Inspirational Person of the Week: Herbert Blomstedt

I wrote the following for a festschrift presented to Herbert Blomstedt in Dresden on June 30, 2017, in celebration of his 90th birthday. The festschrift was published by the Förderverein Freundkreis Friedensau, an organization that supports students at Germany's Adventist University. Blomstedt has for many years generously supported the Förderverein, establishing the Waltraud and Herbert Blomstedt Prize for young musicians, which I was privileged to receive during my time at Friedensau.
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With Herbert Blomstedt in Dresden, June 30, 2017, at a gala event organized to celebrate his 90th birthday.

I first met Herbert Blomstedt in 2015 while I was a student at Friedensau Adventist University. One weekend in March I played organ for a church service he attended in Hamburg. The knowledge that one of the world’s leading conductors—a fine organist himself—was watching me bumble on the organ was enough to make me a bit jumpy. All the while I was thinking about how I could to make a good impression on the maestro: How would I approach him and what would I say to him after the service?

Well, as it turned out, all of the scenarios I was rehearsing in my brain were unnecessary. At the end of the service, the final chord of my postlude had scarcely died away when I looked up and saw the maestro himself hurrying toward me with a spring in his step and a warm smile on his face. Energetically shaking my hand, he enthusiastically thanked me for my contribution to the service and proceeded to talk with me for a while about my future plans and aspirations.

Several weeks later, I went to hear him conduct the Deutches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in Bruckner’s 7th Symphony, and I had a chance to speak with him backstage afterwards. The concert, which Blomstedt had characteristically conducted from memory, had lasted some two hours and, by the time I got backstage, it was around 22:30. The then-88-year-old Blomstedt, far from appearing tired, seemed to have been energized by the performance. He greeted my companions and me warmly and animatedly chatted with us, seemingly in no hurry for us to leave. To my surprise, he remembered not only meeting me in Hamburg weeks before, but also exactly what I had played on the organ that day.

While I was so concerned with making a good impression on Blomstedt, I’m quite certain he made the bigger impression on me—simply by being friendly and sending the message that he cared about me and my career, even though he had nothing to gain from the interaction. I believe that’s essentially the same message he sends to the audiences that come to his performances and to the musicians he conducts. When he comes out on stage, he has the same radiant smile and spring in his step that greeted me in Hamburg—as if to say, “I can’t wait to share this music with you.” He radiates genuineness.

So I would like to add my voice to the myriad of others wishing Herbert Blomstedt a happy 90^th birthday. I am quite sure that I speak not just for myself, but also for a great many other young Adventist musicians who have been inspired by him. That he cares about the future of music in the Adventist Church is illustrated by the scholarship fund he established for young musicians at Friedensau: the Waltraud and Herbert Blomstedt Prize, which I was privileged to receive during my time there. His support and his example help my colleagues and me believe that, regardless of what others may say or what obstacles we may face along the way, it is possible to have a great career in music without compromising our beliefs, it is possible to pursue excellence without giving way to egotism, and it is possible to bring glory to God and light to an often dark world through our music-making.

Receiving the Waltraud and Herbert Blomstedt Prize in Friedensau, June 2015.

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This is the fourth in a series of articles about people who have changed my life for the better. For some background information on what inspired me to write this series, click here.

Inspirational Person of the Week: Aila Stammler

I liked Aila from the very beginning—even though the beginning was just a “business” email. I had written to her to ask some questions about her German language course at Friedensau Adventist University, in which I was thinking of enrolling. She responded very promptly with detailed and helpful information, and somehow I could tell just from reading her email that she was a very nice person. I quite enjoyed our “business” correspondence over the next few months and, when I finally arrived in Friedensau in the fall of 2014, I found that she was just as friendly and thoughtful in person. She invited me to her house for dinner when I arrived and personally showed me around the campus, introducing me to people as we went along. She also gave me a package of “goodies” and a card. It said, “Dear Ethan, I can’t tell you how happy I am that you have come to Friedensau.” She hardly knew me, but somehow I knew that she meant it; she radiated genuineness.

There was another German course I had considered, but the chap I emailed for info about it wasn’t as helpful as Aila—so Aila got the student. But she’s not just warm and friendly for PR purposes—it’s just who she is. She regularly goes above and beyond the call of duty to get to know her students on a personal level and to look out for their wellbeing. Aila helped me feel at home in a foreign land. During my time in Friedensau she regularly invited me to her house for dinner, board games, movies, etc. And because she knew I was into music, she took me to concerts in places like Leipzig and Berlin. She also was my biggest cheerleader when I performed music on campus, and even when I performed out of town once, she sent me a message of encouragement.

Aila ia a great teacher. She is always thoroughly prepared for her classes and takes great delight in coming up with new and entertaining ways to teach certain concepts. She’s patient and helpful when students get confused; she fosters an environment in which the students feel comfortable trying out what they’re learning—in which they don’t feel embarrassed about making mistakes. One senses that she takes great joy in her teaching, and it’s contagious. Some people consider language barriers to be annoying and the learning of foreign languages to be a “necessary evil,” but to Aila—who speaks fluent English, German, and French, along with some Italian thrown in for good measure—languages are beautiful and are a unique expression of the cultures to which they belong. She wants her students not only to learn how to communicate in German, but to enjoy doing so—to enjoy its idiosyncrasies, to appreciate the language on an aesthetic level, delighting even in the nuance of how the words sound. As a musician, I appreciated this perspective very much.

When I had questions or needed advice, even about things not pertaining to the German course, Aila was the person I went to. In the spring of 2015, near the end of my time at Friedensau, Aila found out that I was struggling to decide what to do with my life. Going to Friedensau had been a way of trying to postpone that decision, but when the year was almost up, I was not really any closer to a revelation about what the next step should be. If anything, I was farther from it. It didn’t help that I had let my OCD flair up again (something I had struggled with for years). Somehow I started to feel panicky—I had an obsessive, irrational fear of some kind of impending apocalypse, and was at a loss to decide what my next steps should be in a world that seemed to be crumbling around me (people with OCD often deal with existential dread of things beyond their control). Aila didn’t know all of that, but she knew I was in the proverbial valley of decision. “Would you like to talk about it?” she asked. “You’re future is important to me.” She invited me to go on a walk that evening with her and her husband, Wolfgang, and, after listening intently to all of the crazy stuff I had to say, they offered down-to-earth, levelheaded advice. It had a calming effect on me and helped check some of my irrational thoughts. And it just meant a lot that they cared about me.

Aila recently told me that one of her former students called her from America, overjoyed, to say “Guess what! Guess what! I got engaged!” Aila told me that she was surprised and very flattered that her student, thousands of miles away, would think to contact her personally to share the glad tidings. But, to me, that’s not surprising at all; I’m quite sure that Aila’s student contacted her because she knew that Aila would genuinely care. It’s the same reason that I often find myself contacting her, even about trivial things: she always cares. I want to learn to care about people like Aila does.

Daniel Hayes and I with Aila in December, 2016. We were both former students of Aila's and happened to be visiting Friedensau at the same time.

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For more about Aila's German course, click here.

This is the third in a series of articles about people who have changed my life for the better. For some background information on what inspired me to write this series, click here.

Inspirational Person of the Week: Sarah Tullock

Sarah Tullock and I performing at First Baptist Church of Chattanooga in 2014

For years I had dreamed of attending Cambridge. I wanted to come as an undergraduate some 8 years ago—I was dying to get away from the “insignificance” of small-town Tennessee and “make it big.” But when I sent my transcripts to Cambridge they let me know in no uncertain terms that I would have zero chance of getting in. My guess is they don’t see too many GED diplomas. So I stayed in Chattanooga. I was disappointed but, in hindsight, I can see that my early rejection at Cambridge was probably providential. During the years that followed in Chattanooga I crossed paths with a lot of people who changed my life in profound ways.

One particularly notable example is a “kindred spirit” I met in 2011 when I was the pianist at Ooltewah United Methodist Church. During my time there the choir director resigned. Conveniently, a young lady at the church had recently moved to the area and was fresh out of grad school with a degree in music education; the church decided to hire her “on a trial basis.” Her name was Sarah Tullock. I unintentionally made her very first rehearsal with the choir quite challenging by completely forgetting to even show up. I was probably somewhere composing away. I felt badly about that and, a few days later, found myself in the choir room waiting on pins and needles for my first meeting with her, trying to formulate a suitable apology.

But I found that there was no cause for nervousness. Sarah carries with her an aura of peace and grace that instantly puts people at ease. She wasn’t on a “trial basis” for long; she won over everyone at the church almost immediately. Had she not been so young, no one would have ever assumed that she was fresh out of school—her wisdom was beyond her years and she already seemed like a seasoned choir director. In the following weeks I was amazed not only at Sarah’s extraordinary musical ability, but at the way she built a sense of camaraderie and community in that church through music. For Sarah, music is about building bridges between people, about making people feel loved and valued, like they are an integral part of something important.

Largely because of her influence, I began to reevaluate my own motivation for making music. I began to realize that I was more self-centered than I had thought—I wanted to play the piano in order to show people how good I was; I wanted people to perform my compositions so I would get recognition; I wanted to go to Cambridge for the prestige associated with it. Sarah unknowingly showed me a better way—that music should be about community; that our motivation for making music should be our love for people of all walks of life.

Sarah is one of the rare souls who seems to be extraordinarily good at everything she tries: teaching, singing, conducting, writing songs, playing piano, playing guitar, writing blogs… you name it. And yet she never shows off. There’s a down-to-earth quality about everything she does that encourages us to embrace our own humanity. I didn’t realize just how much I needed that perspective until I finally achieved my goal and came to Cambridge last fall. What I’ve discovered is that this place doesn’t make me feel nearly as significant as I used to think it would. On the contrary, it’s pretty darn easy to feel like a total failure here in this highly concentrated pool of some of the world’s most brilliant minds. Our own problems seem tremendously magnified in a high-pressure environment like this; we set unrealistic expectations for ourselves and then become discouraged when we don’t fulfill them.

In manifold ways Sarah is always trying to remind people like me that we’re just human, and that it’s okay to be human. We need to strive for great things, but we don’t need to beat ourselves up every time we make a mistake. When we do that, it generally indicates that we find our identity in the wrong place—it means we measure our sense of self worth by what we achieve, rather than realizing that our worth in God’s eyes is the same no matter what. One of Sarah’s songs says, “I won’t worship the work of my own hands.” That’s a message that’s deeply needed in Cambridge.



So when I was conducting a choral rehearsal a couple of weeks ago and miserably failed at what I was trying to accomplish and embarrassed myself in front of the whole choir, my reaction was different than it would have been a few years ago. I told myself: Yup, that was really bad, but you’ll live. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do a better job next week. It’s an awful lot like something Sarah had written to me in an email shortly after I arrived in Cambridge:

“To go away and learn how to be alright in your own skin is a very natural thing in the human experience. It was brave of you to pursue your goal, brave of you to go there when you'd achieved it . . . and now it will be brave of you to stick with it and face whatever comes after.”

I can now say with confidence that, because of Sarah, I am both braver and more willing to forgive myself when I fail. Many, many others can undoubtedly say the same. That’s a tremendous gift, and the world would be a much better place if more of us sought with equal devotion to pass that gift on to those around us—to embrace humanity in all it’s diversity and imperfection. I, for one, am going to try. Thanks for the inspiration, Sarah!

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For more about Sarah and her music, click here to visit her website.

This is the second in a series of articles about people who have changed my life for the better. For some background information on what inspired me to write this series, click here.

Inspirational Person of the Week: Gennevieve Brown-Kibble

In the summer of 2009 I was just out of high school and was a self-conscious, awkward music nerd with no social life. I was also a deeply frustrated composer because I couldn’t get anybody to perform my music. With no clear direction for my life and no motivation to start college, I resigned myself to simply trying to find a job. I decided to try to find work as a pianist—largely because I had an aversion to manual labor. One day at the music building at Southern Adventist University I saw a notice hanging on the bulletin board: “Accompanist Needed for University Choirs. If interested contact Gennevieve Brown-Kibble, Director of Choral Activities.” She could scarcely have expected much from the gaunt teenager with wild, greasy hair who showed up at her office door the next day to arrange an audition. But she was very gracious, and she listened to me play.

Apparently she liked what she heard, because she hired me on the spot, even though I wasn’t even a college student. In my mind, I wasn’t much of anything; I felt like a flake. But Dr. Kibble believed in me, and that was a great boost to my self-esteem. The experience I gained working for her was invaluable. I loved seeing her in action. The vast majority of the choir members were not music majors and most had no vocal training, but the collective sound she enabled them to make was absolutely astonishing to me.

From Dr. Kibble I learned how important expectations are: If we think, They’re not trained, so they aren’t capable of much, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But they can do great things, greater than any of them can imagine, if we believe that they can—and if we refuse to settle for anything less. It doesn’t involve any coddling; it just means showing up and getting to work. She’s so efficient in rehearsal that she literally doesn’t leave the singers any time to think, I can’t do this. And, by the end of the rehearsal, they’ve done something amazing. The uncommon vitality of the choral singing they in turn share with the community enriches the lives of all who hear it; it certainly enriched the life of their nerdy accompanist in 2009, and it was because of Dr. Kibble that I became fully sold on the idea of pursuing a career in choral music.

One day I worked up my courage and sheepishly enquired if she would be willing to look at some of my choral compositions, afraid that I would be met with the same lack of interest many others had shown. “I would love to!,” she said, and when I showed her my work she radiated genuine enthusiasm. In the years that followed, I would often drop by her office and play my newest creations for her. Of course, I was always secretly hoping that she would program them, but I also found that I just needed somebody to care about them—and she always did.  In the years that have since gone by, Dr. Kibble has programed more of my compositions than anyone else. I’m immensely grateful to her for believing in me, and for her commitment to using the powerful medium of choral singing as a force for good in the world. 

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For more on Gennevieve Brown-Kibble, click here.

This is the first in a series of articles about people who have changed my life for the better. For some background information on what inspired me to write this series, click here.

Inspirational People: A New Project

It’s often said that people aren’t really appreciated until they die. There’s a little something in us that would like to know what might be said at our funeral. Will we be eulogized? What good things will people remember about us when we’re gone? We go through life not fully knowing if, or to what extent, we’re having a positive impact on others. We doubt ourselves—we doubt our own motives and abilities. We’re so intimately acquainted with our own faults that we often find it hard to see anything else, and we therefore find it difficult to imagine that that anyone else sees us differently than we see ourselves. We’re incredibly curious, but also rather terrified at the prospect of finding out how others really perceive us. We expect—and yet dread—a mere conformation of what our negative self image tells us, but we allow ourselves to hope that maybe a little bit of something good shines through and actually gets noticed.

Well, the fact is, a lot more good shines through than most people realize. The problem is that a lot of us spend so much time worrying about what others think of us that it doesn’t occur to us to let others know what we think of them—to let people know what we like about them, how grateful we are for the positive impact they’ve had on our lives, or simply that we love them. It’s sad to go through life not knowing.

Of course, what I’ve written above is not exactly original—Dale Carnegie and plenty of other people have said similar things. We know we ought to express appreciation more often, but we’re just too busy, too forgetful, or simply don’t know how to go about it. I confess that I’ve used all of those excuses before. So I’ve decided to go about it in a more intentional and concrete way: I’m going to write a series of “blurbs” about people who have changed my life for the better. My inspiration for this came from a presentation by composer/conductor David Brunner at the 2015 Tennessee conference of the American Choral Directors Association. The entire presentation was simply about people who had positively impacted his life. He talked about several individuals, their unique gifts, and what special things he gleaned from them that made him a better person.

At first, I must confess that I felt a little nonplussed. We’re here to learn practical information about choral conducting, and here you are giving a sentimental speech about people most of us don’t even know! But by the end of the presentation he had completely won me over. I don’t know that there’s ever an inappropriate time to say good things about others; we can never do it enough. And it’s never more appropriate than in the context of a conference about music. It’s a rare bird who pursues a career in music because his parents forced him or because he’s after money. No, I venture to say we’re all in this because someone inspired us—someone’s music touched us in a profound way. And we’re all in this because we thereafter had an inestimably huge amount of help and guidance along the way from people who cared about us and believed in the crazy “artist life” we’d chosen for ourselves.

At the end of his speech, Dr. Brunner handed out a sheet on which we could write down the names of people who had had a positive impact on our lives. He told us to contact them and let them know how much we appreciated them. Well, I suppose the following series of blurbs is one way I’ve chosen to take Dr. Brunner up on his challenge. And to start off the expressions of appreciation, I’d just like to say that I am immensely grateful for his presentation that day at Tennessee ACDA. And perhaps as you read a little about the people who have impacted me the most, you, too, will think of people you could write about or contact to say “thanks.” In expressing appreciation, we make the world around us a better place. If nothing else, it prevents us from becoming egotists, because it reminds us of how dismally we may have failed without the inspiration and practical help we’ve received along the way.

I’ll be making every effort to post a blurb about someone once a week for the next several weeks.

Setting Music Free

Early in my musical development I became intensely enamored with the music of Frederic Chopin. Though virtually all of his music was beyond my skill level, I attempted with great vehemence to play just about any Chopin work I could lay my 12-year-old hands on. The polish virtuoso quickly became my hero. Not surprisingly, I also encountered the music of Chopin’s colleague, Franz Liszt, around the same time. I loved Liszt’s music too, but something I read about him bothered me a little: Liszt was said to be “the greatest pianist in the world.” That agitated me because it meant that Liszt was greater than Chopin, my hero.

As was my custom when puzzled about any of the litany of musical information I was cramming into my brain at every opportunity, I took my concerns to lay at the feet of my piano teacher, J. Bruce Ashton. An eloquent, distinguished university professor nearing the end of a long and fruitful career in music, Dr. Ashton always seemed to have the answers, and I, at the beginning of my life’s musical journey, was in awe of his seemingly inexhaustible knowledge and wisdom. So I told him what I had read about Liszt being “the greatest” and asked if that necessarily meant he was better than Chopin. Having braced myself for a mere confirmation of what I’d read, I got an answer I wasn’t expecting—from the Apostle Paul, no less:

“We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise” (II Corinthians 2:12).

Dr. Ashton went on to explain that he did not, in fact, consider Liszt to be better than Chopin. He conceded that Chopin was of slight build and rather ill for most of his life, and that perhaps Liszt could therefore play louder. But, as far as Dr. Ashton was concerned, “louder” does not equal “better,” and both pianists were extraordinary in their own right and had their own unique merits.

And thus I learned two incredibly valuable life lessons: 1) You can’t just blindly believe everything you read, regardless of how reputable the source of information or commonplace the ideology, and 2) it’s folly to try to compare apples with oranges. Of course, I was young and naïve, and didn’t realize that these are extremely basic principles that most people regard as very obvious. The question is, if they’re so basic, why do we forget them so easily? Dr. Ashton taught me in a very memorable way how important these “obvious” points are when it comes to the arts especially. That’s because so little about art is concrete; artists deal primarily with questions of aesthetic and emotion—and not primarily of math and science. There’s so much subjective opinion involved for that reason. It’s virtually impossible to escape biases based on our own personal preferences.

That’s what Dr. Ashton helped me to see for the first time all those years ago, and that’s why, for me, a red flag goes up whenever I hear someone using superlatives or talking about absolutes when it comes to the arts. I consciously avoid words and phrases like “greatest,” “best,” “most beautiful,” “most difficult,” etc. To say that Liszt is better than Chopin is tantamount to insisting that vanilla is better than chocolate. It’s not fact; no matter how many letters are behind the name of the person saying it, it’s nothing more than opinion.

This is why competitions in the arts are for the most part a rather silly exercise. Though it is possible, to some extent, to measure technical skill (i.e. Suzie plays scales more cleanly than Joey), to measure the heart and soul of the matter—the so-called musicality—is another thing entirely. Yes, some people certainly have more “heart and soul” in their work than others, and that’s often readily recognizable. But what if, for example, a Salvador Dali and a Pablo Picasso showed up at the local art contest? Who’s to say that the surrealism of the former is inherently better the cubism of the latter? Or what if a Vladimir Horowitz and an Artur Rubinstein were somehow reincarnated and entered one of today’s major piano competitions? There’s more than one way to effectively perform the same piano piece, and who’s to say which is inherently better? And what of, for example, concerto competitions open to players of all instruments? You might wind up with a pianist playing Mozart competing against a flutist playing Khachaturian. It’s as preposterous as sending your school’s football team to play against the competing school’s basketball team.

On a deeper level, the main problem with competition is that its principles are not in harmony with the underlying principles and chief purpose of music, as I see it. In our society music is often a force that divides us. This isn’t just because of all of the competition in the music industry, but also simply because it’s easy to be so emotional about the kind of music that we think is best, and it becomes a hill we deem worthy to die on. Even churches sometimes become divided because of disagreements about the kind of music that should be used in their services. But I believe that music, if its powers are harnessed and used for good, can bring us together and promote peace in the world in profound ways. It can build a sense of community, of belonging, of feeling like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself.

But the excessive emphasis on competition and big egos in the music industry promote the opposite ideals and often prevent music from fulfilling its potential. We’re told we’ve got to push our way to the top and learn to “toot our own horn” or else we won’t get anywhere. So many aspiring musicians spend their lives trying to prove that they are “better” than their peers, and I too have fallen sway to this mentality at times. But when we think this way we miss the boat entirely. Even if we become “successful” as a result of this “survival-of-the-fittest” system, we won’t really be successful because we will have built a career on ideals that are contrary to what music is all about. And perhaps we’ll regret that some day when we’re old and we look back on a life spent pushing others out of the way.

Let me try to illustrate all of this in another way. I love nature and like to think that the time I spend exploring its wonders has a big impact on what I do as an artist. I’ve even written an essay, with the rather unlikely title of “The Composer on the Infinite Cereal Aisle,” that explores the concept of nature as inspiration for music. It recently occurred to me that nature also provides some interesting food for thought on the issue of comparing things in the arts.

In the summer of 2014 I was out backpacking in the Rockies with some friends from my home state of Tennessee. We set up camp at a sublime spot: a small, crystal-clear lake nestled high among the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range in southeastern Colorado. We all felt a kind of ecstasy up there, the scene being even more glorious than we had dreamed. But, unfortunately, one of my companions chose to express her ecstasy in a way that slightly diminished mine: “We just don’t have anything like this in Tennessee,” she said. “I mean, people say that the mountains in Tennessee are just as pretty in their own way, but that’s just bologna! This is so much better.” Though I had heard people say similar things before, I was particularly nonplussed that someone would view such an awe-inspiring scene as a reason to dis another beautiful place. I’ll be the first to say that the Rockies are glorious, but I’ll never understand why some people feel that the Rockies should be praised on the basis of how much “better” they are than the Appalachians.

The Appalachian Mountains have a special place in my heart. I grew up in their shadow and I feel like those “smoky,” blue hills are somehow a part of me. I feel like I belong when I’m in those mountains; there’s this sense that they are “my” mountains. So when people say things like, “Out west they have real mountains,” I don’t get it, because the eastern mountains sure feel real to me. On the whole, they offer a quieter, more reserved beauty than their rugged western counterparts; does that inherently make them of lesser value or somehow not “real”?

Perhaps this hits close to home for me because of the analogy I see in it. I tend to write small-scale, quiet, meditative music. I happen to be a quiet, reserved person. Does that mean my music is not legitimate or that it’s inherently lesser than that of composers who are inclined toward grandiosity? In some people’s minds, the answer would seem to be “yes.” After all, there are a lot of composers out there making a whole lot more money than I do, and the majority of them are not writing music that resembles mine. But I keep writing in my own way because I believe that the world needs to learn to appreciate a quieter, unassuming aesthetic. Bigger, grander, louder, longer—none of these are synonyms for “better.” We need to learn to appreciate the infinite shades of beauty in the world. Will certain shades appeal to certain individuals more than others? Sure, but we must be ever vigilant in fighting the notion that that which appeals to us—or to the largest group of people—is inherently the best.

Simply put, in the arts and in nature there is no “best.” I would simply ask anyone who disagrees to prove me wrong. Prove that Liszt is better than Chopin. Prove that the Rockies are better than the Appalachians. Prove that apples are better than oranges and that vanilla is better than chocolate. It’s just not possible. It never has been and it never will be. And that’s beautiful. When we learn to appreciate beauty in whatever form it takes, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn to recognize and appreciate the unique, individual beauty in every person we meet—no matter how unlike us they may be.

So let’s set art free—let’s set music free—to do what it does best. Let’s break the arbitrary chains of bias and competitiveness that our society has fastened upon it—chains that threaten to keep it from fulfilling its inestimable potential to promote peace in the world. It’s not an easy task, but it’s ever so worth it. If we spend our lives pursuing that goal, rather than the goal of trying to be “better” than others, we’ll really have something to be proud of when we’re old: We’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that we made music for the right reasons.

The Big Picture: How Music Can Remind Us of the Most Important Things in Life

Originally delivered as a short talk at the East Ridge Seventh-day Adventist Church on July 31, 2015.

During my junior year at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, my piano teacher, Sin-Hsing Tsai, announced that the great pianist Walter Hautzig would present a masterclass in the area, in which a handful of us would be chosen to participate. I was lucky enough to be selected. Since the selection of students had been based on the repertoire we’d submitted, I had no choice but to play the very difficult fourth Scherzo of Chopin, the title of which I had optimistically submitted with the vain hope that I could learn it in time. My anxiety began to increase as my first encounter with the 92-year-old Austrian legend drew nigh. I was not ready, but the show must go on. As luck would have it, I was slated to play last on the program. Hautzig, the strait-talking Peabody Conservatory Emeritus, was not one to butter up students who played badly, and as the masterclass went on it became clear that he was not going to be impressed if I played as sloppily as I expected to.

Finally it was my turn… and yes, I played every bit as sloppily as I expected to—and more. The ten-minute Scherzo seemed to go on for hours and I began to feel as though I would never get out of it alive. When, finally, the last bumbles had been made, the last notes finished sounding, and the smoke cleared, I sat sheepishly on the piano bench, feeling rather like a wet cat. After what seemed like eons (but was probably only seconds), it was Hautzig’s Austrian accent that broke the silence: “I have just one piece of advice for you: Don’t change a single note.” My teacher, Dr. Tsai, was in tears as Hautzig proceeded to rave for several minutes about how incredible my performance was and to predict what a phenomenal career I would have as a pianist. All the while I sat dazed at the piano bench, not sure if I was hearing correctly. Is he talking about ME? If so, which one of us is crazy?  I thought I’d done a lousy job, but now I was the star of the show.

Almost like the prodigal son upon returning home in embarrassment at his failures, I felt I was being honored far beyond what I deserved. After all, Hautzig seemed to be completely ignoring my obvious mistakes, as if they hadn’t happened: “Don’t change a single note.” It’s also a bit like the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, in which the “sheep” are surprised that God thinks they are anything special, almost as if they thought, “You’ve got the wrong sheep.” To this day I still don’t know exactly what happened on that mysterious evening, when I was thinking something along the lines of “Let my shame go where it doth deserve”[1] (in this case, back to the practice room). The only thing I can figure is that he saw something that I didn’t see: the big picture. Where I saw nothing but a wreckage of wrong notes, sloppy scales and arpeggios, blurry pedaling, and the angry face of Frederic Chopin rolling over in his grave, Hautzig saw music—and behind it he perceived a heart that loved it beyond the fingers’ ability to adequately express that love. Beyond this, he also saw potential for what I could become. That has inspired me to try to do the same for others.

Never before had I realized just how important the big picture is and how it effects almost every aspect of life. When we don’t see the big picture, it’s very easy to be judgmental, either of ourselves or of others. When I hear a musician making a mistake on something that’s relatively easy and start to think, O brother, what’s wrong with him? it behooves me to look back on my experience with Hautzig, and also on a few experiences I’ve had collaborating with other musicians. For example, during my years as a student accompanist I played piano for a talented singer who once had a “train wreck” on stage, even though she had practiced very thoroughly and everything had gone perfectly well in rehearsal. On the day of the springtime concert her pollen allergies began to flair up, but she decided to go ahead with the performance, underestimating the effect the allergies would have on her voice. I couldn’t help but think, If only the audience knew how well she can sing this music! And I have to wonder, would I have been so sympathetic had I been in the audience, not knowing the whole story? Probably not.

Of course, this principle applies to situations in everyday life as well. For example, there are people who look in the mirror in the morning and see nothing but moles, pimples, and worry lines, while the rest of us see them as nothing short of beautiful. They don’t see the big picture that we see; they are too zoomed in on insignificant details. Or when we see someone else who looks really rough to us, we don’t know what they are going through, and therefore don’t see the big picture that they see. Jesus, however, always sees the big picture, and that’s why he picked disciples who seemed to have so many issues. He saw past all of the surface stuff. Similarly, in 1 Samuel 16 we read of a simple, unassuming shepherd that God chose to be the King of Israel, even though all of his older brothers seemed more qualified for the job. Nobody else wanted to believe that David had the potential, but God knew, because he saw the big picture that nobody else could see. In the very next chapter, we see in plain colors how right God’s choice was: The brothers find themselves on the front lines of battle, and David is the only one willing to take on the giant. Perhaps his brothers then began to see just a bit more of the big picture. We are told that “the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Zooming out evening further, let’s consider another musical analogy. A composer who memorably illustrates the importance of the big picture is Gustav Mahler, who fashioned some of the most colossal musical structures ever conceived of. Especially near and dear to me is his Symphony 2, a one-and-a-half-hour-long work, characteristically scored for a gargantuan orchestra, chorus, and soloists. The text deals with deep, existential crises, finally culminating with the hope of life beyond the grave. Because of the Symphony’s glorious ending, some record companies have seen fit to excerpt the last three minutes of the work on “best of” collections of classical music. That has always bothered me, somehow. Yes, the ending of the Mahler 2 constitutes three of the most transcendent minutes in music history, but skipping the hour and 27 minutes of struggle leading up to it has always seemed to me a bit like cheating—like the character “Ignorance” in The Pilgrim’s Progress, taking a shortcut to the pearly gates and expecting to be allowed in. No, it’s only after the gut-wrenching struggle that the triumph of Mahler’s 2nd is fully grasped.

And what of the Symphony’s final chord, a fortissimo E-flat major that lasts an entire 30 seconds all by itself? I’ve heard people complain about how ridiculous it is. Indeed, in the context of a three-minute work, it would be pretty silly, but what if we zoom out and look at the whole hour and 30 minutes? Then it becomes clear how essential that ending chord is in balancing the enormous musical monolith. And, going back to our existential crisis, once we finally get to the end of the turmoil, we need the sense of solidarity and the idea of eternity captured in that closing chord. It’s a reaching for the infinite—it seems like it’s never going to end— and it’s only in the larger context of the complete work, as Mahler attended us to hear it, that that makes sense: After all our wandering, we are home to stay… forever. That’s what the Symphony is all about.

And this brings us to the most important point: We don’t see the big picture that God sees, and that’s why existential crises are very real in all of our lives. That’s why the Mahler 2 is so moving. That’s why age-old questions like “Why is there is so much pain, suffering, and death in the world?” never go away. We can’t fully answer them, try as we might. Sometimes we just have to let it go and accept that we don’t fully understand because we can’t see the big picture yet, and trust that someday everything will be made clear. The Apostle Paul, in the famous “love” chapter in 1 Corinthians, wrote, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). God, by contrast, sees and knows everything already: “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good” (Proverbs 15:3).  In Isaiah 55:9 God himself says, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This is not God’s way of looking down at us and saying “na-na na-boo-boo,” but rather a means of bringing us a measure of peace—as if to say, “If you don’t understand what in the world is going on, here’s why.” Jesus said simply, “Do not be afraid; only believe” (Mark 5:38).

In short, the trick is to try and see the big picture whenever we can—and to remember that it exists even when we can’t see it. At least one thing is sure: We are each a part of something that is much bigger than our everyday existence—something that ultimately will explain all of the confusion around us. Both Mahler’s Symphony and The Pilgrim’s Progress remind us that, if we don’t give up, the hardest struggles of this life will lead us to the gates of eternity. It doesn’t get any bigger than that.

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[1] A quotation from George Herbert’s poem, “Love bade me welcome.”