I am in the library studying; no surprise. Then----music!
The main wing of the library has been converted into a concert hall. The room is capacious, open space extending for six floors. The acoustics are superb.
I do not know what composer they are playing. Bach? The melody is everywhere, reverberating off lamps, rising off books... Dancers, clad in blue, dash across the floor. I have prime seats by my computer which is behind the fantastic live orchestra and about fifty-fold-out chairs for the ticket paying audience. It is a full house.
The performance does not last long enough. The stage is cleared.
Afterwards:
“Did you manage to study,” a gentleman asked. “I didn’t want to,” I said. “I watched the whole time.” And I did not tell him that for the previous two-and- a-half-hours I had been bewitchingly mesmerized by their rehearsal, rarely lifting my fingers from my keyboard to type. Later, I congratulated the performers.
The welcoming surprise library concert was great. It reminded me of a few things.
Paula’s List of Things the Surprise Concert Reminded her of:
1. Think outside the circle. How many of your doors are white? We can paint our doors different colors! Or, even paint designs on them (a turtle, rabbit, sunrise, mountains.) Or, an even more radical idea, we can not have doors, we can travel the world for a year...
1. Everyone has an artistic gift to share with the world, creativity is a mindset, and there is so much we can give to each other through song, dance, writing, art, and the things we make everyday—whether we put a birdhouse together with help from a kit, craft a desk in our woodshop or knit a scarf at the breakfast table for our sister or grandchild. There are so many people in my life and family that are creative. They make things all the time. For some reason, I never thought of them as artists, as creators, but, they are. One does not have to make money from art to be considered talented and unbelievably creative. Here I would like to give a little shout out to my Uncle Tim, who can make nearly anything from wood!
2. Music reminds me to be ambitious. I am reminded of Lady Gaga, the current best-selling pop-singer who said in a recent New York Times article, “I have a one-two-punch: ambition and drive.” The point is, creating something amazing takes work. Hearing the superb violinists, cellists and violists today reminded me of the value of discipline and hard work. Without hours of practice and an intense love for music, the sounds I heard would not be feasible. I am reminded to pursue excellence.
3. There is always time for music and nobody is too busy to enjoy art. Maybe this is the voice of a student with time on her hands speaking, but I want it to be true for everyone. I am reminded of an article I read a few years ago in which the Washington Post paid a concert violinist to play in the D.C Metro station for an amount of time. The musician was video-taped. It was rush hour. Later, the journalist doing the story analyzed the film and saw that hardly anyone stopped to listen. There was an exception: children. They all stopped, craning their necks, before being tugged away by their busy parents. The point of the article was to stress how we rarely take time to enjoy beauty when it is staring us in the face. To read this fantastic article, which ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2007 See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html (if this link does not work type Pearls Before Breakfast into google)
4. Most importantly: I am reminded of how much unexplained, unexplored and unexpected BEAUTY surrounds us at every turn. I hope I spend more time with eyes open to it!!!
As I am posting this blog something wonderful happens: A second performance begins... Studying will happen tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment