Transcription
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
Hello everyone, welcome to Cafe 229. My name is Joanne Chen, and I will be the pianist and the speaker for tonight's talk. The title is "Music Without Borders: A Pianist's Journey with Mindfulness." So tonight, I will be performing a few pieces along with my understanding from my mindfulness perspectives.
The first piece is "Clair de Lune," a piece by Debussy written in the early 20th century. Everybody knows he is a famous French composer and pianist. He wrote this music inspired by Paul Verlaine, the French poet. This is his definition and a Western definition of moon and moonlight:
"Your soul is a chosen landscape where charlie masquerades and the dancers are promenading, playing the lute and dancing, and almost sad beneath their fantastic disguises while singing in a minor key of Victoria's love. The pleasant life they seem not to believe in their own happiness, and their soul blends with the light of the moon, with the sad and beautiful light of the moon, which sets the birds in the trees dreaming and makes the fountains soap with accuracy. The slender water streams along the marble statues."
So this is a beautiful scenery, but it's kind of contrasting with the sadness covered under the mask. In the East, traditionally in the Zen tradition, the moon is usually reflected as an illusion; it's something intangible. As you can see, the monkey is trying to touch the moon from the reflection in the water, but it's not real. That's something we usually symbolize the moon with in the East.
Another really famous way that we discuss the moon is how a Zen master would point his finger towards the moon. The moon is an example of an enlightened self-nature, and it is something pure and of extreme beauty that most people don't get to see. A lot of the time, when we try to point to the moon, people mistake that finger as the moon. So we need to go beyond it; through mindfulness practice, we will go beyond the methods and go into the pure beauty of it. That's actually the way we interpret the moon and the moonlight from an Eastern perspective.
There's quite a different contrast there. As someone who has lived in New York for many years and traveled between Asia and the Western world, these are my observations. So now I'm going to perform this piece on the piano.
[Music]
So,
[Music]
So,
[Music]
Okay, so my next piece is called "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel." It's actually by a composer named Franz Schubert, and it's a Lied he wrote for singer and piano, set on the poem by Goethe and arranged by Franz Liszt, who was a great pianist and a virtuoso.
This poem that you can read on my screen is, I'll read a little bit of it:
"My piece is gone, my heart is heavy. I will find it never and never more where I do not have him. That is the grave, and the whole world is bitter to me."
So you can read along. This is a young girl's heart who is set on a man she fell in love with. This is where she has a love tune for him, but underneath it, she has a lot of anxiety and worry about whether he's going to like her or if she's going to find him again. She was weaving with the spinning wheel, and while she is working, she thinks of him.
This is a typical example for someone who practices Koan, which is a method of mindfulness. We keep having this thought that comes back, and we will be thinking her service of thought is this:
[Music]
That's her long longing desire for his love, but underneath, she has a lot of worry. She worries if she can find him, meet him again, and be with him.
So that's a Western music approach, but for me as a mindfulness practitioner, that melody seems like our regular thought. When you meditate, you have a quieted mind; you think there's one thought, but there's actually a lot of noises underneath—undercurrents going on. Some have big waves, some have small waves, so you can see that and you can hear that in this piece written by Schubert 200 years ago.
Even though I, as a mindfulness practitioner, come from the East, this is very close to me. Playing Schubert's music is very closely related to my practice and how I observe my wandering thoughts and destructive thoughts while I have a mind of doing some tasks. But there's so much going on underneath, almost like an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is what you see, but there's so much more underneath and so many emotions and turbulences there.
So this is a beautiful piece of music, and Schubert made it beautiful, but Franz Liszt made it so much more challenging and harder technically. So I'm going to share this piece of music with you.
[Music]
So,
[Music]
Do,
[Applause]
[Music]
Okay, so my next piece is "Dusty Rag," and this is by an African American female composer named May Aufderheide. She wrote this piece in the early 20th century. At this time, African Americans were a minority and were heavily discriminated against, especially women.
May was very lucky; her father was a famous book publisher and very successful, so she got this opportunity. She had all these talents, and she wrote a lot of rags, but they were accepted and published only after her father decided to publish her works and spread them out. Some of her works are still being performed and respected today.
I wanted to play this because of her significant gender role in the history of American jazz music, especially at this time when we hear a lot about African Americans, Asian people, and women being discriminated against. This is a very special time, and I specifically picked this piece to share with everybody. I think we are all born equal, and that is something—there are racial issues and gender issues that are always there. So it's something for us to be mindful of and to raise our awareness to be fair, to be equal, and to treat everybody with equality.
Alright, so here is "Dusty Rag."
[Music]
Do,
Okay, so my next piece is "Cafe 1930." I love this name, not only because it's Cafe 229, but also because it's by Astor Piazzolla. Piazzolla was an Argentinian immigrant who moved to New York City at a very young age. His parents had a lot of little kids, so he had to start working at a very young age as an immigrant. He grew up a real New Yorker and as an immigrant.
He wrote this piece originally for flute and guitar duo. Today, I'm doing a piano solo piece arranged by him. I wanted to play this because personally, I love Piazzolla's pieces because he has a very unique blend of different backgrounds. He went to study in Europe with Nadia Boulanger, who encouraged him to write the music of his style—not to follow traditional classical music, not to follow the New York jazz style, but also to blend his Argentinian background.
Astor Piazzolla loved tango music, so his tango music is not the common Argentinian tango music; it is a blend of jazz, classical music, tango, and his New Yorker background. I picked this piece because I think all of us are immigrants. We are moving from one stage to another, one place to another, one age to another, one stage of life, one situation and condition to another place, to another time, to another location.
So I think this transient nature is very well talked about in mindfulness and in Buddhism, and that's something I feel a lot from his music. The previous pieces I talked about—the poem, the music arts—and now it is all different kinds of cultural backgrounds blended together. I think with mindfulness, we can always explore more internally and more profoundly to explore the parts and the innate talents that we all have that we haven't really had a chance and the opportunity to explore.
So I feel very close to Piazzolla's works because of that. So let's listen to "Cafe 1930."
So,
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]
So,
[Music]
[Music]
[Applause]
Do,
[Applause]
[Applause]
[Music]
Do,
Do,
[Music]
[Music]
The next piece is "Pure Land on Earth." This music is from the Tzu Chi Foundation, and I have been a volunteer for the Tzu Chi Foundation for more than 20 years. During this time, I have traveled around the world to perform, to lecture, and to share my love for doing volunteer work with the Tzu Chi Foundation and all the volunteers around the globe—from China to Haiti, to South Africa, to Taiwan, and to different parts of the U.S.
This music is called "Pure Land on Earth." I would like to read the first two paragraphs and share my thoughts with you, along with some photos:
"Let the trust, honesty, sincerity, and virtue be the earth on which I stand. Let love, compassion, joy, and equanimity be a gentle breeze from the heart."
You know, like in the Tzu Chi Foundation, it means compassion in action. Traditionally, mindfulness consists of compassion and wisdom. Without compassion, wisdom cannot be applied.
So, this first photo is in Gansu Province, where we went to check out the water reservoir because there was no water in the high mountain where they lived. It took eight hours to get two buckets of water for each family. We danced with them, shared some love and music, and we also met some ethnic groups who dressed up in their beautiful clothing. We danced and had live music perform with us, and we also shared teachings effortlessly with them to work with them and share some wisdom from Master Cheng Yen.
Some of them were home visits to those living in extreme poverty, and we went there to understand their lifestyle and share some of that. We also traveled to areas affected by the earthquake, where we went to share and spend time with people who were lacking homes and food. We spent time with their kids, who loved their parents to be accompanied by them.
The next one is also a home visit to help some really smart kids with scholarships and money to study. We also traveled to Haiti when the earthquake hit Port-au-Prince and spent time volunteering with them to help them out. We also went to South Africa, where we sang and danced with people who were extremely talented. We had a book drive and raised a lot of different things there.
And also, Sandy in America, where we traveled to Staten Island, which was hit the worst, walking in the ripples and talking to the residents who were affected. These are all beautiful memories I have, and this is the mindfulness that I have practiced and applied.
Also, in Taiwan, there was a gas explosion, and the next one was also New York performances. I shared my piano performances in the Tzu Chi Foundation at Lincoln Center, as well as Carnegie Hall and Riverside Church. I got to perform as well as do volunteer work in fundraising with youth group members whom I led for over 13 years. They were part of my family, and I traveled with the youth group to a local school with different disability programs to share some joy with them.
So, you know, different parts of the world and different parts of mindfulness practices enabled me to grow, and with the Tzu Chi Foundation, I have a bigger, larger family than I ever expected. Thank you for listening, and I'm going to perform my last piece, which will be followed by a Q&A session. Don't disappear.
[Music]
Do,
[Music]
[Music]
Do,
[Music]
Wow, that was such a wonderful performance! So I'm Peter, and I will be the Q&A host tonight. I think I was reading what the audience is responding, and I think you got the most claps ever in our Cafe 229 tonight so far. So many people are saying wonderful words in the chat room right now, and I think people are saying you're such an inspiration for them.
So we're very happy to have you, Dr. Chen, tonight. As I'm listening to the pieces, those pieces sound so wonderful. I believe many people probably have the same question as me, which is how did you choose those pieces? How did you come up with the program tonight? I think there must be some kind of meaning behind it, so if you can tell us a little bit about it.
Thank you, Peter, for being the host for the Q&A section. Well, and thank you to everybody for being part of my concert tonight. I wanted to thank the Tzu Chi Foundation for this opportunity to present my love, which is music and mindfulness. I think this is such a great opportunity for me to talk about both and present these two very similar topics to me.
Well, it did take quite some thinking to plan today's program. It's not very long, but each of them has its own meanings. First of all, "Clair de Lune" is a contrast and the similarities between East and West, where I have both of the backgrounds. I think living in New York City, it's such a diverse place, as well as teaching at CUNY, where I teach. It's a diverse cultural background with my students and faculty members. I feel it's such a blend.
I really can bring it out from different perspectives, even though it was created by a French composer. I do have my interpretation from mindfulness perspectives about the moon. The second piece was, you know, there's a lot of turbulence underneath. I talked about the underlying turbulence; I feel like that's my mind. When I meditate, I make them fight your thoughts. You're wondering, and some distractions get magnified.
This is a piece where she's not alone. I think all of us sometimes find it hard to concentrate and focus on things that are very important to us. So the mindfulness practice is a method that brings out what's important to us and what's less important to us so we can focus on that.
The third piece addresses the racial and gender issues that are very current, especially under the climate of COVID-19. It is very sensitive to a lot of people, and I think May Aufderheide was such a great female African American composer who wrote such beautiful pieces. She is a symbol for us to learn from, and that's something I also wanted to bring.
The next piece was, you know, I talked about Astor Piazzolla as an immigrant in life. Everybody's life is so transient, and it moves from one place to another, different stages. I think that's very close to a lot of us, and it's inevitable.
The last piece is about my mindfulness practices in different areas of application—my belief, my practice, and putting it into practice. So this covers pretty much different parts and perspectives and also brings the meanings of life to me, and I wanted to share that with my audience here tonight.
Very great! I think that's a wonderful explanation. I think usually when people think about mindfulness, they think about sitting meditation and just relaxing and calming down. But I think what mindfulness does for people is really invite us to investigate deeper into the meaning and purpose of our life and how we want to look at the world differently.
So I think your pieces demonstrate or invite us to use a different perspective to think about issues that we should pay more attention to. So I think that's a wonderful explanation. I know you work as an educator, and I can see from the audience that some students are writing about, "Hey, Professor Chen travels around the world; we want to do the same like her."
So as an educator, I guess mindfulness training helps you to be a good performer, but I assume it does something for your education training or your education for others, right? I mean, would you elaborate a little bit about how mindfulness helps you to be a better teacher? What is your teaching philosophy?
Oh, okay, that's a big question. But I think that question evolves as I grow to be an educator. I think, you know, as a musician, I share my love of music with my students and with people around me. So I think there are a few things I do. I tell them to be creative; I tell them not to let things limit their ability and talents. Explore and be open-minded, have a positive attitude.
I also try to teach something hands-on because I'm a pianist, and they learn music from me. So something creative, something hands-on, and there's something with open-mindedness and open mindfulness, as well as a positive attitude and respect for my students' uniqueness. We are good at certain things and not so good at certain things. We have certain talents that others don't have, so you need to really get to know yourself.
Hopefully, through mindfulness, you can explore that part of you—what is the unique part that you want to share and bring out. That sells yourself as a dependent and great musician. You have to explore that part; you have to find it out on your own, and that's something I also coach my students with.
So I think it's about respecting uniqueness and exploration. That's what I usually base my teaching on when I work with them.
Yeah, it's wonderful sometimes to work with young adults, like I also do. Working with young adults, you have to encourage them to find that beauty within them, right? It's almost like each of us is a piece of an instrument, and they have to play their own music.
As a music professor, I'm sure you have students who probably don't know much about music, like never had Music 101 before. So how do you encourage them or the audience? Because I myself never had music training, right? How do you encourage the audience to appreciate music more in general?
I think, you know, as a music educator, through music, I ask my students a lot: How much time do you spend listening to music? How much do you listen to music, and how much do you understand the music? So I work with them on explaining the different elements of music, taking it like an anatomy of a biology course—breaking the music parts down so they can understand what's made of and how the composers manipulated those different parts of the elements and put it all together.
Each piece is like their baby; it's an individual production and creative process that came out. I think being creative, being open-minded, and noticing things in their life and appreciating nature, appreciating the beauty in other people, and cultivating a sense of understanding and beauty from little things to big things is important.
I think that mindset of appreciation can be extended to appreciating the beauty that's so subtle and intimate to them. They need to notice those things, be aware of them, and then take that into their lives so they can understand more, explore more, and be sensitive to that kind of beauty. Cultivating it is like something you need to nurture. The more you cultivate it, the more sense of beauty you have in different areas of life, and the more you can appreciate music and let it grow.
That's something I, you know, how I work with them.
No, it makes a lot of sense because being mindful means to pay attention, which really means paying attention to the beauty that you have not noticed. So the more we can pay attention, the more we can appreciate.
So that is a thing that makes a lot of sense to me. Some of the audiences now, I'm reading here, love your play of the piece on the moon—the beauty in the moon piece, right? The question I guess some of your audience are musicians, and they wonder how mindfulness helped their music performance.
Now, I think not all our audience knows about this, but you're actually one of the earliest mindfulness researchers in the field of music and mindfulness. I mean, you started that—I mean, you started the mindfulness and music research in 2000, so that's like 20-plus years ago, which not many people know. When people know you, they know you as a pianist; they don't think of you as a researcher.
So maybe you can expand a little bit on how mindfulness helps your music performance, and then maybe you can talk a little bit about research as well.
Okay, that's another big question. Let me think. I think I started practicing mindfulness because I was growing from graduate school to hoping to become a performer. That bridge between the students becoming a professional was daunting because the performance, solo on the stage, wasn't an easy task.
So I found that I needed to have a tool to assist me, and just practicing wasn't simply enough. I developed—I found mindfulness, which was free and easy. I just needed a quiet corner on the cushion. I found it very useful to me, and it helped me relax into it and kind of search more inwardly.
So I can take that into the music understanding as well. It's more like craftsmanship. I'm trying to understand, trying to gain insight into the expression of the music, and trying to do more research into the composer. It's like I'm making a friend with this composer who was hundreds of years ago from another corner of the world, but I'm playing the music. It's so intimate to me, so close to me.
The time and the space and location never mattered; it was a work that I spent a lot of time crafting. It's just very close and intimate to me, and that's something I use my mindfulness to help my music performance.
That led into my interest in working with my students because I know a lot of my students are in performance as well, and they feel the same thing that I do—performance anxiety or a little bit of stage fright or some confidence process of building. We all have certain worries and fears about being on stage.
So I share that with them because it is very personal to me and has worked for me. That brought it into my education part. Then I thought, "Why don't I write to share that part with more educators out there?" So I started to read more scientific research on mindfulness, and there was not really much in music performance when I started.
So I published the first study on mindfulness and music performance anxiety, and then I brought that into education. I shared with other music teachers and faculty how to use mindfulness in the educational setting in three different ways: as a mindfulness practitioner, as someone who talks about it, or someone who teaches some method directly to the students.
So there are different ways that I approach and work with my students, and then I collect some data in figuring out their music major and their preferences. So that branched out a little bit, but that's my—it became my research, so it worked in all different areas of my profession and my life.
Yeah, I mean, that's a—I think when people don't know about research, they don't know how much work you need to put in to do the research. You were talking about running groups and measuring them and following them up every week. It's a lot of work, which, you know, I'm sure that the process and the product are very fruitful for all of us.
Now, as I'm reading the questions, some of your students say you are very inspiring for them, but also someone asked, "Who inspired you? Who was your biggest inspiration in your music?"
So you mean the composers, maybe? Is that the question?
Well, the exact question is, "Who was your biggest inspiration in music?" So that would be the composer or performer, then I assume.
That's a good question. I think every composer became part of me, or I found a part of me in those composers in their works. I think we are all encoding independent; we are all co-existing. We share a lot of life experiences from different corners and times and the world.
I think I grew up knowing Beethoven had a really tough life, and I think he was such an inspiration to me. Everybody knows he started to lose his hearing by his 30s and 40s, and he lived up to 57 years old. He grew up in a domestic violence abusive household with an abusive father and had this role model of Mozart in his life.
He was trying to become a star by his parents, and that just gave him a difficult childhood. He had to travel far away to Vienna to become independent while coming back and traveling to take care of his mother and his siblings.
You know, having written this piece for at least everybody knew that he never got to have an ending with the love of his life and never got married. Losing his hearing cut him off from social life, and I think that is one of the most traumatic things we could ever imagine—to be a musician and lose your hearing.
He performed, composed, and premiered his work, his Ninth Symphony, and he conducted it without knowing how people stood up and gave him this huge ovation. He had to be turned around and look at them clapping, not hearing a sound or a note from the premiere of his Ninth Symphony. But he still remained composing and being successful and left us so many legacies and so much beautiful music. I think that was the most inspiring composer that I would ever know.
Wow, you picked a very good example. I mean, it sounds like Beethoven had a tough life. Jesus, my God! Because this is actually related to another question, which is like another person—another audience asks, "What do you think is the biggest barrier or inconvenience as a pianist and musician during COVID?"
But then listening to your Beethoven story, I'm not sure we had it as tough as Beethoven. But what do you think is the biggest challenge for you as a musician?
As a performer, you know, all the music market is gone; all the concert halls were closed or still closed. I think I worry about musicians and performing arts' future. I mean, where are they going to—you know, I'm an educator; I'm fortunate to still be able to teach online, but what about those performers?
I worry for them. I wanted to perform, but there's no audience there; there's no location available out there. I fear about the future of that for all of us. As an educator, it is so hard to teach performance ensemble and something hands-on and live.
So they got so interactive on the internet through Zoom or through Blackboard. That is a challenge. You have to bring that, you know, as much music through that internet to your students. I think those are the two things that I found extremely challenging, and I hope this will be over and our musicians and performing artists will be back to their work and job, and it will bloom again.
Yeah, I think as a music teacher, I'm sure you worry for your students' future. This is one of the toughest times for your students, so I can understand this very well. I think we all do worry for our students, but I think as music students, they are having a much tougher time, it seems.
Yes, it is. And I think as a volunteer, I'm sure you get to have many chances to help people dealing with tough times. One of our audience is interested in your disaster relief experiences. I think what makes the Tzu Chi Foundation special is not only that we practice mindfulness but mindfulness in action.
So can you share a story with us about your disaster experience?
I have experienced and told so many stories, and each of them has its uniqueness and background to it. I guess when I was starting to do volunteer work, one of the most impressive stories I heard was traveling to Gansu, where, you know, like you saw in the picture, there are no trees on top of the mountain, and the rainfall was almost zero during the year.
So the kids had no money to be sent to school. The kids were assigned a job a day, which was carrying two buckets of water—empty buckets—to walk all the way down to the valley of the mountain to get two buckets of water and carry them all the way back up to their home. That was, you know, a four-hour trip each way, so that's eight hours of life spent there.
When I heard that, the kids weren't allowed to go to school, and their job was to carry the two buckets of water to serve the family for some water and cooking. They left their home after they became adults, after 18, to find a job outside, and they weren't able to count the money they earned or communicate through the language with other people.
I just thought of the education I have received and all my students have received in the States. It's such a luxury. You don't know until you don't have it. I think that's something that really made me aware of the importance of education—how the kids can appreciate little things in their life and grow to be wonderful human beings through stories like this, through sharing like this, and through education to transform them.
That's something I would share.
Well, I mean, it's hard for people to imagine if they've never been there. I mean, you actually—here, well, we take everything for granted. We turn on the faucet, and water comes out. We go to school; we hate to go to school. But then kids in another part of the world don't even have any idea what school is.
So I think, I guess that is one of the strengths of doing mindfulness in action. It allows you to see what people are missing out there, which sort of gives you help to build more gratitude and respect for what others have to go through and what you have.
I think our time is almost up, so this is going to be my last question for you. As a mindfulness researcher, as a mindfulness performer, as a mindfulness practitioner, what would you hope our audience to gain tonight before they leave?
That's a good question. I think mindfulness, as I mentioned earlier, has two wings: compassion and wisdom. I think compassion is love and big hearts. You know, apply that to people near you, and wisdom—use it and then apply it in the right place to the right people who need it.
I think having that is mindfulness, and that is something we can use music as a vehicle to pass our love. Use music to pass your love, use music to entertain, and use music to bring joy to people around you and treat them well. Then, you know, it will circulate; it will come back to you.
So, you know, make people around you happy, and they will make you happy. You know, mindfulness practice in applications, I think that's something I would offer at the end of my lecture concert today.
That's a wonderful answer! Use our talents, such as our music, to make ourselves a little bit wiser and bring joy and love to others. Thank you for coming tonight. Thank you, Peter, and thank you everyone for being here tonight. Thank you to the Tzu Chi Foundation for giving me this opportunity.
Thank you!
So thanks again! We thank you all for staying with our concert. In April, we have a very interesting webinar coming up. Our next speaker is Zarco, a great martial arts teacher who is also a Zen practitioner. His topic will be on the art of conflict. So if you love martial arts and want to know how martial arts can be used to practice mindfulness, please stay tuned. It will be on the third Friday of April and start at 7 PM.
Thank you! Thank you for coming!