| Jessye Norman Commencement Speech |
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| Sunday, May 11, 2008 | |
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, I am happy and honored indeed to speak to you today, as a newly minted alumna of the great University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thank you. I am thrilled to be an official part of you. Although I have the feeling that I shall be preaching to the choir, I have decided to plunge ahead anyway, while knowing that your education at UNC has helped to make you concerned, active, soulful citizens of your world … that the arts are a cherished part of life on this campus, and that Simone de Beauvoir was writing of things close to your hearts with her words: “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the lives of others by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.” The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s grand accomplishments in education, of course, health care and economic development speak volumes of your love for your community, for this planet … your indignation at the state of health care in our country and your compassion for those who, but not for the Carolina Covenant Scholars program, would not be here with us today, the first full class to graduate. My sincere congratulations to all, but especially to these students. But, just in case climbing the corporate ladder might leave you a little out of breath – or searching for the proper tool with which to smash through the proverbial glass ceiling might tend to put a bit of a strain on your graciousness and energy – spend a moment or two with me as we explore the expression, not of your brilliant intellects, but of your soul’s voice … your soul’s music … for I promise that this connection will sustain you, nourish you and as importantly, give you joy! I would like to talk to you today about art … all the arts, from the home I have found in music to the written word ... from the most ephemeral dance step to the most permanent of carvings in wood or stone. Art brings us together as a family because it is an individual expression of universal, human experience. At its best, it is a non-competitive, non-comparative expression, full of meaning that is personal. Art comes from that part of us that is without fear, prejudice, malice, or any of the other things that we create to separate ourselves, one from the other. Art makes each of us whole by insisting that we use all of our senses: our heads and our hearts ... that we express with our voices, our hands, our bodies as well as with our minds. And in this modern society, art may be the only force that invites expression from the inside out, that offers what might be called “the spirit self” … uncluttered by judgment, cynicism, or intolerance: a unique voice that is no more important than any other, but no less important, either. I am not just talking about those of us who have chosen a profession in the arts, but about the arts as a normal and everyday part of life for everyone, whether that means keeping a journal, making pottery for the pleasure of working with our hands, or painting, playing an instrument or dancing with our whole bodies. Your sophisticated, educated, selves may look with a questioning eye on the racing of your heartbeat when singing that wonderful Bach cantata in the community choir or penning the perfect haiku … at the birth of your child … but this my friends is your soul’s music. Listen to it and enjoy it. Indulge in it, nurture it, dance with it, caress it, love it! Though the very term “art” has been turned into something a little rarified – only for a few ... something that is supposed to happen only in museums or concert halls … and be done and seen only by experts – I wish to remind you that for most of human history, art was a normal, daily, crucial part of life. It was recognized as something essential to human life. If you and I had been sitting here in any era other than this industrial and technological one, we would find ourselves resting on chairs or stools made by hand, each one a little different from the other, each one a unique presentation of human creativity. We would wear woven clothing and carved or cast jewelry … a part of a communal tradition, yet individually unique. We would celebrate with food and drink that would be creations in themselves, and take our nourishment from vessels that would be objects of art, as well as objects of use. We would most assuredly be singing together, improvising rhythms together, telling stories and moving to some glorious music. We would do this as a part of everyday events, too, that would include work songs and chants to keep the spirits high throughout the working hours … offer stories or parables to pass on wisdom in a way that statistics and pie-charts never can. Yet, because we learn only about the last few centuries, or at most, the last few thousand years, which happen to be less than 5 percent of human history … we have been reduced to the belief that only singers can sing, only writers can tell stories, only painters can make images and only dancers can dance! To make us buy art as a commodity, to make us conform in a way that people who create their own art rarely do, and to keep us divided from each other for the benefit of the few, we have been told that the arts are a luxury, not a necessity … that they are the frosting on the cake, not the cake itself … an extracurricular activity one should get around to someday … not education, itself. It might require some heavy-duty convincing to help us see art as a normal part of life. But as Native American writer Paula Gunn Allen has written, “The root of oppression is the loss of memory.” We are lost unless we remember our past and its power … the time when the expression of the soul was both natural and expected. Therefore, to remind us that our ancestors knew what they were doing, permit me to offer a few hard-nosed facts about the truths that we are rediscovering. In a California program called “Sentenced to the Stage,” juvenile offenders in the Los Angeles area are given the opportunity to join drama and dance workshops as a condition of their probation. They are given the chance to act out their feelings within a positive, supportive environment. As a result of this and similar programs in other parts of the country, it has been revealed that such “safe havens” are particularly potent in reducing drug abuse, violence and school drop-out rates. From New York to New Mexico, programs that encourage students to write poetry, for example, have resulted in students who are more productive, self confident, less inhibited, more accepting of one another and more likely to improve their general writing skills. The Massachusetts Algebra Project incorporated drumming into its lessons in math, including algebra, and found that students learned more quickly, including those who thought they could not learn math at all. Over the years, students of the arts have out-performed other students on the SATs … the famous scholastic achievement tests through which we have all had to suffer. Scores for those whose studies included four or more years of arts education have been as much as 59 points higher on verbal tests than other students’ … and over 40 points higher in math. The conclusion here is that the arts can transform the student as well as the classroom environment ... and engender enthusiasm and motivation for learning. The arts also teach discipline, the value of sustained effort to achieve excellence and the concrete rewards of hard work … of repetition ... of doing something over and over again until, for example, the first movement of that Mozart piano sonata suddenly becomes far less terrifying … or precisely the correct description is found to chronicle the myriad of feelings in leaving home that first time, to come to university…. Albert Einstein – and surely no speech would be complete without quoting Einstein at least once – stated: “When I examine myself and my method of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.” Layer upon this thought from Einstein one from Jamake Highwater: I would add that the ability to represent our most cherished thoughts with pencil, paint and color ... with words scribbled on paper, with movement or melody … gives us confidence in ourselves, essential contact with our deepest of selves – thereby allowing us to be better understood by others and to understand others – and guides us to a calmer more accepting stance toward the stranger and our outward manifestations of differences. This contact with “the mighty something,” with our deep, spiritual selves, may be the most illuminating and enriching discovery we can make, for it shows without question that at the very level of our beings, we are indeed all one. Creativity equals self-knowledge, this knowledge can lead to wisdom ... and wisdom to the important understanding of others … and this understanding, undoubtedly leads to tolerance. Can creativity do all of this? Yes, it can. I tell you this because we are at a crucial point in our nation’s history. On one side is this wisdom of creativity, ancient and modern … on the other is the backlash, the fervent belief that ‘going back to basics,’ turning away from the individual toward ‘uniform education,’ is the answer to our deficient, our poor public schools. Because this backlash plays upon our understandable despair that many children are indeed being left behind – and I do not use this phrase as one of political expediency, but from the facts as they present themselves – there is a great danger that we will take away from our children the chance to express their true selves. When school systems claim the need to cut costs, the arts are the first subjects to be put aside. And although we spend a lesser percentage on the arts in our country than any other democracy in the world, under five-hundredths of 1 percent of our national budget, the current administration would be happy to eliminate even that. I am preaching to the choir … are you listening, brothers and sisters? This is serious stuff. Art historian Robert Hughes wrote that certain factions of our congressional body mean to sever all links between American government and American culture. They want the federal government to give no support at all to music, theater, ballet, opera, film, intelligent television, literature, history, archeology, museum work, architectural conservation and the visual arts. These factions would like to abolish federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If you believe, as I do, that we should be putting more money into education in general, and arts education in particular, there is a great deal you, and only you, can do. First of all, have your say in the voting booth. The current crisis is upon us mostly because some 60 percent of eligible Americans refuse to vote! I plead with you to vote against anyone, Republican or Democrat, who wishes to cut the comparatively meager funds now spent on cultural programs while suggesting that the Pentagon needs every dollar that can be begged, borrowed or stolen from the futures of our children! Secondly, encourage your friends, colleagues and neighbors to get involved. Put facts about the impact of the arts and the lack of arts spending on museum walls, in concert programs, in letters to any groups to which you belong and most of all, to those whom you have sent to represent you in Washington. Remind them of who placed them in those positions. In states that have measured these activities, it has been shown that far more people go to cultural events than to sports events. They just are not speaking out for that which is important to them. Thirdly, use whatever means you have to include the arts as core content in state and local school curricula. Remember your own education experiences and what made you want to learn. Make sure today’s young minds are nourished and their spirits encouraged to take flight! Fourth, go into the schools yourselves … volunteer to teach your own chosen form of creativity a couple of hours a week … whether this be storytelling or sculpting, square-dancing or watercolors. You will be repaid a thousand times over from sharing your time and your enthusiasm for speaking from the inside out. And finally, make the arts a part of your daily life, not once in a while, but all the time …. listen to your soul’s music every day. If this seems difficult for you because the arts were not part of your growing up experience, if art still seems odd, special things that only gifted people are able to do, think, please, about a young boy in Hawaii who was too embarrassed to write, was sure he spelled badly and most of all, was certain that he had nothing worth saying. His very astute teacher asked him to make his frustration work for him … to write simply from his heart. Here is the poem he turned in just 10 minutes later: It’s too bad I can’t do anything ... … and he thought he had nothing worth saying … If I am able to give people drops of tears or smiles of joy or an experience from soul to soul, it is probably because I was taken at age 6 with my Brownie troop to see “Cinderella” …. I was enchanted by this magical play with real horses and a real carriage on the stage. It is because I sang in the school and church choirs in Augusta, Ga., the Girl Scouts and the opening of recreation centers and PTA meetings, and school closing musicals and you name it…. I was never without the need or the urge to just sing my heart out … sometimes even accompanying myself rather loudly on the piano. It is because I was a part of schools where everyone was expected to stand up and do something … and were encouraged for every effort we made … it is because I traveled from Howard University in Washington, D.C. with friends to New York and bought the cheapest tickets we could find at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera and sat there, or more often stood there, watching and listening with my own dreams soaring as high as Leontyne Price’s magnificent voice. To celebrate this day fully, your commencement, this wonderful Mother’s Day, I hope you will also promise to celebrate yourselves. To live artfully is to live from the inside out. Who knows where this could lead? We might come upon the wild notion that this awakened spirit, this ability to express ourselves creatively, is our purpose. We might discover that this spirit we find deep inside ourselves, if we would but look, is a willing, lifelong ally just waiting for our call … that the exploration of our own imagination is our real life’s work. Resolve to become acquainted with the teachings of your heart, your soul’s music. And imagine, if you will, the harmony this could bring to our world. I thank you. All rights reserved for Ms. Norman's Commencement speech Cutline: Chancellor James Moeser congratulates Jessye Norman on her honorary doctorate. Honorary degrees were conferred upon Norman and four others indoors just before the platform party processed into the stadium for Carolina's rain-shortened ceremony May 11. UNC recognizes Commencement speaker, four others with honorary degrees
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