When I was 20 years old I had a truly transformative experience. I went from being an Ohio farm kid to playing the bass in (what was then) the most famous orchestra in the world, the Boston Pops.
I essentially experienced first hand a stark juxtaposition of industrial factory culture (the school I attended had prepped me for factory work in Toledo) to an Alice-In-Wonderland time warp back to an artistic community that was what the workaday world was like before Henry Ford started putting everyone on an assembly line.
Major orchestra culture managed to dodge the cultural genocide of the industrial era, which was so eager to make everything run faster through uniformity. And now that the industrial era is over, it is time, nay essential, to get back to the more artistic/ individual whole-ism that existed prior to. And that, in a kaleidoscope of variations, is what I talk about.
see more at www.justinlocke.com/speak.htm
(Watch more videos, listen to an interview on CBS radio about my latest book, “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid“, or read my Bio.)
–Peter Schickele (“curator” of “PDQ Bach”)
