I just directed my first concert tonight. It went really well, and was a lot of fun. The kids performed very well. It's going to be hard to tell them goodbye. I had a couple of them come up and chastise me afterwards for not giving them any warning that this was my last week amongst them. Apparently they were absent the day it came up in class. I enjoyed everything I learned from them these last 3 months.
After we finished tearing down the stage I ended up getting into a philosophical discussion with the janitor Robert. It was fantastic. We have very similar views of the world and how life should be lived and experienced. He taught me his viewpoint that we all have a set path. This is not fate though, merely the path we should travel to get all the experiences we were meant to have, to learn what we were meant to learn, etc. We are allowed to deviate from this path, but its like driving down a road lined with bushes. You can go off the road, but you are forging a path where one wasn't before, and your going to rip off a mirror and ding your bumper along the way. I taught him about the thought that every person, place, or object gives off its own unique vibration. Like attracts like, not necessarily the same, as unisons get boring, but more the idea of a chord. The one, three, five, and seven of a chord are all different notes, but the harmonize their vibrations and fit together in a way a one and a flat five never will. This is why two different people could wander the world, and run into each other. Or why you can meet people in vastly different areas and times who have experienced at another time something the same as you. We are attracted to these complimentary vibrational patterns. This theory is something that was very common in the older Eastern religions, and as been lost to most of the Western World. I did study the concept briefly in music history though. It refers to the Music of the Spheres. A very fascinating concept that is credited to Pythagoras originally, but made popular and almost famous by Johannes Kepler in his work
Harmonices Mundi in 1619.
It always reminds me too, of the song we used to sing at band camp. Slightly morbid, but very true, and it always makes me feel better for some reason, especially when I combine it with this theorum.
"All things shall perish from under the sky. Music alone shall live. Music alone shall live. Music alone shall live, never to die."
I also found the translation for this in French, German, Danish, and a couple other languages. I think this alone says something about the immortality of music, both culturally and scientifically.
This concept goes back to basic physics, that energy never ends, it is merely transmitted into another form. Kinetic energy grows as gravitational potential energy decreases when you roll a ball down a hill. Same idea, once the vibration starts, technically it never stops. Sure it may change its state of appearance and no longer resemble a vibration as we would recognize it today, but it is still there. That song you sang with the radio in your car on your way home, is still out there, change shape and state, but always present. It is part of the world and will never leave. So if we all create our own vibration, we always exist in a sense. Yes we will die and move on, but there is an echo of us resonating through time.
Robert also had the opinion that we never meet someone we are not intended to meet. We all give and take something from eachother. We all learn something, and then pass it on again. For example, maybe I was not the one intended for this message from him. Maybe it was intended for someone who will read this blog in passing someday, but as they never will have met Robert, I became the facilitator, the middle man who passed the message along. There is always a purpose to what is happening.
Life is merely a series of contrast. If nothing bad ever happens to you, sure you can recognize that you had a good life, but can you appreciate what that really means? You can only have something as great as you have had something horrible. You can only play music as loud as you can play it quiet. Silence is nothing without sound, enemies are nothing without friends, the future is nothing without the past. You have to take everything that is given you in life and enjoy it. Robert told me to live in the present, because that's what it is, a present. An excellent lesson if ever I heard one.
Chrysler Building and Grand Central Station, followed it up with the Empire State Building, 
