to do this tedtalk i was really chuckled because you see my father 's name was ted and much of my life especially my musical life is really a talk that i 'm still having with him or the part of me that he continues to be
he was a self taught illustrator and musician he didn 't read a note
and he was profoundlyhearing impaired yet he was my greatest teacher
because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids his understanding of music was profound and for him it wasn 't so much
the way the music goes as about what it witnesses and where it can take you and he did a painting of this experience which he called in the realm of music
they didn 't know all that much about it but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them and i think inspired by that memory it 's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as i can sort of pass it on through whatever means
and how people get this music how it comes into their lives really fascinates me one day in new york i was on the street and i saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants and a tough slouchy kid got up to bat
and he ran around the bases
and i thought go figure how did this piece of eighteenth century austrian aristocratic entertainment
turn into the victory crow of this new york
classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over one thousand years and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it 's like to be alive
but what classical music does
is to distill all of these musics down to condense them to their absoluteessence and from that essence create
a new language a language that speaks very lovingly
it 's a language that 's still evolving
now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of like
to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment like this one from
the beethoven violin concerto
it 's so simple
four hundred and forty per second
but the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood
and
and in the seventeenth century
it was more like this
happy with this last chord even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you or sent some of you running from the room and the reason you like it is because you 've inherited whether you knew it or not centuries worth
of the music 's powerful silent partner the way it 's been passed on notation now the impulse to notate or more exactly i should say encode music
in two hundred b c a man named sekulos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the greeks
in these excerpts from the christmas mass puer natus est nobis for us is born
well notation not only passed the music on notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely because it enabled the musicians to imagine music on a much vaster scale now
inspired moves of improvisation could be recorded saved considered
prioritized made into intricate designs and from this moment classical music became what it most essentially is a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature instinct and intelligence
and there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition
all possible moves testing them out prioritizing them out until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring
but every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason instinct and intelligence and every musical era had different priorities of these things different things to pass on different whats
the big what was to praise god and by the one thousand four hundred s music was being written that tried to mirror god 's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky
this
this of course was the birth of opera and its development put music on a radical new course the what now was not to mirror the mind of god but to follow the emotion turbulence of man
have with us the triads either the
major one
six hundred and fifty nine vibrations per second
or e flat
thirty seven freakin vibrations
so you can see in a system like this there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions and in fact as man began to understand more his complex and ambivalent nature harmony grew more complex to reflect it
emotions beyond the ability of words
printing put music the scores the codebooks of music into the hands of performers everywhere
this is when those big forms arose the symphonies the sonatas the concertos and in these big architectures of time
composers like beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime
a piece like beethoven 's fifth
basically witnessing how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger
over the course of a half an hour step by exacting step
of his route to the moment when he could make it across to joy
and it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues like
gripping ones of culture such as nationalism or
quest for freedom or the frontiers of
one thing until recently was always the same and that was
when the musicians stopped playing the music stopped
what 's left what sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude and how might that change their lives to me this is the intimate personal side of music it 's the passing on part it 's the why part of it
to me that 's the most essential of all
mostly it 's been a person to person thing a teacher student performeraudience thing
and then around one thousand eight hundred and eighty came this new technology that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally created a new and miraculous way of
passing things on
albeit an impersonal one
people could now hear music all the time even though it wasn 't necessary for them to play an instrument read music or even go to concerts
and technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences at the same time
technology by taking over the role that notation had always played shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side the culture in which we live now
is awash with music of improvisation that 's been sliced diced layered and god knows distributed and sold
what 's the long term effect of this on us or on music nobody knows
the question remains what happens when the music stops what sticks with people now that we have unlimitedaccess to music what does stick with us well let me show you a story of what i mean by really sticking with us i was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home
and i spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker he came over to a piano that was there and he balanced himself and began playing something like this
suddenly got it and i said friend
by any chance are you trying to play this
well that 's why i take every performance so seriously why it matters to me so much i never know who might be there who might be absorbing it and what will happen to it in their life
but now i 'm excited that there 's more chance than ever before possible of sharing this music
that 's what drives my interest in projects like the tv series keeping score with the san francisco symphony that looks at the backstories of music and working
with the young musicians at the new world symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new performing arts centers for both entertainment and education and of course the new world
to be explorers together
sure the big events attract a lot of attention but what really matters is what goes on every single day
we need your perspectives your curiosity your voices and it excites me now to meet people who are hikers chefs code writers taxi drivers people i never would have guessed who loved the music and who are passing it on
you don 't need to worry about knowing anything if you 're curious if you have a capacity for wonder if you 're alive you know all that you need to know
you can start anywhereramble a bit follow traces get lost be surprised amused inspired all that what all that how is out there waiting for you to discover its why
to dive in and pass it on
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