Music in the time of Malaise
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 9:40PM 
PEOPLE JUST WANT TO FEEL GOOD. Maybe that’s as basic an explanation as you need for why so many creative people produce paintings, sculptures, dances, plays, photographs, songs and more. These things have the ability to make us feel good.
That can be difficult for some people to fully appreciate. Especially in America we tend to value the utility of things more than the beauty of things. But as I told a class of graduate music education students in a commencement speech [VIDEO, PRINT, AUDIO] at VanderCook College of Music in 2006, “The world needs moments where we don’t say ‘What good is this?’ but only ‘How good this is.’”
Music is my particular passion because nothing makes me feel as good as listening to or performing great music. Although the research frequently gets oversimplified in the popular media, for several years neuroscientists have been exploring the way the brain is affected by music, and there does seem to be evidence that music can trigger the same “pleasure center” of the brain that is also activated by chocolate, cocaine, and sex. (A particularly good book on the topic is This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
That’s why I think what Anne Phillips is doing in New York is so cool. Anne is a dear friend and a remarkably accomplished singer/songwriter who is uniquely able to marry music’s commercial id with its healing soul.
Anne is starting a sing-a-long at Café Loup, a hip French bistro in lower Manhattan. It’s called “Sing! Sing! Sing! A Great American Songbook Sing-a-long,” and its purpose is simply to make people feel good. Anne and her friend and fellow Songbook devotee Michael Shepley are kicking off the project on the 15th anniversary of the original “Sing! Sing! Sing!” which was founded and produced by singer Judy Wolman and is still happening every month at Ruth Price’s Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles.
The goal of both coastal song fests is to lift spirits and to celebrate and preserve the music of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter and other giants of sophisticated lyrics and melodious tunes from the 20th Century.
“I’m getting a great response to this idea,” Anne said in an email today. “Michael is a goldmine of information about this music. His parents loved it and were friends with many theater people. He told me if there had been a family Bible, it would have been the Great American Songbook.”
Anne is being modest, as she herself has spent a lifetime with the greats of jazz, cabaret and theater music in New York and beyond and has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the genres. But she is not music’s academic. She is its ambassador.
“Music is so important, especially now,” she enthused in her message. “And I think people really need this!”
Sound quaint? Well, yes, a sing-a-long does have an air of anachronism about it, but consider the profound malaise our country is in – an “econopocalypse” complete with pirates (pirates, for God’s sake!) homelessness, anxiety, depression, distrust, and war – so perhaps it’s not so much quaint as it is natural to look for the simple things that make us feel good again.
Dr. Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at The Boston Conservatory, gave a speech in 2004 that has become a popular “forward” email among musicians. His message was that music is a necessity. I was especially struck by these three excerpts:
“I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.
“You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2 a.m. someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 p.m. someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.”
Anne Phillips and Judy Wolman are doing more than leading sing-a-longs. They’re making people feel good. They’re making people whole again.
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“Sing! Sing! Sing!” begins at Cafe Loup Saturday, May 9, 2009 from 2 to 4 p.m. Admission is $10. Call 212-255-4746 for reservations.
The next “Sing! Sing! Sing!” event at the Jazz Bakery is a Memorial Day Big Band Tribute on May 17, 2009 beginning at 4 p.m. Call 310-271-9039 for more information.
© 2009 John Armato
Reader Comments (1)
I just read this and really enjoyed it..especially since the songwriters were some of my favorites.
A little Gershwin, Berlin and Porter never hurt anyone!
Love you, John
Aunt Joan