Street performers, Tevye’s daughters, and a young man embracing his gift.
Transcript
A few weeks ago, my family visited Boston for a long weekend. On one of our days there, we spent a morning at Faneuil Hall, which is one of the popular tourist destinations in the city. The area boasts lots of food vendors and opportunities for shopping, but what I was looking forward to most was the chance to witness some of the many street performers who danced, juggled, performed magic, and played music for a living in the outdoor spaces around the various historic buildings in the area; and as I believed it would be my son’s first time seeing professional street performers, I was excited to share this with him as well.
After we parked the car and began making our way to the square, it wasn’t long before we began to hear what sounded like a group of percussionists playing along with a hypnotic and harmonic musical track repeating on a loop. Upon turning the corner, we discovered that it wasn't a group of musicians, but just a single drummer sitting on a low stool in front of an array of five gallon buckets, pots, and pans. Out of these ordinary objects, he had created a collection of improvised instruments, the sound of which bore an uncanny resemblance to the percussive sounds you would expect to hear in a sample of electronic dance music, complete which pitched bowls with which he could play a melodic line in counterpoint to his prerecorded track.
The music on the track was calming, but the drummer was playing hard and fast as if possessed by a fever he was trying to sweat out through his wrists and elbows. I did the math, and in the ten minutes that we stood there watching him, he must have struck the objects in front of him four or five thousand times. Every so often, an on-looker would step forward to place some money in the drummer’s jar, and he would look up from what he was doing, arms still swinging; and facing the sky with an expression that was contorted - either with the joy of the music he was making or the pain and fatigue of his sustained physical exertion… OR BOTH - he would shout words of gratitude out to the universe. To say that he was ‘in the zone’ feels like an understatement. It seems more accurate to say that he was on fire… passionately ablaze, and also burning alive from the inside out.
As we stood there watching and listening to the street drummer, I wondered whether my older son would be able to ascertain how hard he had worked to develop his skills, all the hours of practice, the requite frustrations, and the dedication. I wondered whether I should say something to him to that effect, but I chose instead just to let him take it all in until he was ready to move on.
We happened to be in Boston for the wedding of another professional musician. His name is Jasper, and he was one of my students when I taught in the public school system. Jasper studied film scoring in college, and after graduating, he eventually landed a job with a highly reputable film music company. His fiance (whose name is Aekta) works in tech, so naturally they moved to LA.
Aekta’s parents were born in India, and the wedding had a great deal of Indian cultural influence. The festivities started on Thursday evening with a reception that coincided with the bride’s adornment with mehndi (otherwise known as henna), a symbol of good luck. As one might expect when attending a wedding, I was introduced to several people whom I had not met before. As much as such introductions are to be expected, something happened that I did not expect: I was introduced several times - by several different members of Jasper’s family (including his fiance) - as “the reason that he went into music” as a career.
This recognition was very flattering, but as I share it as a critical part of this story, I also feel the need to temper it by saying that Jasper has always had an exceptional gift for music that I had pretty much nothing to with. Regardless of this fact, the role I had in Jasper’s early career obviously made an impression on the family at large, and I was fascinated with the consistency in the narrative between different family members as they made these introductions. Just as cultures have collective mythologies, so do families; and it seemed as though my role as Jasper’s teacher had found a small corner to occupy within the family mythology. And this I suppose is fitting, because, if I’m honest, Jasper and his family are definitely important characters in my own personal myth as well.
If our interrelated tales were to be documented, the most important incident would probably be an interaction we had on a spring afternoon during Jasper’s junior year of high school. A group of students were hanging out in the school’s auditorium after the end of the school day. It was near the end of the year, and so most of our major school performances had already happened. The overall mood in the room was very relaxed, with all of the work lights and house lights on; a small group of students were chatting at the front of the seating area. Jasper was on the stage by himself, sitting at the piano, and I was somewhere towards the back of the seats, just taking it all in.
Jasper began playing a composition he had written… something I had been hearing him do more and more frequently when he had the chance to sit at the piano. I was becoming more and more impressed with his command of composition, and in this moment, I was struck by the unique voice evident in the music, the heart with which he played, and the way this particular piece seemed to capture the mood of the moment. And then a thought came to me, as if someone else had spoken it: The world needs to hear this young man’s music.
I went up to the stage, and when Jasper finished playing, I asked what he was doing that summer. He shrugged and made an uninspired comment about a summer job. I suggested that he should do something to build on his skills as a composer, and I told him that, if he and his parents were OK with it, I would be willing and interested to give him composition lessons.
I imagine this might have been the reason I was introduced the way I was at the wedding festivities. This must have been a pivotal moment for Jasper, just as his wedding was also sure to be pivotal. So, while in Boston, I began to wonder if there was some thread connecting these moments in Jasper’s life, a through-line from which a little bit of wisdom might even be ascertained. And sure enough, the Hindu wedding ceremony, to which this was my first time being a witness, offered an image that seemed to tie it all together. But before I get to that, I should tell you a bit more about Jasper’s time in high school.
Jasper and I did end up working together on his compositions that summer, and by the beginning of his senior year, it seemed he had started considering whether he could actually make a career out of music. Just considering that seemed to be a big deal for him, because up until that point, Jasper had figured he would end up going into business. Jasper’s father is a very successful businessman; and with family being so important to him, I’m guessing that Jasper saw the decision to follow his father’s career path as being the best way to support his future family. So, with all of our cultural images and stories of the archetypal starving artist, the consideration of a career in music was rather disruptive. His parents were very, very supportive of him, but not being professional musicians themselves, nor really knowing any, they simply weren’t sure what to expect or how best to guide him.
It just so happens that the school musical Jasper’s senior year was Fiddler on the Roof, and Jasper was cast in the role of Tevye. The central theme of Fiddler on the Roof, of course, is the keeping of cultural tradition and what happens when tradition is broken. Tevye, a devout Jew and an impoverished milkman, arranges for his oldest daughter to marry the wealthy butcher, only to find out that she is in love with the poor tailor, and that they had made a promise to one another. Thereafter, Tevye’s second oldest daughter falls in love with a radical student and leaves their village to be with him when he is arrested and sent to Siberia. Finally, the third oldest daughter falls in love with someone of another ethnicity and culture, and they elope after she is forbidden to see him. These instances, of course, confront Tevye with progressively more significant defiance of tradition, and the issue of belonging becomes rather salient; in other words, Tevye is forced to acknowledge that his daughters ultimately belong to themselves, and therefore have their own agendas and desires.
Archetypal psychology suggests that as we grow as children, we develop an inner father and an inner mother around the images, feelings, and functions of these archetypal principals. These figures are decidedly interior but are moderated by the external mother and father; in other words, our inner mother and father are distinct from our biological mother and father, but the way we relate to the inner figures is significantly influenced by the living people who are our mother and father, as well as others who might fulfill motherly and fatherly functions in our exterior lives.
Thinking of Jasper wrestling with the decision of whether to pursue a career in music, I can imagine Tevye being a sort of outpicturing of his own inner father who - just like Tevye’s reaction to his daughter wanting to marry the poor tailor - was skeptical about whether a music career would generate enough money to support physical life. Coincidentally, not unlike Tevye’s second and third daughters, Jasper, when he moved to LA, also moved to a distant city to follow two of his loves (his music and his fiance); and having a solid upbringing in the Christian religion, he also happened to fall in love with someone from a different cultural background.
Jasper and Aekta’s wedding included both a Hindu ceremony and a Christian ceremony, and as I mentioned before, it was my first time witnessing a Hindu wedding. About two thirds of the way through the Hindu ceremony, there was a ritual that I found especially compelling. This ritual is called the Vivah Homa, and at this point in the proceedings, the priest lit a fire in a small bowl. It was then Jasper’s task as the groom to pour a ceremonial offering of crushed herbs and spices into the fire. He did this several times, and with each repetition of this symbolic sacrifice, he spoke the words, “This belongs to you, and not to me.”
The Sanskrit word for fire is agni, and it represents a core principle throughout Hindu cosmology. I was familiar with the term agni prior to the wedding thanks to a general knowledge of Ayurveda, which is a methodology pertaining to health, bodily constitution, and nutrition, and that has its roots in ancient Hindu texts. In Ayurveda, agni is the digestive fire that turns food into vital energy.
On a personal level, agni can also refer to the fire we feel with regard to our personal passions and desires. But the sacred Agni in the wedding ceremony refers to the divine god of fire, and the priest officiating the wedding explained that the sacred Agni represents the Sun - the source of all life-giving energy. In Vedic astrology, the Sun represents (among other things) the soul of an individual, and (jumping over to Western terminology for a moment) the Latin word for soul is anima - as in, the animating force, life, breath, and vital principle.
Watching Jasper pour the offering into the fire, I thought back to earlier that day when my family listened to the drummer performing on the street… and the way he seemed to be on fire - burning, as if in subjugation to some inner power that was driving him to play. And I thought, too, about my curiosity as to whether my son would recognize the time, effort, and dedication - in other words, the sacrifice - that went into developing his talent. In the modern world, it seems the concept of sacrifice is all too easily confused with ‘being a martyr;’ but the original meaning of sacrifice is simply ‘to make sacred.’
As I watched the drummer that morning, it felt like his playing was truly in service to some inner (and perhaps divine) force that was really the one calling the shots. Perhaps there is something burning inside each of us, and - whether or not we think we know what is going on with our life - that inner fire is the one with the real plan… the plan to make our life into something sacred. So if we are honest about it, it is almost like our life doesn’t really belong to us, but it belongs instead, to the divine being within us that knows the gifts we’ve been given and how we might use them to bring more passion and light to the world. The Greeks called this being the daimon; the Romans called it the genius; and the way these ‘divine others’ function is not unlike the Holy Spirit of Christianity, which (of course) is also depicted as fire.
When we acknowledge the inner fire of our soul and offer it the raw materials of our daily life as a sacrifice - in other words, saying “This belongs to you, and not to me” - just like the digestive fire that turns our food into energy, perhaps the sacred Agni that is in us (but not of us) sublimates our life into something like pure, divine energy; and maybe, without knowing it, that’s what I spotted that day in the high school auditorium when I heard Jasper playing the piano - some light or inner fire that had a voice of its own… something that came from neither me or Jasper, but compelled both of us to engage with the story it meant to tell.
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash