Great music can also help us laugh, a vital ability to cultivate especially as we age.  Recently in a New York Times interview, Lorin Maazel, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who has just completed his final season with the orchestra at 79, talked about Giuseppe Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff, which premiered at La Scala in 1893 when Verdi, like Maazel, was nearly 80!

This comic opera, adapted from parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, is a major accomplishment for any composer, let alone one so advanced in years. (Verdi died at 88.)

Verdi’s own life was filled with both tragedy and transcendence. Married in 1836 at 23, he lost his wife and 2 children to sudden illnesses all within the next 4 years. Devastated, he found it hard to keep working, but music ultimately helped him not only to survive but thrive.

In 1842 Verdi’s career suddenly took off with the opening of his opera Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar), based on the biblical story of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The premiere was an electrifying event, since it came at a time of growing Italian nationalism.  Italian patriots of the day immediately identified with the enslaved Jews and reviled the detested Hapsburg rulers of Italy as tyrants like Nebuchadnezzar and his court.

The stirring chorus from that opera, “Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate,” (“Go, my thoughts, on golden wings”) quickly became an anthem of the patriotic movement and helped make Verdi a national hero.

To learn more about Verdi’s achievements in his later years and hear the grand finale of Falstaff–his celebration of laughter  in old age–listen to our audio or download it here.

Here in New York we’ve had a pretty brutal winter along with equally hard economic news.So we’ve been listening to music that bolsters our spirits.

How about you?

Two character strengths that can help uplift us are VITALITY, which includes zest, vigor and energy, and HUMOR or playfulness.

Vitality is defined in “Character Strengths and Virtues”(Peterson and Seligman) as

“the subjective experience of energy and aliveness”; it has both physical and psychological connotations.”

Humor is described there as

“a composed and cheerful view on adversity that allows one to see its light side and thereby sustain a good mood.”

It might seem strange to choose the “St Louis Blues” to illustrate zest and humor in music, but humor us and read on. As Josh says, “It’s all in the interpretation.”

Listen to the sample on the audio and tell us if you agree with him.

Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton made this recording in 1954. On the audio, along with the music, Josh makes some comments to help you get full enjoyment of the samples we have chosen for you.

Suggestion: Make a habit of listening daily to at least one piece of music that makes you smile and move. Add your favorite pieces to the Comments section below.

To hear the audio via streaming:

http://www.audioacrobat.com/play/W8KLh2RQ

or via download:

http://tinyurl.com/daf7wd

If you’d like to get a recording of the 1954 version, you can find it on Louis Armstrong and his All Stars:
“Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy,” Columbia CK 64925

Glass restored a vital component to music:  the composer as performer. The Philip Glass Ensemble, formed in 1968, became the core of his endeavors, a group driven by his sense of innovation and business savvy. As the son of a record-store owner, he knew the importance of selling his music. Rather than have others perform his music, Glass banked on the broad appeal of what he himself had to directly offer his public with his ensemble of amplified flutes, saxophones, keyboards, and synthesizers. “I felt that if I had a monopoly on the music, that as the music became known there would be more work for the ensemble.” Determined from the start to provide financial support for his ensemble and ensure performances of high quality, Glass worked for ten years at a variety of day jobs, as cab driver, plumber, and furniture mover. By 1978, however, with grants and commissions assured, he was able to concentrate on composing.

Performances of northern Indian music by Ravi Shankar he heard in Paris in the early 1960′s helped lead him to “a whole different way of thinking about music.” His resulting accessible style, often simplistically labeled “minimalism,” has typically meant working with basic rhythmic cells in an additive, cyclic process. While seemingly  rather static and incantatory, this is a music that invites the listener to shed conventional standard listening habits, freeing one from memory and anticipation, in favor of savoring the moment–”to be able to perceive the music as a ‘presence’, freed of dramatic structure, a pure medium of sound.”

Virtually all of Glass’s works from the mid-70’s on have been for dance, film, or theater. My favorite among his film scores, Koyaanisqatsi– the title is inspired by a Hopi word for “life out of balance”– was released in 1983. It was produced and directed by Godfrey Reggio, and presented by Francis Ford Coppolla. This 87-minute film provides a uniquely rich experience in savoring. Lacking any narrative or any identifiable character or dialogue, it presents the viewer with a series of compelling images, including clouds chasing clouds across the desert of New Mexico, the dynamiting of a failed housing project, crowds swarming in and out of Grand Central Station, road rage driving patterns on one of the Los Angeles freeways, and much more. Glass substantially expands his initial instrumental ensemble to include a vocal ensemble—one hears dark oracular voices at various points– as well as lower strings and brass, namely violas, cellos, double basses, French horns, trumpets, trombones and tuba. This is a remarkably prescient film anticipating in many ways the disturbing message of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Glass’s mostly widely acclaimed music for the theater is represented by his operatic trilogy about “historical figures who changed the course of world events through the wisdom and strength of their inner vision.” They are Einstein on the Beach (premiered in 1976 with a title shared with Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel ), Satyagraha (1980, the story of Gandhi’s nonviolent struggles starting in South Africa and continuing in India), and Akhnaten (1983, about an Egyptian pharaoh martyred for his monotheism).

A work I have particularly come to love is his 1987 concerto for violin and orchestra, a medium realizing his dramatic convictions. For him, the concerto form is “more theatrical and more personal” than pure orchestral music. Written in three contrasting movements and using a conventional orchestra, Glass’s work brings together his trademark permutations of cyclic rhythmic cells with a romantic warmth and soaring lyricism. Most memorable for me are the slow movement, with its solemn ground bass and passionate solo violin utterances, and the ebullient finale culminating in a slow coda with a solo line soaring into the stratosphere as we savor what we recall from the start of the work.

In the history of jazz there is no example more inspiring and compelling than that of Miles Davis. When he first came to New York in the fall of 1944, supposedly to study at Juilliard, he was really intent upon pursuing bebop performing opportunities on 52nd Street with his saxophone idol, Charlie Parker. And in fact, the following year, at the tender age of nineteen, Davis had the good fortune to be included in an historic recording session, the first featuring Parker as a leader.

Yet, Davis early realized that he was out of his depth here, unable to match the blistering speed of his saxophone hero or the stratospheric brilliance and rhythmic virtuosity of trumpeter of Dizzy Gillespie. But, resilient and resourceful, he was determined to find his own voice. Rather than trying to compete with these greats, he looked inside himself to mine his particular strengths. What he came up with was a distinctive style and aesthetic, something very different.

His was a mellower sound in the trumpet’s middle register, where understatement, restraint, and even a touch of vulnerability became his distinctive trademark. Davis was soon to earn a place in the jazz pantheon for a series of recordings made for Capitol Records in 1949 and 1950, subsequently released as Birth of the Cool. Listeners heard this new sound of Davis as part of a nonet–an ensemble consisting of the three rhythm instruments of piano, bass and drums, together with six wind instruments arranged in pairs, in high and low ranges: trumpet and trombone, French horn and tuba, and alto saxophone and baritone saxophone. Pieces like “Jeru,” “Israel,” and ” Boplicity” are now part of the Cool canon.

Capitol Records’s liner notes suggest the effect this had at the time: “Under one branch of the modern jazz tree, it’s cool and quiet. Here a unique group of musicians is gathered–exponents of a carefully casual style that flows with studied ease. The jazz they play is pleasant, almost unobtrusive, but with each new hearing it reveals a surprising wealth of sparkling new ideas. Some of these stylists’ most imaginative music is collected in this album–thoroughly intriguing performances that truly qualify as classics in jazz.”

Davis never stood still after this. Two other landmark recordings from the 1950′s were Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess, both major collaborations with Gil Evans. In the following decades Davis was on the cutting edge of fresh developments, whether it be hard bop, modal jazz, jazz-rock fusion or MIDI sequencng and sampling.

Lynne adds: Josh is very intrigued by Miles Davis’s ability to accept the fact that he could not do what other great jazz musicians relied on for their reputations. Instead, by exploring his own gifts to their fullest, he developed a whole other form of jazz. After that he continued to innovate, as if by making that choice he had discovered the fountain of eternal creativity.

The scene is “a paint-peeling hangar of a room, ” the Great Hall of the Battery Maritime Building, once a bustling ferry terminal in lower Manhattan which has been dormant for over half a century. But these days it is alive with the sound of music. No, it is not exactly Rodgers and Hammerstein that you can hear, but a place vibrating with the sounds of rusty steam pipes, ceiling girders, and columns, triggered by a Weaver pump organ retrofitted with relays, wires, and air hoses, all connected to an array of solenoids and such.

This is a site to visit, until August 10, 2008, where anyone can come press those organ keys and play the building. But, more than that, it invites people everywhere into an egalitarian rather than hierarchical world in which, to quote Buddhist American composer John Cage, “Everyone is in the best seat.” Cage was in many ways a walking oymoron, one who refused to acknowledge boundaries and came to see all the world as music. He was prone to such paradoxical aphorisms as “My purpose is to eliminate purpose,” and “I have nothing to say, and am saying it.” He wrote a book with the highly provocative title of Silence. Wrappping up a seminal address to the Music Teachers National Association more than fifty years ago, Cage spoke of the importance of “a purposeless play…an affirmation of life…a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.” He composed a famous (some say infamous) piece of “music” called 4 minutes, 33 seconds, where a performer comes out on stage, sits down at a piano, stopwatch in hand, raises and lowers the lid at various points, but never plays a single note. The audience is asked to wake up to the sounds of the environment in a place where music is conventionally made and become alive to new possibilities.

So go play the pipes in your kitchen, bathroom, or whatever. Have fun as you sing with your environment, tapping into the child within you.

It’s thought-provoking for several reasons.

As one group member says happily, ??????singing is good for you. It clearly makes him feel more alive. It also gives him exercise, since there’s always some choreography accompanying the songs.

It’s also challenging to the brain. The music director, a marvellous man in his early 50′s named Bob Cilman, expects his singers to work: to memorize songs, to grapple with music that is quite foreign to most of this age group (most of whose taste runs to classical music, they say), to sing the songs well.

One singer says ruefully–after being taken to task for not working hard enough at his solo–that Bob is tough, then adds with a grin that he himself is also tough and can handle the heat in this particular kitchen. The group is eclectic and inclusive. It even has room for a 92 year old who can’t really sing but can declaim words with a wonderful British accent. It’s apparent that everybody is having fun even while taking their performances seriously.

This is a perfect example of the power of music into old age. Singing Rock music forces him to stretch the boundaries of his taste, one man says, since he has never really understood its appeal. But when you see him sing with a sparkle in his eye, totally focused on performing, you know that his engagement with this music makes all the difference. It’s fun. It’s rhythmic. It’s loud. It taps the youngster inside each of us.

Several times during the movie the audience we were part of–made up of all ages, from little kids to their grandparents–spontaneously burst into applause, as if we were watching live theater. I’m surprised we didn’t all get up and dance!

Go see it. People can really surprise themselves in a wonderful way when they let down their hair and follow a playful, knowledgeable leader.

David Fajgenbaum, a freshman at Georgetown University, was faced with the predicament of a mother dying of brain cancer. Rather than avoid this fact by escaping into the whirlwind of college activities, he spent every weekend with his family. Even more significant, he had an inspiration. Because there was no on-campus counseling for grieving students, he established a support group, Students of Ailing Mothers and Fathers. It soon expanded into some 20 chapters and has come to serve high school kids as well. This is an unforgettable example of the way human beings can transcend grief through dedicating themselves to extending comfort to others.

Two of the great composers of the 19th-century, Johannes Brahms and Gabriel Faure, each wrote masterpieces of musical consolation, unique settings of the Requiem after similar losses. Instead of focusing on the usual fire and brimstone of divine judgment, their music transports us to world of serenity, a calming world for the survivors of personal loss.

Brahms began working on his monumental A German Requiem around 1865. Although he said that he had “the whole of humanity in mind,” it is clear that the deaths of his beloved mentor Robert Schumann and then his mother were precipitating factors, intensifying his feelings about both the dead and, more important, the living. Rather than follow the traditional Catholic liturgy, it draws upon such sources as the psalms, prophetic writings, and The Gospels. The general tone of the work is set in the opening movement, which begins with the following quotation from The Gospel According to St Matthew: “Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.”

The year 1888 saw the premiere performance in Paris of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, a work written in the shadow of his father’s death. Like the Brahms, it is sublimely serene, even though the text comes from the Catholic liturgy. One of its movements, “Pie Jesu” (“Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy. You who take away the sins of the world, grant them peace.”) has taken on a life of its own with its otherworldly sound.

Peace and comfort will await you when you immerse yourself in this music, music which has inspired singers and listeners alike for well over a century. Open yourself to its transcendent beauty. Savor the experience and allow it to suggest ways you might, like David Fajgenbaum, transform your loss into some positive action.

For some 19th-century commentators, this movement evoked the image of Orpheus taming the wild beasts, even though Beethoven himself is nowhere on record as having claimed any connection with the Greek legend. Yet the music has such compelling power as to make the association quite convincing.

What is unmistakable is the vivid contrast presented at the outset. Using only unison strings playing in angry clipped phrases in an uncompromising martial rhythm, Beethoven has his solo instrument respond in a gently pleading voice. And by the midpoint of the movement it has won over the strings as it grows ever more expansive. For their part, the strings now punctuate the music with subdued pizzicato chords, harmony coming to them at last. And in the exquisite closing moments of the movement, with the piano now in serene control, we hear in the lower strings only a distant echo of the opening anger. In the eloquent words of Edward Downes: “The stern voice of the orchestra relents, the octaves melt into harmony, and at the very end, orchestra unites with solo in a little sigh of acquiescence.”

Lynne suggests: as you listen to this movement, pay particular attention to the musical process Josh has described.

Have there been times in your life when you have felt furious and then, through dialog with a quiet inner voice, been able to bring yourself back to a state of equilibrium? Can you recall times when you have intuitively calmed others’ fury through your quietness?
Savor each memory as you listen to the movement.

If anger has been hard for you to let go of, try imagining that the piano is the voice of your inner wisdom gradually growing strong enough to be heard as you listen with new ears and new awareness.

I attended a monthly meditation group led by a highly respected oncologist in New York City. Dr. Mitchell Gaynor, who has made many CDs and written numerous books on the healing power of sound and clearly is passionate about the subject. Dr. Gaynor is unusual in combining mainstream and complementary medicine for his patients.

Being with people who have come together with their doctor in a setting other than his office or the hospital is a rare enough experience; watching him expertly play singing bowls as he chanted in (I believe) Hindi as well as English was mind-blowing. Then he asked all of us in the gracious livingroom of the Manhattan apartment to chant OM five times at whatever pace was right for us. At this point chanting truly became singing, since everybody chanted at a different pitch. The sound built and resonated in our ears and bones in that room filled with people.

Some of them were current cancer patients. Others have been, and are not now. Others never have been. Dr. Gaynor focuses on prevention as well as treatment. Does music prevent cancer? That’s not the right question. Instead, do certain kinds of sound and music promote mindfulness, which is a state of quiet in which the immune system can renew itself?

We say yes. We know people with heart diseases who also attend Dr. Gaynor’s group, and we would guess that people with autoimmune diseases that are exacerbated by stress would benefit from this kind of experience too. The focus, peacefulness, and optimism which were present in that room are hard to come by in everyday life.

I think there is special power in group experiences of this sort. Just as groups can engage in mindless violence, so coming together to make “joyful sound” can increase individual mindfulness. But mindfulness is a quality we need to practice daily by ourselves as well.

With that in mind, Josh and I recently bought a crystal singing bowl to play as we listen to certain pieces of music. Our bowl is pitched to B. The chakra is the top of the head. The element is thought or understanding. The color associated with it is violet, my favorite color.

This was a surprise, since when we bought the bowl–we had few choices at the store and were mindful of cost–we were told it was pitched to C, which resonates at the base of the spine and relates to physical needs. But the bowl knew better than we did what we truly wanted, and it’s given that to us.

Levitin, who is a professor of psychology and music at McGill University in Montreal, studies the many aspects of music’s effects on our brains. He points out that “The ancient connections between music and movement show up in the laboratory. Brainscans…make it clear that both the motor cortex and cerebellum–the parts of the brain responsible for initiating and coordinating movements–are active during music listening, even when people lie perfectly still. Singing and dancing have been shown to modulate brain chemistry, specifically levels of dopamine, the “feel good” neurotransmitter.”

The bottom line is his strong belief that we would all have more fun in the concert hall if we could get up and move to the music. He recommends–tongue in cheek perhaps–that when Lincoln Center is renovated, some of the seats should be ripped out to give listeners room and permission to move to the beat of Ravel or Mahler or even Bach.

Try this in your own livingroom: put on a piece of classical music that you love and move to the music in any way that feels “right.” If you can’t actually move around safely, conduct the music or at least sway your body and tap your foot to it from a chair. As`Levitin says, “Music can be a more satisfying cerebral experience if we let it move us physically.” The more open you are to this, the more you’ll get from it.