New twist on motivation LO4820

Ray Evans Harrell (mcore@soho.ios.com)
Fri, 12 Jan 1996 03:13:38 -0500

Replying to LO4789 --

This morning at 7:30 a.m. Andrew Moreno said:
>That's a very interesting example of your ensemble. I am practicing
>writing sales letters and would like this opportunity to give an example
>of a sales letter I might write to prospective opera singers using some
>of the motivations you outlined above with the goal of convincing opera
>singers to join your ensemble. Please excuse the "fast talking" tone of
>this sales letter, I haven't learned to adapt the sales letter to
>different markets i.e. this sales letter copy is targeted to "National
>Enquirer" tabloid readers. I also have limited experience with the
>"performance arts" industry so please excuse any misrepresentations of
>your organization.

Andrew, that was amazing. I wanted to join immediately and I can't
imagine anyone with "a twinkle in the eye" not loving it. I love Conway
Twitty.

However; the issue about the loss of American talent through the "Venturi
effect" of this win/lose game mentality is a question of the validity of
the future competitiveness of America against countries like Germany, (a
country the size of Montana) Korea, (the size of Vermont/New Hampshire)
and Japan (I would guess Florida). The Japanese and Korean students are
very clear about the use of our Artistic culture as a code to
understanding what my first voice teacher, the great English Diva Dame Eva
Turner used to call the "Unconscious forces that define the soul of a
people."

You have Japanese country fiddlers, Japanese classical cellists, Japanese
R & B, I teach a very fine R&B singer who is making a recording "In
English" next month of her hit record in Japan. Japanese Flamenco dancers
and Japanese Salsa bands. All of this from an island with no natural
resources except the people and their imagination. They understand the
learning meditation mandala that all of the traditional peoples of the
world know from birth. It begins with 1)Imitation, 2)Analysis/practice,
3) Performance and 4) Reflection/teach. You can see it traced in the
journey of the Sun from birth (sunrise) to growth (noonday) to maturity
(sunset, the traditional time of dramas) to renewal (night and sleep)
everyday and in the seasons.

We seemed to have lost that connection to the natural, to the web of
reality that guarantees that we will be able to land safely after we have
had the thrill. We have lost our ability to be observant of the rhythms,
pitches and inflections, of the tiny movements that define the difference
between knowing there is life, and that awesome stillness that causes a
corpse to quiet a room.

Our "Winners" are junkies addicted to the speed of a "Venturi" sluice
shunt where the whole world is either smashed in the crush or lost in the
speed of the economic forecast. Instead of openness there is focus,
instead of perception there is tempo, instead of the synergy of a person,
there is the linear aridity of the machine.

In Darwin's "Recollections" he recalled that music had once given him:
"intense pleasure, so that my backbone would sometimes shiver. I
have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty
or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many
kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took
intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I
have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very
great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of
poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so
intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste
for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically
on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain
some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite
delight which it formerly did...
"This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all
the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of
any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of
subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have
become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large
collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that
part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot
conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted
than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live
my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to
some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now
atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these
tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the
intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the
emotional part of our nature."
Charles Darwin "Recollections"

And so Andrew, my friend.

Why not put your considerable talents to writing this same kind of letter
in reverse. Sell the worth of the higher aesthetics to the American
public. Sell the beginning of intellect in the young, as seated first in
the ability to see clearly, hear distinctly, feel calmly and taste
discriminatory. Going further and developing these perceptions into the
awareness of the forms that lie beneath all of reality. Convince them to
let games not be for winners or losers but for personal development. A
wolf perceives a whole different reality from a human and has the good
SENSE to avoid danger. Perhaps, like the old ones, we can learn something
from the wolf, not in order to be wolves but in order to expand our human
potentials. Beethoven heard the wolf and made something of delight from
that encounter. Can you sell personal growth and the perceptual tools
that make that growth delightful and synergistic both individually and in
groups? Can you sell (not just model T education) but the delightful,
intimate, sexy soul memory of our history to a group of people who have
Darwin's problem without his insight?

I'd really like to see those letters. I might even find a buyer for them
at Lincoln Center.

Thank you again for that terrific gift. I was delighted, moved and
challenged.

-- 
Ray Evans Harrell
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. 
200 West 70th Street, Suite 6-c
New York City, New York 10023-4324
212-724-2398
mcore@soho.ios.com