Amazing. With Strings Attached
I am lucky to have met and become a friend of Miha and experienced this directly on our first meeting in London but I cannot ever do justice to it.
This guy walked into my life many years ago carrying a violin case and said to me can you pull your entire company together for 20 minutes? It was lunchtime - I said what the heck and called everyone into the studio area. 20 or so bemused folk (who believe I am mad anyway) stood and stared at this guy who proceeded to attack us with rapid fire violin excellence - breaking in an instant breathlessly to scribble magically intelligible scrawls of explanation on a flip chart. In 20 minutes everyone was in a mess of tears - emotional jubilation. He had explained life through music in 20 minutes.
Read Miha's own incredible summary of a recent event below. Incredible.
Dear Minister Podobnik,
It was great pleasure to lecture and perform for you and your colleagues, EU Ministers of Environment and their staff, last Friday in our National Gallery. For the sake of a vivid memory, please have a look at the attached photos and here is the short summary of my workshop as you requested:
The topic of discussion of your meetings was the synergy of climate change, biodiversity and sustainable use of forests.
SYNERGY OF DEEP ECOLOGY AND DEEP CULTURE:
My contribution was highlighting yet another synergy which needs to be added to the ecological sustainability strategy of European policy if we want to be successful: the synergy of deep ecology with deep culture. At very least for two reasons:
1) Only societies with deep cultural environment can be expected to act genuinely sustainable and bear the consequences of sacrifice and self-education to the issues. Acting out of low cultural level results in a raw, short term self interest, search for diverse policy loopholes and production of "green books" as is the case with numerous global companies.
2) Even if we for a moment imagine the extraordinary success and see reversed global warming with fully cleaned-up environment and healthy nature, WHAT FOR ? - where would be the meaning to live in such nature if we let our cultures to be degraded to barbarism ?
At stake is the synergy of sustainable ecology and deep culture, and
the key to success is the education of our societies through
interdisciplinary application of Art processes as I have, for instance,
demonstrated with the orchestral workshop after my speech. This is my
appeal to the policymakers of EU Parliament and Commissions: to help
creating the opportunity for such experimental pilot project, where we
could explore the interdisciplinary power of Art as an important
element in transformation of society. This is something different from
supporting traditional institutions of Art.
THE VISION:
As it is essential for our body to breath clean air, so it is as essential for our soul and spirit to breath deep culture. If we discuss sustainable use of forests and biomass, let us not forget those forests where every single tree bears its unique and timeless name: Bach, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Raphael, Palestrina, Beethoven, Dante, Mozart, Rumi, Pushkin, Sibelius, Goethe, Bartok, Presern, - forgive me if I now stop naming thousands of trees of our ecologically endangered cultural forests! It is not enough if these sublime creative qualities are safely "protected" in the greenhouses of cultural institutions to be available as entertaining and often exclusive ornament of life, we must explore additional opportunities for this genius "Art -Biomass" to be available as a PROCESS, as a transformative power and technique everywhere where we are dealing with the most critical issues, dilemmas, challenges and decision making in our modern world.
I started my presentation by reminding all participants - (who were sitted AMONG musicians of the symphony orchestra, please see the analysis of my orchestral workshops below) - how our Slovenian forefathers and mothers responded to the tragic challenge of industrial revolution 100 years ago: Through the introduction of farming machines in the USA low wheat prices in Europe forced thousands of our farmers to immigrate to the New World. But their love for our land was so deep that they could not imagine their fields go wild and despite knowing of no return, they planted these very forests we are so proud of today!
And now, 100 years later? The challenges we face are 100 times augmented, we face a convergence of many forces: Enormous environmental degradation, global warming with all consequences, financial crisis, flight of jobs, widening gap between few rich and many poor, rise of fundamentalism and "sub-culture", religious clashes, power abuse, corporate and other wars....to name but few.
If we single out ecological sustainability challenge we can see a short and long term strategy:
Short term is to send out fire fighters if the house is in flames.
Long term would be the synergy of deep ecology and culture.
I have later demonstrated through my workshop (using violin concerto by Beethoven) that it is possible to hear and re-discover the elements of nature as they become individualised through the genius of composer into masterpieces of Art. In this way the synergy of deep ecology and culture can be understood as healing and creating nature.
THE IMPLEMENTATION OF VISION, THE EUROPEAN STYLE LEADERSHIP?
In the course of the evening I then introduced the participants to the violin concerto as a musical implementation strategy. The resounding patterns of music can be experienced as a development journey through various stages to its own glorious completion. The heroic journey to the "wholeness". From linear (left brain) to polyphonic and intuitive, from "one bottom line" to multiple bottom line, from shareholder value to stakeholders value from the interval of the prime to the octave, from "ego" to "I". We asked the question: can we find those qualities which would characterize "European style" leadership" ? And the answer came as the experience of the unfolding higher meaning of the masterpiece.
We demonstrated different qualities of leadership by performing with the orchestra certain passages of the masterpiece and in addition I commented by painting symbolic icons on the flipchart:
- The most essential leadership capacity to be continuously aware of, is the presence and metamorphosis of the identity of the masterpiece, (theme, brand, essence, big picture) * Particular supportive relationship of musical lines that can be experienced as servant leadership (contra point weaving around the theme, feeling enlivening an abstract idea, on organic level the blood capillaries nourishing nerves)
- The experience of crescendo and subito piano at the highpoint: the leadership mastery of productive resignation (Goethe) ( TAO of ancient Chinese wisdom, grafting of crab-apple in agriculture) * And foremost, to hear in the music one of the most essential elements of any real learning: the ongoing cycles of birth, death (crisis) and renewal.
Then I introduced to the participants the structure of the classical "sonata form" which is the musical architecture of the first movement of the violin concerto. We could experience the deep meaning of the four stages of this sonata form as they unfold, reflecting archetypal stages of human biography: youth, midlife (crisis), maturity and integrated wisdom and in music: exposition, development, recapitulation and coda.
We could then experience how at first the orchestra (without the soloist) reveals in the exposition the entire journey as a VISION, and only then the soloist enters the scene and IMPLEMENTS this exposition in productive oscillation of tension and harmony together with the orchestra. A deeply meaningful example of relation between leaders and their teams.
The last step of the workshop was meant to demonstrate the relationship of masterpiece to the elements of nature. We listened to the process of the "development" section of the first movement of the concerto, how the music expresses at first the melancholic earthly quality of musical identity, transitioning in organic fashion as if from the character of the roots of the plant to the unfolding greening of foliage, alive, growing, increasing playfully till at the highpoint, as in a productive resignation, the identity turns into the red of the rose, opening in most innocent and devoted, gentle and vulnerable gesture towards the warm and airy sound of sunlight and concluding with overpowering crescendo to the mighty entry of the entire orchestra, thundering the identity theme in its most fiery form.
We could hear music on various
levels at the same time: earth, water, air, fire; roots, leaves,
flowers, seeds; lifeless, enlivened, deeply sentient and fully human.
Through music truly sacred space was created at that moment and it was
as if the NATURE could be heard calling on us from everywhere:
WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME ???!
The workshop was concluded with the performance of the entire concerto.
With warmest regards, and thank you for making this event possible,
Comments