Convocation

Scroll down for full text of Mr. Fletcher's  remarks.
 

Convocation Speakers:
 

Remarks from Alan Fletcher

I’d like to talk about our theme for this summer’s 75th anniversary season, “Becoming who you are.” But first, I need to tell you about three people whose work is going to inform my remarks.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a poet, scientist, and diplomat in the late 18th and early 19th century. His active career spanned from Mozart and Haydn through all of Beethoven, and then on to Mendelssohn. As one of the creators of liberal humanism, he was the person celebrated in the 1949 Aspen Convocation, which gave rise to the Aspen Music Festival and School and the Aspen Institute.

Albert Schweitzer – a physician, humanitarian, theologian, musician, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize as one of the earliest international figures to oppose nuclear weapons, was the 1949 keynote speaker in Aspen.

Shirley Hazzard was an extraordinary novelist and thinker about words, born in Australia in the early 20th century, becoming American, and living much of her life in Italy.

In his 1949 address, given on this spot in a quite different sort of tent, Schweitzer quoted Goethe’s belief that to be human was to be in a state of becoming, and to need to make positive choices to become the person one wishes to be. Schweitzer himself ended one of his remarkable books with this phrase, which I paraphrase: “And as an ineffable mystery, we shall learn in our own experience who we are.”

So, today, we are thinking about learning and teaching, changing and becoming. I expect everyone on this stage would agree that one of the most profound experiences of learning begins when one becomes a teacher.

In a talk given this weekend at the Aspen Institute, Renée Fleming and Damian Woetzel (the president of Juilliard) were agreeing that, in our art form, we all must build an extraordinary foundation of technique. This can easily take many years of dedication, with the help of many others. But that foundation is not itself the goal, not at all. The goal is to advance from that foundation in a unique, personal way. Indeed, the most wonderful teachers – I think of Dorothy DeLay, a great member of our faculty here, in this way – are most concerned with helping musicians release themselves from technique into personal artistry.

So, the goal is to advance, sometimes subtly and sometimes dazzlingly, into being our own selves. I hope I’m not making this sound easy, because it is not.

Some artists “find themselves” at almost a definite moment, and we’ll be exploring some of those moments this summer. Mozart was perhaps like that: for a while, he was a very gifted person, and then, all of a sudden, Mozart. I think of Elliott Carter this way. There’s some really good music, and then there’s the astounding Elliott Carter! Or Pauline Oliveros. Starting as a leader in her marching band, she experimented with musique concrete in very interesting ways, but then she found the core of what would come to be called “deep listening.” But some artists, equally wonderful, are instead almost always in a state of becoming. Beethoven, Stravinsky, Maria Callas – daring to transform themselves continuously, to their very limits.

Because they are right here with us on the stage, I’ll venture to nominate Peter Sellars as in the Mozart category – even as an undergraduate at Harvard, he was producing and directing evenings with the full stamp of “Peter Sellars.” Renée Fleming I would put in the Beethoven category: what has come to be her sublime, seemingly effortless persona that shines through the whole world of music is indeed sublime, but not at all effortless. She has practiced and analyzed and listened and studied with astonishing dedication to bring us all her achievement.

My teacher, Roger Sessions, was like Dorothy DeLay in the way he not only allowed, but insisted that students be themselves, and not pale imitations of himself or any other person. But in one of the most profound moments of our work together, he told me I was like him, in that it would take me a long time to find myself. “Some of your colleagues already have that in their early twenties,” he said, “and that’s a wonderful thing. You’ll have to keep working a long while, but I think you’ll be glad you did.”

And, I am glad!

Getting to the point where you have your foundation complete is a ton of work. Keeping with it, remaking it, transcending it over the years is the true, great challenge.

A college friend of mine, a poet, was working for a literary magazine. She had the chance to interview a truly great writer, Shirley Hazzard. If you want some wonderful reading, I suggest the novel “The Transit of Venus.” Anyway, my friend was called Ame, short for a beautiful old-fashioned name, and just as she left Shirley Hazzard’s apartment, the writer said, “Stay in bloom, Amelia!”

Stay in bloom!

To stay in bloom is the ineffable mystery Schweitzer wrote about. It takes everything. Everything about the world may conspire to close you down, and really only you can stay determined always to be opening up. To me, it is one of the most striking things to observe in artists of all kinds: after years of effort, are they still as full of life as when they started? Or even more so? The musicians here on stage, and the guests who will come through Aspen this summer, will be examples for you. And having examples is a precious gift.

But it isn’t enough! 

Also this past weekend, I heard the great bassist Christian McBride describe his work as a very young artist. As is typical in jazz pedagogy, he studied the music of people he admired, comparing printed sources to the sounds they actually created, and trying to copy it in his own playing. This was building the foundation, along with a lot of purely technical study. But finally, he began seeing where he could make his own choices, thanks to that study.

Earlier in my life, I became a pilot, through one of the most disciplined, consequential kinds of study anyone can imagine. If you have a memory lapse on stage, that’s a problem, but if you make a big mistake while flying, you have a really big problem. In the first lesson in an actual airplane, after lots of foundational classroom learning, the instructor says, “Do this. Now this. Now this. Now this. Now pull back on this.”  And…as if by magic, you are in the air, at the controls, flying the plane. (Landing it is a whole other story.)

That is a version of what we do. Someone starts us. “Do this!” We have the music on the page, or we have the music we love in our heads. Later, someone says, “Now you’re ready to do this, so do it!” And so on, maybe for years, but at a certain point, magically, you are in the air, in control for yourself.

I’d like to close with a simple reflection. I don’t know if it will be obvious….

You are here today at what I hope is a beautiful, memorable, important time in your lives. Fabulously, all of us on this stage are also here at a beautiful, memorable, important time in our lives! The order of things is that you will become us. We will go, and the controls will be yours. For me, the great majority of my work has been to try to honor the wonderful people who helped me, who inspired me, who came before. That has included so many! A small part, also, is to reflect on what I hope never to perpetuate – things that aren’t right, that should not continue. And there is enough of that to keep us working night and day.

But you will be for others what others have been for you, and where others are now responsible, you will be responsible.

Stay in bloom! Take the controls! Open up! Become who you are! And, if you do become a pilot, remember that landing is harder than taking off.