Our provost at Pacific Lutheran University, Dr. Joanna Gregson, reminded me this week of how you, the class of 2020, started your college education. It was the fall of 2016. Whatever your political leanings, it was a time when the open partisan wound that is the United States today became our undeniable reality. The anger, the resentment, the frustration of feeling invisible became, arguably, the greatest challenge our democracy has faced.

The ignorance in which I used to live would have led me to think I might have some wisdom to offer you at this point in your lives. Covid-19 has disabused me of that notion. There is nothing in my experience from which I can draw to offer you any advice. Well, there are the classics…persistence, practice…

I might have said to you, “Stay engaged, no matter how hard it gets.” That would not have been bad advice, but, coming from me to you, it would be meaningless. You are being tested in ways that I never was. It’s still good advice, but my experience can only provide a suggestion.

Don’t misunderstand, my generation may still have something to offer you, wisdom-wise. We have a lot of human experience. We have made a lot of mistakes that you don’t necessarily need to make. Yet, for this moment, this challenge, no one is better prepared or equipped than you are. You have already been tested. Your refinement by fire has already begun.

You may feel doubt in this moment. I hope that my confidence in you will help just a little to ease that doubt. You can meet the challenge. You are exactly what we need at this moment. I’m 1974. I’ve had my time, and it’s been great. You are 2020! You are now. You are this moment. You are up to the challenge, and for what it’s worth, we have your back.

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

This picture of my piano, Henry F. Miller 40603, has appeared in my blog entries before. I’m including it in this one because I am thinking about the arc of its history. Made in 1910, this piano is now going through its second global pandemic.

My best efforts so far have not been able to conclusively determine the specific history of this instrument, but it seems likely that it had been purchased by someone in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan soon after it’s manufacture. The area was at or near the peak of its population around that time. Some figures put the number at between 95 and 96 thousand, some as high as 111 thousand plus. (The Keweenaw today has around 38 thousand residents.) There was a wide income gap between the average mine worker, who probably made less than a thousand dollars a year, and the mine owners and executives. Only the latter would have been able to afford the $750 price-tag of this instrument at the time.

Yet this was a time when a piano—especially a magnificent parlor grand like this Miller—would have been an aspirational object for anyone seeking to be recognized as having achieved a certain social status. Wages had gone up considerably across the nation as the first world war came to a close in 1918. Yet, just as the economy was on the move, so were people and the virus that caused the Spanish Flu.

Waves of the pandemic would continue in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula until 1921. During that extended period, the Miller was probably in someone’s house in Calumet or Houghton, perhaps one of the few distractions to which a family could turn in order to keep their minds away from the terror lurking all around them. Ironically, it’s even possible that its keys helped to spread the virus at one time or another. But mostly, it was surely an island of solace in a sea of doubt; a tangible reminder that beauty and joy could still be found in the singing of a song together.

This is how the Miller looks in this global pandemic, 102 years later. It’s not so much providing solace for a family as it is helping to provide stability for students. It has become the platform (figuratively and literally) from which I interact with them online. It’s helping to keep their educational experience going, providing them with at least a hint of normalcy, and making it possible for me to continue to do at least part of my job. While I don’t know for sure, its voice may be traveling farther in this circumstance than it has in its entire history up to this episode.

The Miller has proven its durability in the last 110 years. Its likely to be around long after I am gone. However long it lasts, I only hope that this will be its last global pandemic.

For those who might have clicked on this post title thinking they were going to get a contemplation of racial and gender inequities, I apologize for what may seem like false advertising. What I am really contemplating is that sooner rather than later, I will be a dead white guy.

OK. I will be noting that my race and gender have biased me as a musical consumer to the work of other dead white guys; that their work has largely shaped my perception and judgment of all music, and that even the work of musicians of color and other genders is judged (by me) against a “standard” set by dead white guys. I just don’t know what to do about that. I am who I am. I have lived when I have lived. And I am impoverished in terms of what I have heard and experienced.

I am not trying to paint myself as a victim. I claim nothing of the sort. I am guilty. I claim no exemption for my cultural upbringing. I am guilty. I have been blind, but not blinded. I have been deaf, but not deafened. I am fully responsible for my choices of that to which I should listen, and that to which I should attend.

For the most part, I have listened to, and attended to dead white guys. If I have any defense at all, it is that these dead white guys have produced some amazing stuff. The Pope Marcellus Mass, Spem in alium, the St. Matthew Passion, Don Giovanni, Die Winterreise, Beethoven Op. 111, Brahms’ symphonies (all of them!), the Verdi Requiem, Das Ring, Mahler 9, Wozzeck, Le Sacre du printemps, Knoxville Summer of 1915, Appalachian Spring, Mass… These are all life-changing experiences. And there are so many more.

Yet…how many more lives might have been changed had Amy Beach written a second, a third, a fourth symphony. Her first and only was so good…so achingly good! (Which is not to say that only symphonic music matters. Amy Beach wrote a lot of great music for smaller forces. But the most public statements are symphonies, operas and ballets.) How many more lives might have been changed if Florence Price’s music had been even more widely performed and recognized for the truly great music that it is. William Grant Still…Adolphus Hailstork…Margaret Bonds…

I have no excuse. These composers are all my heritage. I have succumbed to the siren call of the dead white guys—whose music I will extol with my last breath. Yet there is so much more of which I have been willingly ignorant.

So, I look to the faces of my students. Thankfully, they seem so much more willing to go beyond the DWGs. They value the important works of our European legacy, but they seem so much more willing to look past that to the wonderful things that the rest of the world has to offer.

Thank God!

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

There is an old saying, “You can’t tell a book by its cover.” It’s probably one of those idiomatic English expressions, but I suspect that it translates pretty well. For those of you just joining us from outside this cultural bubble, the expression means that appearances can be deceiving. One who appears disheveled, clumsy, and confused may actually be a brilliant Nobel laureate. Or one who appears well-tailored, socially at ease, and focused may, in fact, be a sociopathic monster. But it’s more than that.

The “book” in this expression refers to the whole truth or story of something or someone. The “cover” refers to some snapshot image of a moment in that story. Romance novel covers seem always to picture the moment just before the most salacious passage in the book. Science fiction novel covers often show us the point of furthest remove from our lives and experience. We, who buy the books, know that. It’s baked into our decisions at the newsstand or the Kindle store. We count on the story being much more interesting and nuanced than the picture on the cover.

Why do we find it so difficult to cut a living being the same slack? Why is it so hard to picture the woman who just took my order at Burger King as the PhD chemical engineer that she once was before she left everything behind in her home country to escape the horror of war? Why is it so impossible to think of the gnarled old man sitting on a park bench as the husband, father, brother, son, friend that he was before time and the unpredictable cruelty of life ravaged him and everyone and everything he loved?

Even harder still, why do we so often see a woman or man who seems to have grabbed life by the horns, and fail to recognize the pain and suffering that she or he endured on the way to that apparent triumph?

It is far too easy to see someone in a moment of strength or weakness and assume that what they are at that moment is their essential truth. We know everything we need to know about them. End of story. But a moment of deprivation and vulnerability may blind us to the tough and capable person in front of us. On the other hand, we may fail to see in someone who seems to have mastered her circumstances, the fragile person who has often been desperate for the compassion of others. We see only the strength, or the weakness, but we lack the crucial context of the story.

I have a lovely dog named Chloe. To the drive-through baristas who see her sitting regally in my back seat each morning when I am getting my coffee, she seems prim and proper, aloof, and even a little bored. It would seem, by all indications, that she has it made. But I learned today, because she had some x-rays, that years ago, when she was a young stray roaming the streets living on the scraps of food she could scrape from the pavement, or an occasional mouse that she could catch and eat, someone shot her with one of those air rifles that people use to target “vermin.” Apparently that’s how someone saw her then. No one really knows what happened except Chloe, who has been carrying the slug around in her hip ever since. She licked her wounds and continued to survive. At some point she was taken to the shelter where we found each other. Perhaps now she does have it made, but it was no easy road getting here.

It’s easy to see in Chloe a pampered pet. But unless you know about that slug lodged in her hip, you don’t know her story. Without knowing the story, you probably won’t recognize the strength and resolve that helped her survive.

As it has been with Chloe, how blind might I be to the strength or the vulnerability of the people around me?  It’s too easy to dismiss someone I see on a street corner, or on a park bench, or at a freeway exit on the basis of that moment. The vulnerability and need is all I can see. I may as easily dismiss the rich or seemingly powerful person as one without concern or care, never recognizing the pain that she may have endured in another time and place.

Our stories matter. They make us who we are, not just what the moment may make us appear to be.

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Sabbatical Leave. There are no two sweeter words to most academics. As a profession, college professors don’t get paid much. There are exceptions, of course. Football coaches. They get paid a lot—if they are in the right Division 1 schools. Chemical engineering professors can get pretty good deals because they can be paid so much more out in the industrial world. There are other examples. But music? History? Philosophy? Even mathematics? Well…we haven’t much with which to negotiate.

Yet we don’t usually complain because many of us have the chance to take sabbatical leaves. I know what an amazing privilege that is in a world where most people are lucky to get a couple of paid weeks of vacation each year. The time to think, to explore, to follow thought experiments, and just to breathe is so valuable that the greatly reduced salary I accept in exchange seems like a good bargain.

Readers should understand that what we do while on sabbatical is not all self-indulgent. Many of us use a lot of the time to catch-up on things that we feel that we have neglected under the considerable time pressures inherent in our normal schedules. I have a colleague on sabbatical this year who is devoting part of her precious time to deepening her committee work (her committee work!) in order to serve a need in the institution. That’s why sabbatical leave is beneficial to a university. It is far from just a perq for the professors.

That said, this past sabbatical year for me, coming within just a few years of my mid-sixties, felt much more like a dress rehearsal for retirement than the career-building experience that I sought in my last sabbatical leave. I ended the previous year on a high note with the orchestra. We were on tour in the Iberian Peninsula. Our last performance was SRO in a beautiful church in Barcelona. It was great, but I came home tired. The year leading up to that tour was a wringer, and I was dog tired.

So when I put on my nametag and walked into the ensemble auditions this fall (the real beginning of the year for me), knowing that this was the first of at least five more years, I expected to feel differently at this point about my return. I expected to feel committed to the goals that I have for the PLU Orchestra and for the classes that I teach and in which I have invested a lot of time. But I also expected to have to grind it out, so to speak. I expected to feel continually drawn back to other things—retirement things.

Imagine my surprise to find that the orchestra in front of me in these first four rehearsals is one of the most exciting ensembles I have ever been privileged to conduct! Imagine my surprise to find that the new chair, the new provost, the new curriculum, the new colleagues, the new courses, and the new committee assignments that I am encountering are, far from bewildering me, exciting me!

Retirement looks pretty good in as much as I can set my own agenda—as I was able to do in the last year. But I am not ready for that yet. I still want to be a part of this university, and especially of this orchestra.

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Just outside the house into which we moved three years ago lives a hydrangea, a new experience for me. I’m sure I have seen them, but I had no previous experience with the dynamic character of this plant’s relationship with its environment. A couple of months after our arrival this bush astounded me by producing blooms in the most electric blue I have ever seen in nature.

A few weeks before, my wife had painted an old swing set in the yard (about 20 feet away) with the same color. I wondered if the plant had somehow seen the paint color and decided to try it on. I assumed that wasn’t possible, but it was such a charming notion that I hesitated to search out the real reason for this remarkable coincidence.

The relatively pale lavender color of the blooms the next year finally prompted me to learn a little more about this extraordinary plant and its chameleon-like ability. It seems that the amount of aluminum that the plant’s roots can extract from the soil can, in part, determine the degree to which the blooms may produce the bright blue that I had seen in that first season. Little or no aluminum? Little or no blue. In that case the blooms may appear pink, depending on the character of the plant, or they may just appear pale, as ours had done.

The presence or absence of aluminum is not the whole story. A high pH factor in the soil will inhibit the plant’s ability to absorb the aluminum even if it is present, thus producing duller colors. The genetic profile of the plant is also important. An individual plant has to be inherently capable of producing bright colors at either end of the spectrum in order to display the most brilliant blues or pinks. Some are not.

I am struck by the close parallel between the chromatic behavior of these plants and our own characteristics as human beings. We each live with our own immutable limitations on our capacity for this or that behavior or ability. But the extent to which these genetic factors actually limit us is subject to multiple environmental factors. If we find ourselves in a rich environment, nurtured by the love and care of those around us, we can push the outer limits of, perhaps even transcend those natural boundaries. Yet even those who have the highest capacities can be severely limited if denied those critical resources.

I may never again see a blue as bright as the one that our hydrangea produced during that first season in our new house. Or perhaps it will produce something even more brilliant in a future year. Now that I know how important the resources available to the plant are in allowing it to reach its potential, I am in a position to do something about it. I can give it the best chance possible to dazzle.

Knowing how significant what I do is for this plant, can I do less for the people around me?

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Years ago, in a different state and different job, I spent at least the equivalent of two 40-hour weeks each year requesting and reporting on a state-funded arts grant that kept my orchestra going, and even growing in important ways. The forward-leaning support for the arts that had existed for some time in that state was not the reason I had gone there, but it was something that I had long admired and had learned how to access.

As this support began to erode with the increasingly conservative bent of the state government in the 1980s, obtaining and keeping these grants became more and more time consuming. What I found particularly vexing was the often ridiculous requirement to boil down the visit of a guest artist to a grade school into a dollar and cents benefit for the community. That frustrating exercise, together with the cuts in funding made to the state arts budget each year, prompted me to begin thinking about how one could quantify the benefits of arts activity in a community. Beyond the register receipts at arts centers and box offices, and the payrolls for arts-related operations, how does the art displayed, the music, dance, or theater produced, or the novel written provide a benefit for the community?

It quickly dawned on me that the answer to this question could only be fully known after the passage of a lot of time. That’s why the political argument over this support would be so hard for the artistic community to win. Opponents who wanted to slash arts support budgets could easily point to numbers and claim that the benefit of this investment was miniscule at best. Supporters had mostly qualitative arguments. Beyond the immediate emotional impact of some rare anecdote, it might only be years after arts programs had been eliminated that we would see their true benefit—or the degradation of community against which they had once been a bulwark. Even then, straight lines to the arts would be hard to draw.

As it is with that specific issue, so it is with the rightward drift of our politics in general. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky includes these observations in his conclusion:

The driving force of modern industrialized civilization has been individual material gain. It has long been understood that a society based on this principle will destroy itself in time…At this stage of history, one of two things is possible: Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny to control.

Importantly, Chomsky asserts that an American media dominated by a corporate hegemony works constantly to blunt the empathetic impulses that would lead us toward these communitarian values. These hegemonic forces seek instead to reinforce our baser, material values, leading us to spend all our time and effort on the pursuit of our own narrow self-interests and acquisitions. Given the populist spasm demonstrated in our 2016 elections (misguided as it seems to have been), Chomsky’s decades-old admonition appears prescient.

But to lay this inward turn, away from Enlightenment values and toward zero-sum tribalism, paranoia and magical thinking, at the feet of only a few among us misses an important realization. We have all taken part in this downward spiral. Our penchant for day-to-day decision making, and our reluctance to do the hard work of thinking long-term has led us too often to follow the loudest voice rather than the wisest words, the shiniest new object rather than the soundest investment, and the most pleasing experience rather than the best opportunity to expand and grow. That some have been slightly more aware of the trend and have acted to profit from it is simply another aspect of our lack of vision. Artists are guilty of this failing as much as anyone—maybe more so.

Perhaps the very nature of a free, democratic society leads us toward this sort of carelessness. Yet, as Chomsky observes, we can do the hard work of engaging mindfully in the governing of our own society, and we must. Absent a new resolve among at least most of us to become more engaged stewards of this democracy, we may discover that our democratic republic is anything but, far too late to do anything about it.

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Somewhere I heard that our current president is not a film devotee. But if he has watched even a few movies in the last few decades, I would bet that he has seen Miracle, the cinematic telling of the story of the US Olympic Hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union in 1980 to win the gold medal. As far as I know, Trump has never claimed to have been a top prospect for the NHL. Curious! He must not think that hockey has a broad enough demographic.

On the surface this film seems to highlight everything that Trump believes about himself. It shows Coach Brooks as a singular figure, bucking every convention and resisting everyone’s advice. He knows better, and he will do as he sees fit.

But there are more than a few differences that he likely overlooks:

• Coach Brooks won the job of coaching the Olympic team after devoting decades of hard work to coaching hockey.
• Coach Brooks had a seriously impressive record as a winning coach before he coached the Olympic team.
• Though he dabbled in related businesses during the remainder of his career, be always returned to coaching; clearly his north star.
• Brooks obviously cared a lot about real outcomes, and very little about public approbation.

I could go on, but you get the point. Coaching was his vocation. He didn’t assume he had a right to do it. He worked at it, and he earned that right.

The most important truth in this film was delivered just shy of ¾ of the way through as the plucky American amateurs prepared for the medal round and their Olympic game against the Soviets. In an unguarded moment, the movie Brooks says to his wife, “The important thing [is] that in twenty years those twenty boys know they didn’t leave anything on the table; that they played their hearts out. That’s the important thing.” And here is what our president…tragically…has never and will never understand. True victory can only be won within one’s self. It is not measured against someone else. Moreover, means are more important than ends.

The American dream, indeed, the very idea of the United States of America, is about the individual giving her absolute best for the benefit of herself and her team—her community. And in pursuing good citizenship, she becomes a better version of herself.

The story of the “Miracle” team is a call to all of us who would claim citizenship in this great nation to be more than that to which we are born. It is a call to our better angels, to a sense that we can transcend our own selfish interests and become part of a community. The founders of this country turned away from the old world where an accident of birth could destine one either to privilege or deprivation. They got a lot wrong at the time, but they counted on us, their successors to perfect this community, and not to fall into old patterns of predetermined stations.

In the film, before the medal-round game with the Soviets. Coach Brooks tells his athletes that they were born to be hockey players. What he doesn’t say to them in that moment, but what he had demonstrated to them over and over again during the months leading up to that game, was that they earned their places on that American team. He told them that they would have to be extraordinary men to achieve the goal in front of them, and that too would have to be earned. Naturally they were all motivated by the prospect of beating the Soviets. But had they lost, which Brooks knew was probably more likely than what actually happened, the twenty young men on that team, the coaches, and everyone else who was involved with the effort would be better than they were when they began.

Of course, Coach Brooks wanted to win that game. But had it gone the other way, I am confident that he would have stepped off the ice knowing that he had done something great. Perhaps few others would have recognized it. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to watch a movie about it. But he would have known that tireless preparation, study, decades of hard-earned experience, and the hard work of a whole team had allowed those twenty young men to skate sixty minutes with the greatest hockey team in history. He would have held his head high, and he would not have demanded applause.

by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

(Thomas Cole: The Voyage of Life: Youth, from the National Gallery of Art)

I passed a window today as I walked across campus. At the end of my sixteenth year on the faculty here there should be little that strikes me as new along this pathway. Yet the year away on sabbatical leave has perhaps changed my perspective, and I saw in something familiar a hint of something long forgotten.

This window was inside our university center, downstairs, looking into an office that serves student organizations. Yet through that window I also glimpsed shadows of a place both familiar and distant. It was a place that I inhabited long ago. I was a student. I was very serious, and yet not so serious. I was essentially care free, though I didn’t realize it. There was very little of interest behind me then. Almost everything there was to see was in front of me, stretching off toward the bright horizon. At some point I left that place, only gradually realizing that I had gone somewhere else. Maybe I never completely comprehended its absence—or rather, mine. That’s why it was so surprising to see it on the other side of that window today.

It was just a glimpse lasting only a few seconds, and then I was again out in the crisp spring air. But it jarred me. That glimpse came with a sudden realization that I was no longer in that place, even though it surrounds me every day. And it seems unlikely that I will ever find my way back.

I walked on. I came around the corner of another building on campus, and something else sent my thoughts spinning even further back. There was an impulse sprinkler watering the lawn. Slowly and methodically it traced its circle in the greening grass: psst…psst…psst… It’s likely that the first time I ever saw or heard one of these little machines was on a college campus in the Midwest, on a lazy, gentle summer day between terms, just like this one. I was just a kid, probably trailing after my dad or my big sister who were there trying to sort out something about their student experiences. To me, then, college and the student life were themselves far off toward the distant horizon.

However improbable it had seemed a few minutes earlier that I could ever return to either one of those places, it was now clearly impossible. And in that moment of realization, my heart broke just a little. These places now belong to others. I only hope that they are inhabiting them more mindfully and with greater appreciation than I did so long ago.