Head's Blog: Some Assembly Required

Our Reply to Violence

After September 11th, 2001, I vividly remember walking by the music department at the school where I taught at the time and seeing the following quotation from Leonard Bernstein taped on the window of a studio: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” I thought of this quotation as I, part of a respectful and full-hearted LA audience listened to our arts department’s performance of The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.

The nature of the performance will be documented elsewhere, but for here, I will only say it was extraordinary in the literal sense—lifting us up out of ordinary life for an unflinching look at “certain normal predicaments of human divinity,” as one of my favorite author-maniacs, James Agee once described the human condition. The performance was serious. It was intense. It was beautiful. It was an act of devotion, as Bernstein describes it. In certain moments, it was actually uncomfortable, which made me think of another Agee quotation,

“You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music. Is what you hear pretty? Or beautiful? Or legal? Or acceptable in polite or any other society?”

What we experienced during The Armed Man was something real, something embodied by singer, musician, dancer, audience.  Yes, it was “just a performance” on the one hand and not an easy “fa-la-la” on the other, but it was unrelenting, brave, and spectacular in its search through the full range of human emotion and experience. And it must be that way because our response to the world we live in, the world Bernstein and Agee would confront, must be as real as the world itself.

As I noted to the audience at the beginning of the concert, the same day and the same world brought us two realities within hours of each other: the birth of a faculty child at Emerson Hospital in Concord and the massacre of children in a school in Pakistan. To some degree, the concert was dedicated in principle and in fact to young lives—lives of innocence, vulnerability, and possibility. Students, both performers and audience, rose to the occasion when expression, passion, and imagination were most needed.

Each generation will have its occasions of darkness and its opportunities for enlightened conviction, for redemption. As I searched the internet for the exact wording and origin of the quotation, I found that Bernstein’s words were written in response to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. As I read up on The Armed Man, I discovered that the CD for the performance was released on September 10th, 2001. 

How fortunate we are to be in an educational setting that supports the essential transformations that are a part of becoming fully human. Here are some final words, heading into our holiday rest and return:

From the Hannukah blessing read before the concert: “Grateful for small miracles, we rejoice in the wonder of light and darkness and the daring of hope.”

From the end of the concert courtesy of Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Ring out the thousand wars of old. Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring out the old, ring in the new.  Ring happy bells across the snow. The year is going, let him go. Ring in the love of truth and right, ring in the common love of good.”