On Saturday night we went to see our talented friend Stanton C. Jack perform his Duo Romantico with Shannon Rowe; a beautiful selections of songs arranged for the classical guitar and flute. They played at St. Andrew’s Wesley, a United Church in Vancouver, on a rainy rainy October evening. Check out Stanton’s recording of him playing Concierto de Aranjuez – II Adagio.
As I’m sitting there listening and enjoying the music, zing! This idea zooms in from the right and plunk! There it is – a solution to a sticky bit of a conference design I had been thinking about earlier that day. I wasn’t thinking about it (or anything) while I was listening to the music but all of a sudden there it was.
And later it got me thinking how I might incorporate gifts like Stanton’s into conferences, meetings, gatherings, and convenings. Not where the live music is relegated to the breaks, but an actual part of the design experience. To accompany an invited reflective pause as we shift from one question to the next, or at the end of a circle check-in where Stanton offers an in-the-moment song back as a kind of heart-felt harvest.
There was live music and song at Margaret Wheatley’s event I attended last year, but with the singing I found I was listening to someone else’s words instead of there being the space for my own insights to come forth. So I find myself leaning towards the kind of musicality an artist like Stanton could share with a group. Good noodlings for this conversation designer.
Stanton C. Jack playing Allegro Solemne / La Catedral – Augustin Barrios
2 replies on “Music = Ideas”
This is my friend Miha: https://vimeo.com/8552775
He is the one in Theory U that plays the “macro-violin” at Chartres Cathedral. I met him in Slovenia this summer where he used music to take us through this same process while we were on the land of Parzival’s quest. He played violin in an ancient church and led us through the U showing us how the architecture of the quest is embodied in Bach and all great art. As part of this exploration of questing on the landscape, he invited me to play my flute in a huge cave, the cave where parzival confronted his shadow.
It was an amzing experience to work with this guy – he is a real character – and to use music this way, not as incidental atmosphere to what we were learning, but as a fundamental object that embodied a teaching.
Oh he is a character! What energy and passion. And thanks for sharing how he used music ‘that embodied a teaching’. Let’s do more of this!