I can’t find the exact date at which this marvelous musician began to play and study the piano. Biographers simply say that his mother started him at “an early age.” It must have been very early as, at the age of 16, he performed the Rachmaninoff work upon graduating from the Kiev Conservatory.

Flash back with me to a segment on NPR in which a top tier musician commented during an interview that they are starting children as early as age three on a musical education. This steered me to a road trip a friend and I took a while back through the Arkansas Delta. He is highly educated and studied something akin to urban economics as an undergraduate.

We talked briefly about the economic concept of “location quotient” which is a way of quantifying how concentrated a particular industry, cluster, occupation, or demographic group is in a region as compared to the nation.

Hmm. Did you just see those blackbirds flying off?

What occupation might rate a high location quotient in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta? “Music?” you say. Why I suppose that’s so. Think of Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, B.B. King, Levon Helm, Johnny Cash, and many others.

Then, another shiny thought flew by. How many musical prodigies may be scattered through this largely forgotten part of our country waiting for a parent, friend, or teacher, to start them on the road to music? Is there a Horowitz, or a Scott Joplin, waiting behind one of those closed doors, waiting for someone to offer the key to greatness? Perhaps there is a Rachmaninoff. A Beethoven? There must be.

If you believe as I do, in the immortal words of Plato that “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything,” you must be distressed as I was at that moment. Distressed? Why? It’s only that some of the richest and most powerful people in America are bent not on ennobling, but on dismantling our public school system and replacing it with some ill-defined market-based affair.

And what will the new system teach the very most capable of those young minds waiting for nurture and guidance? One can only wonder, but …

You can bet your sweet ass it won’t be music.