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Translator: Timothy Covell
Reviewer: Morton Bast
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Well when I was asked to do this TEDTalk, I was really chuckled,
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because, you see, my father's name was Ted,
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and much of my life, especially my musical life,
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is really a talk that I'm still having with him,
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or the part of me that he continues to be.
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Now Ted was a New Yorker, an all-around theater guy,
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and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician.
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He didn't read a note,
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and he was profoundly hearing impaired.
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Yet, he was my greatest teacher.
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Because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids,
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his understanding of music was profound.
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And for him, it wasn't so much the way the music goes
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as about what it witnesses and where it can take you.
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And he did a painting of this experience,
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which he called "In the Realm of Music."
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Now Ted entered this realm every day by improvising
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in a sort of Tin Pan Alley style like this.
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(Music)
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But he was tough when it came to music.
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He said, "There are only two things that matter in music:
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what and how.
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And the thing about classical music,
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that what and how, it's inexhaustible."
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That was his passion for the music.
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Both my parents really loved it.
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They didn't know all that much about it,
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but they gave me the opportunity to discover it
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together with them.
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And I think inspired by that memory,
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it's been my desire to try and bring it
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to as many other people as I can,
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sort of pass it on through whatever means.
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And how people get this music, how it comes into their lives,
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really fascinates me.
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One day in New York, I was on the street
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and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants.
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And a tough, slouchy kid got up to bat,
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and he took a swing and really connected.
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And he watched the ball fly for a second,
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and then he went, "Dah dadaratatatah.
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Brah dada dadadadah."
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And he ran around the bases.
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And I thought, go figure.
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How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment
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turn into the victory crow of this New York kid?
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How was that passed on? How did he get to hear Mozart?
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Well when it comes to classical music,
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there's an awful lot to pass on,
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much more than Mozart, Beethoven or Tchiakovsky.
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Because classical music
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is an unbroken living tradition
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that goes back over 1,000 years.
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And every one of those years
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has had something unique and powerful to say to us
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about what it's like to be alive.
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Now the raw material of it, of course,
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is just the music of everyday life.
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It's all the anthems and dance crazes
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and ballads and marches.
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But what classical music does
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is to distill all of these musics down,
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to condense them to their absolute essence,
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and from that essence create a new language,
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a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly
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about who we really are.
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It's a language that's still evolving.
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Now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of,
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like concertos and symphonies,
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but even the most ambitious masterpiece
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can have as its central mission
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to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment --
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like this one from the Beethoven Violin Concerto.
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(Music)
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It's so simple, so evocative.
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So many emotions seem to be inside of it.
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Yet, of course, like all music,
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it's essentially not about anything.
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It's just a design of pitches and silence and time.
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And the pitches, the notes, as you know, are just vibrations.
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They're locations in the spectrum of sound.
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And whether we call them 440 per second, A,
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or 3,729, B flat -- trust me, that's right --
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they're just phenomena.
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But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena
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is complex and emotional and not totally understood.
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And the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries,
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as have our preferences for them.
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So for example, in the 11th century,
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people liked pieces that ended like this.
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(Music)
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And in the 17th century, it was more like this.
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(Music)
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And in the 21st century ...
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(Music)
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Now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord,
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even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you
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or sent some of you running from the room.
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And the reason you like it
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is because you've inherited, whether you knew it or not,
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centuries-worth of changes
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in musical theory, practice and fashion.
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And in classical music we can follow these changes very, very accurately
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because of the music's powerful silent partner,
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the way it's been passed on: notation.
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Now the impulse to notate,
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or, more exactly I should say, encode music
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has been with us for a very long time.
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In 200 B.C., a man named Sekulos
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wrote this song for his departed wife
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and inscribed it on her gravestone
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in the notational system of the Greeks.
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(Music)
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And a thousand years later,
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this impulse to notate took an entirely different form.
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And you can see how this happened
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in these excerpts from the Christmas mass "Puer Natus est nobis,"
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"For Us is Born."
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(Music)
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In the 10th century, little squiggles were used
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just to indicate the general shape of the tune.
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And in the 12th century, a line was drawn, like a musical horizon line,
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to better pinpoint the pitch's location.
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And then in the 13th century, more lines and new shapes of notes
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locked in the concept of the tune exactly,
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and that led to the kind of notation we have today.
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Well notation not only passed the music on,
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notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely,
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because it enabled the musicians
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to imagine music on a much vaster scale.
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Now inspired moves of improvisation
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could be recorded, saved, considered, prioritized,
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made into intricate designs.
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And from this moment, classical music became
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what it most essentially is,
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a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature:
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instinct and intelligence.
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And there began to be a real difference at this point
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between the art of improvisation
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and the art of composition.
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Now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move,
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but a composer is considering all possible moves,
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testing them out, prioritizing them out,
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until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design
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of ultimate and enduring coolness.
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Now some of the greatest composers, like Bach,
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were combinations of these two things.
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Bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master.
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Mozart was the same way.
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But every musician strikes a different balance
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between faith and reason, instinct and intelligence.
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And every musical era had different priorities of these things,
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different things to pass on, different 'whats' and 'hows'.
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So in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition
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the big 'what' was to praise God.
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And by the 1400s, music was being written
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that tried to mirror God's mind
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as could be seen in the design of the night sky.
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The 'how' was a style called polyphony,
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music of many independently moving voices
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that suggested the way the planets seemed to move
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in Ptolemy's geocentric universe.
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This was truly the music of the spheres.
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(Music)
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This is the kind of music that Leonardo DaVinci would have known.
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And perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity
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meant that something new had to happen --
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a radical new move, which in 1600 is what did happen.
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(Music) Singer: Ah, bitter blow!
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Ah, wicked, cruel fate!
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Ah, baleful stars!
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Ah, avaricious heaven!
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MTT: This, of course, was the birth of opera,
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and its development put music on a radical new course.
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The what now was not to mirror the mind of God,
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but to follow the emotion turbulence of man.
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And the how was harmony,
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stacking up the pitches to form chords.
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And the chords, it turned out,
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were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions.
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And the basic chords were the ones we still have with us,
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the triads,
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either the major one,
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which we think is happy,
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or the minor one,
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which we perceive as sad.
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But what's the actual difference between these two chords?
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It's just these two notes in the middle.
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It's either E natural,
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and 659 vibrations per second,
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or E flat, at 622.
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So the big difference between human happiness and sadness?
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37 freakin' vibrations.
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So you can see in a system like this
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there was enormous subtle potential
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of representing human emotions.
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And in fact, as man began to understand more
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his complex and ambivalent nature,
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harmony grew more complex to reflect it.
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Turns out it was capable of expressing emotions
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beyond the ability of words.
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Now with all this possibility,
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classical music really took off.
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It's the time in which the big forms began to arise.
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And the effects of technology began to be felt also,
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because printing put music, the scores, the codebooks of music,
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into the hands of performers everywhere.
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And new and improved instruments
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made the age of the virtuoso possible.
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This is when those big forms arose --
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the symphonies, the sonatas, the concertos.
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And in these big architectures of time,
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composers like Beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime.
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A piece like Beethoven's Fifth
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basically witnessing how it was possible
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for him to go from sorrow and anger,
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over the course of a half an hour,
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step by exacting step of his route,
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to the moment when he could make it across to joy.
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(Music)
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And it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues,
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like gripping ones of culture,
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such as nationalism or quest for freedom
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or the frontiers of sensuality.
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But whatever direction the music took,
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one thing until recently was always the same,
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and that was when the musicians stopped playing,
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the music stopped.
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Now this moment so fascinates me.
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I find it such a profound one.
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What happens when the music stops?
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Where does it go? What's left?
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What sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance?
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Is it a melody or a rhythm
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or a mood or an attitude?
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And how might that change their lives?
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To me this is the intimate, personal side of music.
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It's the passing on part. It's the 'why' part of it.
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And to me that's the most essential of all.
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Mostly it's been a person-to-person thing,
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a teacher-student, performer-audience thing,
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and then around 1880 came this new technology
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that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally
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created a new and miraculous way of passing things on,
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albeit an impersonal one.
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People could now hear music all the time,
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even though it wasn't necessary
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for them to play an instrument, read music or even go to concerts.
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And technology democratized music by making everything available.
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It spearheaded a cultural revolution
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in which artists like Caruso and Bessie Smith were on the same footing.
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And technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes,
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using computers and synthesizers
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to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity
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beyond the means of performers and audiences.
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At the same time technology,
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by taking over the role that notation had always played,
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shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence
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way over to the instinctive side.
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The culture in which we live now
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is awash with music of improvisation
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that's been sliced, diced, layered
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and, God knows, distributed and sold.
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What's the long-term effect of this on us or on music?
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Nobody knows.
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The question remains: What happens when the music stops?
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What sticks with people?
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Now that we have unlimited access to music, what does stick with us?
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Well let me show you a story of what I mean
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by "really sticking with us."
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I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home,
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and I spied a very shaky old man
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making his way across the room on a walker.
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He came over to a piano that was there,
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and he balanced himself and began playing something like this.
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(Music)
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And he said something like, "Me ... boy ... symphony ... Beethoven."
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And I suddenly got it,
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and I said, "Friend, by any chance are you trying to play this?"
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(Music)
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And he said, "Yes, yes. I was a little boy.
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The symphony: Isaac Stern, the concerto, I heard it."
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And I thought, my God,
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how much must this music mean to this man
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that he would get himself out of his bed, across the room
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to recover the memory of this music
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that, after everything else in his life is sloughing away,
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still means so much to him?
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Well, that's why I take every performance so seriously,
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why it matters to me so much.
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I never know who might be there, who might be absorbing it
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and what will happen to it in their life.
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But now I'm excited that there's more chance than ever before possible
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of sharing this music.
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That's what drives my interest in projects
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like the TV series "Keeping Score" with the San Francisco Symphony
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that looks at the backstories of music,
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and working with the young musicians at the New World Symphony
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on projects that explore the potential
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of the new performing arts centers
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for both entertainment and education.
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And of course, the New World Symphony
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led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet
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that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world.
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And the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype.
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There's just a role here for so many people --
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teachers, parents, performers --
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to be explorers together.
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Sure, the big events attract a lot of attention,
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but what really matters is what goes on every single day.
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We need your perspectives, your curiosity, your voices.
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And it excites me now to meet people
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who are hikers, chefs, code writers, taxi drivers,
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people I never would have guessed who loved the music
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and who are passing it on.
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You don't need to worry about knowing anything.
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If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive,
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you know all that you need to know.
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You can start anywhere. Ramble a bit.
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Follow traces. Get lost. Be surprised, amused inspired.
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All that 'what', all that 'how' is out there
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waiting for you to discover its 'why',
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to dive in and pass it on.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
