"If Music Be The Food Of [True] Love..."
It would seem that a lot has changed since our Hiroshima Music Summit for Peace in April 2016. Instead of nuclear disarmament, some of our political leaders are opting for newly-fashioned disharmony. Idle talk, dangerous threats, attempts at coercion, and acts of aggression coupled with policies of isolation and exclusion pop up in the news on a daily basis. With barely any difference between rumor and reality, we are left to wonder in this climate of uncertainty just how much has really changed for the better in our social discourse.
Meanwhile, there are two changes in the world of which I am certain. The first is personal -- I officially became a citizen of the United States of America seven months ago on July 17, 2017.
You may question my judgment in choosing to pledge allegiance to a nation that appears to have adopted a level of coarseness the likes of which we have never experienced in the public sphere until now. But when all is said and done, I have become a citizen of a country where I am still free to become an ambassador for good. Despite what you may be hearing in the so-called “fake” news, the majority of my fellow Americans are beating their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks in the same spirit that inspired Soviet artist Yevgeny Vuchetich’s sculpture located in the North Garden of the United Nations Headquarters in New York City since 1959. Moreover, we are speaking out against injustice, and protecting the world’s vulnerable and displaced human beings in sanctuary cities across our entire land. Signs even appear on the lawns of private homes declaring, “All are welcome here.”
The second change of which I am certain is not only personal; it is global. Just as my new passport validates my American citizenship, atmospheric scientists have presented irrefutable documentation that points to an ongoing degradation of our natural environment due to climate change. According to CNN reporter Daniella Diaz, even the Federal Government of the United States’ November 2017 Climate Science Special Report admits that there is “‘no convincing alternative explanation’ for the changing climate other than ‘human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases.’” Skeptics may choose to deny this, but the impoverished nation of Kiribati, in spite of more immediate economic needs, spent 9.3 million Australian dollars in 2012 purchasing 5,460 acres on the second largest island of Fiji. They are frantically preparing for total evacuation of their population in 2100, when it is predicted that their entire archipelago of 34 islands will disappear beneath the rising waters of the Pacific Ocean due to global warming.
To withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord at this critical juncture is the figurative equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, or literally, twiddling while Mother Earth churns. Sad!
This brings me to my role as a musician. Like Bob Marley, my Jamaican-born compatriot of “One Love” fame, I am compelled to shine a light on our global condition as well as offer hope for a better future for our children. In 2016, I spoke with the reassurance that good will always overcome evil. Today, in order to advance the safety and security as well as the sanity and sanctity of all humankind, I add the Golden Rule, which is embraced by just about every religious and ethical tradition. Most simply articulated, it says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” This true and highest form of love – Agape – holds the key to caring for planet Earth and all who dwell therein. And for me, to paraphrase the English Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, “If music be the food of [true] love, [I must] play on.”
Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai urges us,
Don’t stop after beating the swords
into plowshares, don’t stop! Go on beating
and make musical instruments out of them.
Whoever wants to make war again
will have to turn them into plowshares first.
Finally, on behalf of my music colleagues past and present, I quote American composer, conductor, author, lecturer, pianist and humanitarian Leonard Bernstein: It is our pledge “. . . to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Play on, play on!
Hailed by The New York Times as "both a virtuoso with herculean technical command and a sensitive introspective artist," Jamaican-born pianist Paul Shaw, a top prize-winner in the William Kapell International Piano Competition and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, has performed to high critical acclaim at prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York; the Kennedy Center and the Hall of the Americas in Washington, D.C.; Beethovenhalle in Bonn; the Manoel Theatre in Valletta, Malta; Teatro Nacional de Costa Rica in San José; and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Paul Shaw was educated at the Jamaica School of Music under the tutelage of Kaestner Robertson and at The Juilliard School, on full scholarship, where he earned the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in Piano Performance working with William Masselos and Herbert Stessin. He is Associate Professor of Piano at the University of Minnesota School of Music and a Steinway Artist. Paul Shaw can be heard on compact disc in solo recitals of classical music: Live from New York, It's Paul Shaw; Caribbean Art Music: Le Grand Tour, featured on a WQXR worldwide web-cast; and in a release on the Clarion label playing James P. Johnson’s Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody for piano solo and orchestra.