Music, memory, and a little motivation
The longer we work at something — a new job, a new school year, a new side project — the harder it can be to remember what our motivation really is. It’s been a whirlwind few months out here. I’ve met amazing people who both welcome and profoundly challenge me. I’ve seen plays, climbed mountains, learned how to meal prep for a week. But, in between the case studies and study groups, I’m constantly trying to refocus on why exactly I took this all on.
I had lost some of that focus when a professor tipped me off to the Pulitzer Centennial celebration weekend at Harvard, whose theme celebrated Pulitzer winners who have reported on terrifying abuses of power, from the global to the micro level.
The kickoff show was a performance and talk from Wynton Marsalis. The sunset on the walk to the show was the most striking I’d seen in my brief time here. Just above the old oaks of Cambridge, an intense, orange magmatic light bubbled down through the cool, blue-gray cotton ball clouds. Concert-goers snapped pictures from the stairs of Memorial Hall before heading in. Speaking of Memorial Hall, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen at a university (And at Harvard, go figure). A curvaceous metal chandelier hanging from the dome. Colored strip lights illuminating the stage’s wooden arches underneath a towering Latin engraving. Wood paneling. Everywhere.
Then began the two hour set interspersed with commentary from Wynton Marsalis and his team, Walter Blandling, James Chirillo, Ali Jackson, Carlos Henriques, and Dan Nimmer. The first ever Pulitzer winner in jazz recounted how jazz taught him about life. Fundamentally, they’re both defined by action. Great jazz artists, knowing their music inside and out, can recall any note, any tune, like it’s second nature. Any ideas, any solos their bandmates play, are immediately met with another creation. Marsalis connected this to life offstage: you accept the moment, not saying “that’s the way it is”, but in a way that gives your moment meaning and that drives the ‘melody’ along, using your own voice to help improve what’s already being played. While his experience as a musician differs from that of the audience, that life lesson holds for anyone. And it wasn’t exactly the lesson I expected from a Pulitzer event.
Marsalis spoke about power and struggle too, but the meat of that discussion was reserved for Sunday. Fast forward to the end of the weekend’s festivities and to another packed auditorium. Many of us had spent most of the day hanging on the words of the many Pulitzers who came in to speak. Lauren Poitras asked the executive editor of the New York Times how willing he was to risk prison. Lin-Manuel Miranda urged us not to write a musical about voting rights. Exciting visions of courageous storytelling danced in our heads. It was 8:30pm. The sun had fully set now, no outside light peeked into the room. Maybe somewhere, a young Woodward stood in a dank garage, hoping to uncover the next big scandal.
The evening’s score was John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls, written a year after 9/11 and chosen tonight to commemorate its fifteenth anniversary. If you’ve heard it before, you know this isn’t the kind of show for a first date. The music is ethereal but distressingly heavy. Choirs chant words lifted directly from “Missing” posters found following the collapse of the Twin Towers. The music’s volume itself builds and dissipates like the shaking of someone who has cried for too long. It perfectly distills the empty, engulfing weight of loss.
For a while, I wondered — was this really in the program just for the 9/11 connection? Adams himself saw the piece as a “memory space” to “summon human experience” beyond that one event. Then it hit me. Look around at writing and journalism today, at how those in the profession so often pursue more profitable or “interesting” beats than that of investigating power, and the performance takes on a different meaning. These thin legions who tell the stories of power — from priestly child abuse to genocide and terrorism — simply aren’t big enough do what needs to be done. “On the Transmigration of Souls” for me was a “memory space” to mourn those untold abuses, slipping through the cracks of our collective conscious, the stories that may never see a Pulitzer, let alone the light of day.
As I was swept under the choral waves of Adams’ piece, I glimpsed, buried in the sand, like the columns of a submerged temple, flickers of all those untold stories. Countless Flints, Trayvon Martins, and Watergates, slowly eroding from memory — but not yet totally lost. It’s easy for this lone, privileged grad student, stomach rumbling, to be overwhelmed by the presence of these champions of the fourth estate. But for all the advantages I have as a Harvard student, for my desire to try and join the struggle myself, I caught too few pockets of air and saw too much darkness.
For some reason, on the way home from Wynton’s show, I did things a little differently. I took a new route home. I picked up a six pack and talked for a little while with Louie, the biophysics PhD who runs the corner liquor store, for a little longer than usual. Some lady in his store had called him a Communist and told him to go the hell home. Heck, I even stayed in on that weekend night to start writing this, not one hour after leaving Memorial Hall, with my post-show burrito, demolished on the way home, still hot in my stomach.
Harvard’s Pulitzer Centennial was on the one hand quite inspiring. Those of us who plan to spend our lives in service with others, be it journalism or elsewhere, need contact with those who (with help) took on entrenched power and came out to tell the tale. We have to see the possibility and learn the lessons.
On the other hand, after one hundred years of the Pulitzer, what is the status of investigative storytelling and journalism? Why are but a small band of its victors celebrated at America’s most powerful university? Where are the next round recruits to be found? The Pulitzer Centennial weekend was so meaningful and profound for this student because it both inspired and challenged to me, and other seekers of justice, with enough questions to keep ourselves busy for the next hundred years.
