The Power of the Ahhhhhtz

"All other composers seem to be writing novels, but Bach writes non-fiction."
 That's a good line, Jeremy Denk.  Wish I had written it.

Today I don't feel much like blogging about horn-related topics, mostly because I'm frustrated, near-disgusted, with the limitations of my instrument.  I've spent a leisurely Sunday morning listening to the Goldberg Variations, and without fail, that piece always sends me into a French horn funk.  How can I possibly confront the limitations of time, nature, and God with a one-toot-at-a-time metal tube pressed into my face?  But that's a topic for another day...

So today I want to discuss the warmer, fuzzier topic of falling in love.   More specifically, (stealing from Oprah here) my Aha! Moment with the arts, when I had a realization of what the arts can do for humanity and for me as a person.  While I'm absolutely sure I had a give-my-heart-to-music experience, or else why am I doing what I do, I can't actually conjure up that memory.  Nor for visual arts, dance, and theater, though I'm also sure I fell in love with those artistic disciplines when I was a kid.  But I can recall the exact moment I understood what good writing can do.  And it was in 6th grade silent reading class when I stumbled upon this poem by Langston Hughes, entitled "A Christian Country":

God slumbers in a back alley
With a gin bottle in His hand.
Come on, God, get up and fight
Like a man. 

Now, as has been mentioned in previous posts, I was a precocious kid and though I had no taste, loved anything serious and intellectual and "above my reading level."  But this poem just knocked my teeth out.  Given my socio-economic status and hometown, I'm absolutely sure I would not have actually known what gin was nor when and where Langston Hughes lived, nor would I have probably ever seen a back alley, let alone been in one.  But these four lines made me feel sad, scared, and confused all at the same time and called into question my weekly Sunday school relationship with God.  I couldn't stop re-reading them, I couldn't get them out of my head.  And now, so many years later, I still can't get them out of my head.

Up until that point, I had thought of literature as entertainment, a chance to try on someone else's life for a change.  But reading that poem, I began to think about the notion of a writer- some guy who sat down at a desk, looked out a window at an urban landscape, and chose those specific words to elicit that mixed-up, angsty emotion inside my upper-middle class elementary school classroom.  Wow.  It just changed everything for me.  I understood the immense power of the art of creative writing.  Sock you in the gut, Cassius Clay power, not to be taken lightly.  And not to be tortured in my English classes at school.  As a result of that moment (and the fact that my mom is a lit-hoarder and I grew up in libraries and book stores), I am a lifelong lover of words, poetry, literature, and books.

Ummmmmm dream home.

So now the question is, what particular set of circumstances allowed me to fall in love in that moment?  And more importantly for my work with under-privileged high school students, can I create similar conditions so they too can have an artistic Eureka experience?  Was it just sheer coincidence that my scrolling eyes chose that poem at that moment in my intellectual and emotional development to lead me into a literary life?  My gut tells me yes, it was just a random happy-accident, but the statistical demographic breakdown of artistic audiences tells me...no.  It is just a fact that children born to higher-income parents are more likely to enjoy classical music, art museums, ballet shows, poetry readings, etc.  I am grateful for that step up in life, but goddammit, I want every single one of my students to experience what I experienced in that Langston Hughes poem.  (And geez, the Harlem Renaissance might as well have been on Mars for me, so maybe it'd be even more potent for a 16-year-old kid in Harlem...)  And I want them to experience it in classical music even more.  But that memory of mine is so personal, so individual, I wonder how I'd even incorporate that into a classroom.  In fact, that's what makes that moment memorable, the fact that this poem was revealed to me alone, not to my classmates or my sisters or even my teacher.
But I do think there is a way to communicate love, to communicate the esoteric purity of a work of art using the tools of teaching. In the open-ness of my unadulterated nerding-out, maybe some kids will find a path into the complex labyrinth of the arts.  Or just ceaselessly mock me.

P.S. If you don't know, the title of this post comes from this Youtube gem.  Also the reason I want to yell "Guten taaaaaaag!" every time I step off a plane in Germany.