jesse helms wasn t pulling that out of nowhere. his associate, daniel levinson, probably had been a communist. and the main demand of the march for jobs and freedom was a phrase that was resounding at the time but we don t remember it now, a marshal plan for the cities, which meant a massive federal investment in developing the depressed areas of america. which i don t think we heard in washington. there s also we ll get to it. the vietnam war in the late 60s, martin luther king was a very outspoken critic of that. he took his movement to chicago after after the voting rights act was signed. and i think revealed a little bit the country liked to believe at that point racism was a southern problem and that exposed it was a lot bigger and broader than that. and we also shouldn t act like king wasn t hated before he was killed. dr. king had issues within the african-american community. remember, this was the young baptist preacher who went to the
0 they were bracing for violence and chaos. they were fearing strident and inflammatory rhetoric and they were convinced the main effect of the rally would be to inflict a grievous wound, maybe even a fatal wound, on a very movement it sought to advance. that is the context in which the march took place 50 years ago this week. context that can and all too often is lost to history. it came at a particularly crucial and politically sensitive time in the civil rights movement. three months before the march, in may of 1963, demonstrations in birmingham excuse me, demonstrators in birmingham, alabama, had been met with sheriff conner s violence, images of dogs and fire hose trained on peaceful protesters, horrified millions of people around the globe. in june a month after that alabama governor george wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and president kennedy sent in the national guard to desegregate alabama university. a speech in which he formally called on congress to pass a civil rig
in that process, i learned a lot. also, of teaching. when you start to teach, you have to think about what you re doing so you can explain it to somebody else in a meaningful way. i think it was that process of having to write and transcribe music that made me aware that you can analyze something, to benefit, but one needs to be careful that the analytical side does not wipe out the initial impulse to write music. there is that famous story where a music ecologist told john lennon that he ended a song in an alien cadence, and he says, i did? this program is provided by the commonwealth club in forum. tonight we are presenting music. i am here with alex degrassi, a grammy award winning guitarist. we will continue with audience questions. you mentioned in your book, and right now, music has a pulse. i wonder what you think or know happens in the brain when music is disjointed, bad. how about classical music? one of the things whether you know it or not, whether you are
example. there is such new ones in the way it is played, it creates such a sense of depth in the rhythm. to you think there is a gene for music? well, you are the scientists. [laughter] i do not know. my grandfather was a side violinist with the san francisco symphony. my father was quite a good pianist. my brother was musical, my sister was not. i have a musical cousin. i do not really know. let me put it this way and i will try to stumble through a scientific explanation. let me remind the audience at this point that we are going to take questions in five minutes. there are microphones set up in the aisles. please be ready with your questions. if you had not become a musician professionally, do you think you would still be playing? yes, i think i would still be playing, but everybody should play a little bit, sing not everyone feels confident about their medical abilities, musical abilities, but it is such an import way to connect. it is, after all, a vibratio
itself in some way different ways. not all composers can blame their instruments very well. and not all instrumentalists compose, and there are for rangers that do not play or compose. you would not say that they are not musical. then you have all of these people who are musical experts, disk jockeys, film supervisors, and they have what we would call musical sensitivity, but it manifests itself in so many different ways, the hunt for a gene is complicated by that. if you are looking for a gene that might give you blond hair, that manifests itself in different ways, but more less is blond hair. musicality is 10 or 12 different things. and to become a great musician requires different personalities. you have to be willing to sit in a room off for hours on end practicing, that kind of willpower, and you have to have a belief in yourself, certainly, for the first few years of musical training, it does not sound very good. you have to believe it has to amount to something. all of