Why Do We Make Music & Art? (我門為什麼創造音樂和藝術?)

Why Do We Make Music & Art? (我門為什麼創造音樂和藝術?)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/06)

Why Do We Make Music & Art?

THINK of your favorite painting, your favorite poem, your favorite piece of music. How do these works of art make you feel? What do they reveal about you? In museums and music halls across the country, appreciation of the arts is enjoying a renaissance. The opening of a Picasso or Van Gogh exhibit, for instance, produces crowds customarily seen at rock concerts or sporting events. What is it about music and art that causes this excitement? We seem suspended, transported, connected, expanded--as if subsumed by something larger. A piece of music or a painting or a poem may lift our hearts, or fill us with ecstasy, or bring us to the brink of despair, or do absolutely nothing to us. What relationship is there between these human emotions and our analytical, rational selves? And what about the social import of art? Does art reflect our culture, or does art help to create our culture? From earliest times, in virtually every society on earth, an advanced aesthetic has marked the high point of civilization. Are these circumstances necessarily linked? We invited five very different artists to speculate about how music, poetry, painting, and other art forms release the human spirit and advance the human condition.

PARTICIPANTS

Dr. Todd Boyd, author of Am I Black Enough For You?: Popular Culture from the 'Hood and Beyond, teaches critical studies in the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. Todd talks about how rap music, hip-hop culture, jazz, and American movies have helped to create a global community.

Dr. Robert Freeman is a leading music educator, historian, pianist, and public spokesman for music education. Bob discusses the importance of musical education and the powerful impact of music on all levels of society.

Dr. Rhoda Janzen has won numerous poetry prizes and received UCLA's teaching award for innovation. Rhoda describes art as a visceral experience, much needed in a cerebral world.

Dr. Ray Kurzweil, scientist, author and entrepreneur, is the inventor of the first computer music keyboard. Ray believes that nonbiological entities will eventually contribute significantly to all forms of art and even create new ones.

Dr. Todd Siler is an artist whose science-based multimedia works are in major museums and numerous collections worldwide. Todd talks about art as immersion without boundaries, and about the observer as an integral part of the work.

ROBERT: Bob, you became director of the Eastman School of Music at the young age of thirty-seven, as a tenured professor from MIT; you've been chief executive of the New England Conservatory. You've traveled throughout the world of music. How can music so powerfully affect human emotion?

BOB: There is, of course, concert music, to which I've dedicated my life, but I'm going to tell you a story that doesn't have to do with music you hear in a concert hall. Bishop Matthew Clark of Rochester told this story, at the dedication of an organ in a Catholic church in his diocese. He spoke about the recent death of his mother. The bishop has three brothers--two of them priests--and four sisters. They were all gathered around the bedside of their eighty-nine-year-old mother, who was in great pain and dying of cancer. They'd given her the last rites, and they all prayed that she wouldn't linger. And their mother would not die. She remained in great pain. The more they prayed, the more nothing seemed to happen. And finally the oldest sister said, "Let's sing some of the songs she taught us when we were children." Holding hands around her bed, they began with "You Are My Sunshine." By the end of the first verse, her breathing had become more regular and relaxed, and by the end of the second verse she had died. These seven people, looking to the heavens, had just found out how powerful a force music can be. And the Bishop said, don't misuse music.

ROBERT: Todd Boyd--we're honored to have two Todds with us today--you've been called one of the new public intellectuals on matters of race, class, and gender. How do music and art contribute to a common culture in America?

TODD BOYD: If you look closely back over the twentieth century, you'll find commonalties in music and other forms of culture that you may not find in social or political areas of life. A recent example would be rap music and hip-hop culture, which, interestingly enough, together constitute one of the few movements in our society that includes a broad cross-section of the people who make up the fabric of America. And if you go beyond America's shores, you'll find that this phenomenon has saturated the globe. That you can start from something as small as a song, or an album, and connect people throughout the world is strong testimony to what music and culture can do to create community at a higher level.

ROBERT: Ray, you've written two pathbreaking books--The Age of Intelligent Machines some years ago, and more recently, The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Do you see computers moving in an artistic direction?

RAY: Computers today are better than people expect in terms of music and art. There's [UC Santa Cruz professor of music] David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer program [a program that generates new compositions in the styles of various composers, among them Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev, and Scott Joplin]. The British abstract artist Harold Cohen has developed a robotic painter named Aaron, which actually does pretty interesting work. Harold signs his own name to Aaron's drawings, but Aaron has not been programmed to complain. And I think there's a message there--that Aaron is really an expression of Harold Cohen's human intelligence, which he expresses through this program that in turn creates art. That's where we are today.

ROBERT: Will computers ever be able to create original works of music and art that will move human beings? Will they be proficient to the same degree as, say, Deep Blue, the computer that beat the world chess champion a few years ago?

RAY: Computers today are amplifying our human intelligence, providing new canvases, new tools. But computers--or, as I'd prefer to say, nonbiological forms of intelligence--are going to become more and more powerful. We're going to be able to replicate human intelligence by scanning it, understanding it, and reinstantiating it in new media. So we will meet entities in the twenty-first century that are very human and can express and respond appropriately to human emotion--which is really the ultimate expression of our intelligence. And music, art, and culture are perhaps the ultimate expression of our emotion. And I'd say that within thirty years or so nonbiological entities will have their own artistic reputations and will be creating paintings and music and other forms of art, too, such as virtual-reality environments.

ROBERT: I hope they don't replace Rhoda too quickly. Rhoda, you're a well-known poet who specializes in the nature of aesthetics. What is it about music and art that moves us so deeply, that gets inside us and ties our stomach in knots?

RHODA: Well, for every respondent it's different. I'm going to answer personally. I like listening to music, looking at art, and reading poetry so much because it gives me something that I don't get in the course of my regular life. My regular life is all about responding to analytical forms, using my mind, consciously engaging on an intellectual level. But when I'm listening to music or reading poetry, I'm being invited to respond at a visceral level, with my whole body. And it creates a space for me that's completely unlike anything I experience elsewhere. It gives me an opportunity to step away from the didactic messages that we're surrounded with. I mean, we're bombarded with messages about morality, civility, culture, race, and so forth, and we're asked to think about those things. And they're important. But poetry and music and art give us more; they invite us to respond sensually and viscerally.

ROBERT: Todd Siler, you're an important artist whose starkly original works project strong emotions. You were the first visual artist to receive a PhD from MIT, where, I should disclose, we met twenty years ago, when I was a teaching assistant in brain science and you were in my class. [I was at the same time attending the Sloan School of Management.] What do you feel when you create? Do your emotions depend upon the medium?

TODD SILER: When I get involved in the installations and things I build that involve painting, drawing, video, and other kinds of media, I don't draw any boundaries between them. It's a complete immersion.

ROBERT: What's the relationship between the objects you create and the observers who see them?

TODD SILER: I like to break down that distinction; I want the observer to literally become part of my art. In fact, I may finish the work, but it remains unfinished. It's completed by the constant interpretations and revisits that people have when they come to it, from all different disciplines, backgrounds, and experiences. My work tries to represent the nature of the thought process, as I studied it, experienced it. I'm not trying to paint thought, but I'm trying to paint the process of thought. So I love it when people begin to map their world onto my artwork. That's what completes it.

ROBERT: Does interaction with observers ever change your work?

TODD SILER: Very much so. All the time, I discover more things about a piece--when children approach it with openness, when colleagues approach it from a scholarly perspective. I welcome every kind of approach. Interaction is a way of journeying into the greatest mystery that we have--human thought--and not worrying whether it's going to be interpreted as you see it but rather inviting all kinds of interpretations.

ROBERT: Bob, you're a first-class pianist as well as a top administrator. What does performing feel like?

BOB: A successful performance depends upon a variety of elements. First is preparation. Are you fully in charge of what's going on? Do you know the material really well, so that you don't have to worry about it? Are you well rested? Your body can't do what your mind tells it to if you're not. Most important, many musicians suffer from terrible stage fright. The way to keep that from happening is to make sure that you're not playing for stakes that are too high: that if I don't play this piece really beautifully--

ROBERT: --I won't eat.

BOB: Well, "I won't eat" is the least of it. If you can get rid of all extraneous matters and play directly to the audience--as though you're playing for a particular person in the third row, say--it can be very successful. And enormously exhilarating.

RAY: There's an aspect of computer technology that gets to the heart of what computers can do today for the arts--which is to amplify our abilities and bring the tools to make art and music to more people. My father was a composer. He died in 1970, and in the 1960s, when he wanted to hear his multi-instrumental compositions, he had to raise money, bring a whole orchestra together, hand-write and mimeograph the scores. Finally, he'd hear his composition. And God forbid he didn't like it--then he'd have to start all over again, raise more money, and so forth. Now music students in any conservatory, or in their own apartments, can hear a multi-instrumental composition and change it as easily as you rewrite a letter on your word processor. And while they will still want to hear it performed by a real orchestra, they can create music as never before. Computers provide a whole new canvas for the arts. Also, synthesizers provide new sounds, which were impossible before.

BOB: Computers provide a whole new basis for musical literacy. You can [compose] without worrying about how many sharps there are in E major.

ROBERT: Ray's music keyboards have been one of the major forces expanding the range of music. Many people are very grateful for these new worlds that have opened to them.

RAY: That's the thrill of being an inventor--moving from equations on a blackboard to actually affecting people's lives. We get lots of feedback from musicians who, with this new technology, create forms of music that weren't feasible before.

ROBERT: Todd Boyd, you specialize in the critical analysis of motion pictures and popular culture. How significant is film as an art form?

TODD BOYD: Motion pictures certainly play a powerful role in all our lives--particularly with the advent of the VCR, which transformed movies by bringing them into the American home. And just as with any other art form, there are a few classics--I often refer to [Francis Ford] Coppola's The Godfather and Godfather II as a kind of quintessential text of the latter half of the twentieth century. Those films, at some level, can speak to all of us. The particular story may not be exactly like everyone's, but you can find something there about family, about the struggle to integrate into mainstream America. You can study these films and take them apart; not only are they fascinating, they're fulfilling. I often set up a screening for myself on Sunday afternoons, when I have the time to watch all six hours of The Godfather and Godfather II, with a bottle of Bordeaux and a nice cigar, and take it all in at the sensory level.

ROBERT: Godfather III didn't have the same quality?

TODD BOYD: Godfather III came out seventeen years later and had a whole different scenario--but Coppola needed the money.

RHODA: Do you feel that the accessibility of film is putting other genres, like poetry and music, into the background?

TODD BOYD: I think so, because film is now so prevalent. When I was teaching in Stockholm, I was amazed how much knowledge the Swedish people had of America, even those who hadn't traveled very much. The reason was that they had watched so many American films. So imagine the impact here in America. We have a common language now. Even if you aren't a moviegoer, it's in the popular dialogue. Film definitely does overshadow other areas of culture--music, poetry, what have you--because, at some level, film contains them all.

RAY: Film and TV have certainly empowered the arts, but what has really empowered the arts is the World Wide Web. I have artist friends who used to make four or five thousand dollars a year, and now they're doing extremely well. There's a tremendous explosion of demand for graphic arts on the Web. The same is true of music, film, video, writing, even poetry. We need content that's exciting and creates this sense of transcendence. There's a tremendous demand for content now.

ROBERT: Todd Siler, give us a sense of your art--I'm a great fan. What do you do? What do you see? What do you want to accomplish?

TODD SILER: My world is about the synthesis of different disciplines, and the only way I know how to express it is by using lots of different media. Sometimes I wish I were a filmmaker, because they get to use all those good things--animation and so on. My journey began when I became fascinated with how the brain puts ideas and information together, and I approach my work from both the arts and the sciences, from both sets of inquiry. And my search, really, has been about helping people understand their own creative process--not in a didactic way, but experientially. You literally have to go in and feel the rapture, feel the pain, feel a range of emotions--and allow yourself to understand the process from your own perspective, not from mine. I consider my works just as creative catalysts to get people going. And often I have to invent new technologies to create these works--like one installation I did, for example, which was twelve feet high and a hundred feet long and involved many different kinds of printing processes.

ROBERT: In some of your installations, you have people moving through, as if the people become part of the installation.

TODD SILER: Yes, absolutely. They're very much part of that mental and physical space. I try to break the distinction down, literally, by setting up conditions for a kind of magic, for people to catch themselves in their own reverie. Even a month later, they begin to understand that all the different elements of the creative process were at work there--from confusion to clarity, a full range of things. Everything, in a way, is meant to prompt viewers to examine their own experience. That's where my art comes back full circle.

ROBERT: Is confusion a legitimate emotion you want to trigger in us mortals?

TODD SILER: Ah, no--but I think ambiguity is. There's enormous power in ambiguity. People try to edit it out of the creative process. I welcome it. I think there are moments when you need enormous chaos, and sometimes, in preparing for presentations, I absorb an overload of information, and allow myself to literally fail--and then I find the order in the chaos, which enables the installation to live. This is part of the creative process and how it unfolds.

BOB: Doesn't a lot of that have to do with pattern recognition? Certainly it does in music, which unfolds in patterns. Isn't it important for kids to learn pattern recognition at an early age?

RAY: Pattern recognition is based on mastering chaos. Our earlier computers were based on structured rules, and that's why they were so formulaic and predictable and brittle. We're learning that we need to build machines in a different way to master self-organizing, complex, chaotic processing, which is really how the human brain works.

BOB: With respect to music, you can see what a poor job we're doing nationally with pattern recognition. Anytime you go to a restaurant where the staff sings "Happy Birthday" to the honoree of the day, almost none of the waiters and waitresses can hit the right notes--just going up an octave is practically impossible.

ROBERT: Certainly for me it is.

TODD SILER: I recently did a collaboration where, for the first time in my life, a musician completed my art by composing and performing a dedicated piece. The music and the textures and the layers were so integrated that I saw the seamlessness of all those different connections and relationships--I was so moved I was crying. That's the magic of emotion and ambiguity...all that.

ROBERT: What contributions do you think the arts make to human development?

TODD SILER: Billions of contributions, and that's not hyperbole. James Baldwin summed it up eloquently: the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers. And when you think of all the answers we give one another question; this is the arts' greatest contribution--to enable us to deepen the inquiry, to enrich the questions, to extend the inner journey we make in attempting to understand our own inner world and how it connects to other worlds.

BOB: Several years ago I had the privilege of chairing an international commission on the future of the principal music school in Finland, the Sibelius Academy. I learned at that time that in a country of five million people, with high rates of alcoholism and suicide and seventeen-percent unemployment, there were a hundred and fifty music schools. None of the musicians were unemployed, and why? Because the country cares deeply about music. This is the kind of society we're looking for; music and the arts bring Finland together.

TODD BOYD: I want to follow up on what Todd [Siler] said about art laying bare the questions, but take it someplace a little different. I remember hearing Miles Davis talk about how he structured a trumpet solo after watching a Sugar Ray Robinson boxing match. Sugar Ray was known as a master of style--you know, he would walk into the ring wearing two robes, and he'd take off the outer robe and underneath would be this white silk robe. It was all about presentation and performance. But Miles focused specifically on how Sugar Ray, in the first round of a fight, would set traps for his opponent without springing them. And then he'd come back in the second round and spring one of those traps, and the fight, of course, would be over. And Miles took that idea and applied it to his solo, so at the beginning of the solo there are all these traps set, and in the second half of the solo, he's springing the trap. So you can flow between those two disparate forms and find that sort of inspiration. Art really does lay bare the questions, and the questions can become much more interesting than the answers sometimes.

RAY: What's so interesting is that Miles was doing a form of boxing and Sugar Ray a form of music. A fascinating exchange and synthesis.

ROBERT: It's the resonance of great talent. Rhoda, you've unified art forms with a wonderful poem about a piece of art.

RHODA: It fits very well into this discussion, in the sense that it's a piece of art that responds to another piece of art. To give you some background: I was in the J. Paul Getty museum looking at an exhibit of twelveth-century sacramentaries. These are liturgical books, and they were displayed under glass, open. And in these books the first letter on each page was enlarged and beautifully decorated, with flowers, vines, animals; and sometimes the inital was inhabited by human figures. These initials were illustrative of the semantic; that is, they were in some way connected to the message on the page. And they were pictorializing and literalizing the language. And what promoted my poem was an inhabited "D"--a large capital D inhabited by a tiny male figure. It was a little man with one foot inside the D and one foot outside the D, just sort of taking a tentative step onto the page. And when I saw it, I knew this was poem material, this was going to be a poem for me. I was immediately struck by the possibilities implicit in the idea of language as symbolic shelter. I mean, the little man looked as if he were leaving a little D house. In this poem, the speaker is speaking to the little man who is leaving the D.

Like a decorous swimmer you test
the world outside your D. Is language
then so easy to bear? Your D shells

your narrow shoulders, poised for retreat
in case the sentence into which you
have maneuvered is tiresome or dangerous.

How do you design your view, with its illuminare
so deucedly gold? That tendril of filigree
tickling your hat? A sacramentary denizen,

devotee of diffidence, must commence some praise
of Christ, your neighbor in the word. Or is
your interior too fretted with script,

damask drapes, damson drawing room?
You men of letters remind me it's time
to pay my calls, to entertain, to correspond

devoutly with those whose residence you recall.
Careful, piccolino, the nobleman with heavy
plume and shadowed chin would love to invite

you out, himself in. Then where would you be--
homeless? Damnified, or keeping house
with Lord of Arguments, who seeks, I hear,

a D for personal definition? What is
your mission, if you must depart? At least
look up. Your domestic D is half a world

of comfort and could attract difficulty.
Perhaps you venture out simply to return
to depth as some in recent centuries

shore pages in foam, the waves' declension
dreams, dreaming, dreamt, where no traveler
speaks our salt. Desiccate, unlettered land.

TODD SILER: That's beautiful.

ROBERT: Ray, from your pioneering vision applying computer technology to generate music, what can we learn about the nature of human intelligence and its relationship to art?

RAY: The history of trying to emulate human intelligence through computers has been surprising. Even early computers were able to do mathematics problems that leading mathematicians had done, diagnose disease, and the like, but what has been very difficult, and what we still can't do, is master human emotion [replicate it in a computer], just to [give a computer the capacity to] understand a poem or respond to a piece of music [meaningfully]. We're really finding that the arts, which is a sort of transcendent expression of human emotion, represent the cutting edge of human intelligence. It will be the most difficult aspect of our intelligence to re-create [nonbiologically]. But in the process of trying to do that [i.e., develop profound artificial intelligence], we're learning some of the underlying elements and structure of art that are behind the inspiration.

ROBERT: And what does that process tell you about the human emotional response to art?

RAY: Well, it's clear that human emotion is the most subtle, most sublime, most complex, deepest aspect of human intelligence, and the hardest aspect to model fully in nonbiological systems.

ROBERT: Bob, let's get to education, because it enables appreciation of music and art. You've been a great proponent of bringing music education to everyone in America, not just to the elite. Why is this important?

BOB: It's important to musicians, for obvious reasons, but music education is important to humanity--not just America--because of the message music brings, which is a liberating one. All kinds of music can be for all kinds of people. There's a wonderful young string quartet from the Eastman School called the Ying Quartet, which spent two years in residence in a little town named Jessup, Iowa, and turned this town of corn and hog farmers into music lovers and string players. At their last concert in a gymnasium, a thousand people came--the population of Jessup is only two thousand. When the quartet members were invited to testify on Capitol Hill at the reauthorization hearing for the National Endowment for the Arts, twelve farmers came along, each at his own expense, to tell Congress what an important force this was for their town.

ROBERT: Todd Boyd, can music play a role in promoting racial harmony and bringing America together?

TODD BOYD: It certainly does that, though historically it has been quite divisive as well. Music has probably erected as many barriers as it has broken down. But in my mind the most significant American music is jazz, and this is a music that clearly emanates from an African-American cultural perspective. Jazz is high art at this point, and it's truly fascinating how for so many years it has been able to cut across boundaries in America and throughout the world. We're now seeing the same sort of thing with hip-hop, which is attracting very broad audiences. I was in Japan and happened upon a hip-hop club in which all the people were Japanese, none spoke any English, but they knew every word of Biggie Smalls' "Big Papa." And they could rap it just as if they'd lived in America all their lives. There's something about art--music, film, and other forms--that transcends social and national barriers, and when people encounter these things they tend to put aside some of the baggage they'd otherwise be carrying.

BOB: A big question with respect to the future of jazz is whether it should now be essentially a classical form, as invented in the 1920s and 1930s, or whether it should continue to grow.

TODD BOYD: I don't think jazz could ever be classical in the traditional sense, because the root of jazz, of course, is improvisation. And therefore it's constantly growing, constantly changing--and the minute you try to, say, put it under glass, then problems come about. That's what happened in the 1970s, and then in the 1980s there was a resurgence, when people realized that you couldn't treat jazz like a precious art object--you had to engage it for it to grow.

BOB: Like the rest of art, jazz must be growing, changing and evolving.

TODD BOYD: Exactly.
BOB: At the New England Conservatory of Music, for the past twenty-five years, there's been an annual event called the Gospel Jubilee--lots of gospel music. The hall is packed with an audience largely, but not exclusively, African-American. At the last concert, on my left were an African-American from the conservatory and her boyfriend, and on my right were two Russian immigrants--ladies in their mid-eighties. And the Russian ladies asked me, "What is this music?" And I said, "Well, this expresses something of the way in which African-Americans learned to live with pain during the days of slavery. This music represents a way of moving forward despite lots of sadness, and it involves a kind of responsive procedure with the audience. If you want to get into it, why don't you start singing right off, `Amen' and `Hallelujah,' with everybody else?" They did, and at the end of the evening they said, "You know, this concert made us feel like real Americans for the first time."

TODD BOYD: The idea that gospel music would be the quintessential American experience for them speaks a lot about its power.

ROBERT: And the ability of music to unify a culture. Let's look forward a hundred years. Will music and art be more or less important in society?

BOB: It depends on how we proceed with the education of young musicians. If they believe that music is for everybody, and that everybody needs to be involved in it, whether or not they become Paganinis or Heifitzes in the long run, then we'll have a vibrant culture and music will serve as a force to unify us all. If not, it'll be just the way it is now.

ROBERT: We wouldn't want too many Paganinis.

TODD BOYD: Music and art, for me, are always organic. As long as there's the need and desire to create, there will always be art forms, and art will continue to be significant, because this is how people throughout history have expressed themselves. And that's the beauty of it--there's no way we can restrain this organic process as it takes place.

TODD SILER: The arts are going to be central to tapping and developing human potential. People are going to realize the enormous power of art to liberate and innovate the human spirit.

RHODA: We usually talk about the future in terms of our achievements in science, but I think we're going to have a resurgence in the fine arts in the coming decades. And I hope that will continue, including the development of new art forms, such as the screenplay.

RAY: As the technologist on the panel, I think society is going to be very different a hundred years from now. We'll have overcome our material needs and we'll have literally expanded our minds by merging with very intelligent nonbiological entities. And what we're going to do is create art. Music will take on different forms. We'll have new art forms, like virtual-reality environments, and we're going to experience new forms of knowledge with our expanded mental faculties.

ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

GREAT music and art, as we feel the emotion and sense the insight, penetrates our psyches and marks us as human beings. But what is "great art?" The fact is that "greatness" has little to do with it: what counts is the enjoyment, the vision, the soaring of emotion. "Great" is not relevant, because it's almost impossible to decide what is great. Some say that great music or art must improve with age--that the marketplace of ideas, given sufficient time, will sift the diamonds from the dirt. But fads are common, and rediscovered works can speak with surprising freshness. So it's up to each generation, and history, to say what endures. Education in music and art should focus on appreciation as well as performance, and not on an academic analysis. Above all, that kind of education must be open to everyone; art and music are not to be limited to society's elite. An aesthetic education, widespread and well-structured, can become a powerful social equalizer. There's no better way to civilize and unify our society. But if you feel the emotion and sense the insight, if the piece lifts and ennobles the spirit, that's enough to make the case for now. Such exhilaration is already closer to truth.

Editor's Comments:

Todd Boyd observes that

"... I was in Japan and happened upon a hip-hop club in which all the people were Japanese, none spoke any English, but they knew every word of Biggie Smalls' "Big Papa." And they could rap it just as if they'd lived in America all their lives. There's something about art--music, film, and other forms--that transcends social and national barriers, and when people encounter these things they tend to put aside some of the baggage they'd otherwise be carrying."

Culture must never be allowed to become a tool for petty demagogues to create or exaggerate divisions between "us" and "them." Culture -- genuine culture, is invariably the expression of the artist's own humanity. The true artist, as opposed to the political propagandist, honors his fellow man with his art, without regard for race, creed, or national origin. Men and women of conscience throughout the planet have a moral responsibility to reject the misuse of "kultur" as a political tool for fomenting atavistic hatred of "the other."

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Why Do We Make Music & Art?
Illustration(s): Todd Boyd, Robert Freeman, Rhoda Janzen, Ray Kurzweil, Todd Siler, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/206/206transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect