Members of The Board of Trustees; fellow honorary degree recipients; Father Pilarz; distinguished members of the faculty, staff, and administration; family members and guests; and most importantly of all, my fellow members of the graduating class of 2009; I’m truly delighted to be here today as your commencement speaker. The University of Scranton had an enormous impact on me at a key moment early in my career, and had it not been for Cheryl Boga, the Director of Performance Music here at the University for the past 28 years, my life might have gone in a very different direction. Composition has occupied a major role in my musical activities for the past 20 years, but I first began my career as a performer—as a conductor and a pianist--and it was as a conductor that I first met Cheryl. Though at the time I had not written a single commissioned piece of music, had never conducted a band, and wasn’t even sure I knew what a euphonium was; somehow Cheryl had the courage  - or the foolishness - to think that I might be able to write a band piece anyway, and through the Premiere Composition series here at the University, she gave me my very first commission as a composer 24 years ago in 1985. Though the piece I wrote for her was ridiculously overambitious and ludicrously difficult, composing it was a major turning point for me and opened up a brand new direction and path that I might otherwise never have seen. Then 24 years later, this fall, Cheryl’s courage and foolishness came full cycle as she gave my teenage son his first commission as a composer for this year’s Noel Night. Though I can’t say how his musical career will turn out, without Cheryl’s early support, I might never have become a composer, and I only hope that all of you graduating today will be as courageous and foolish in your professional lives as Cheryl has been in hers. Thank you Cheryl . 

When I first got a call from Father Pilarz about a month ago asking me if I’d be interested in giving the commencement speech this year, I was absolutely sure that this was another one of Cheryl’s practical jokes, and all I wanted to know was which band member had done such a convincing presidential impersonation. When it became clear that it was in fact the University President calling, my next thought was to ask--who cancelled?  I had recently done a keynote speech for an international business conference in Japan when Al Gore cancelled, and though it’s never been clear to me why I was the logical replacement for Al Gore—I have extremely minimal global warming credentials and my Toyota isn’t even a hybrid—I seemed to be an even more unlikely candidate for a University of Scranton commencement—a Jewish musician for a Jesuit commencement? What could I possibly talk about? 

My first thought was to look back to the commencement speech I had heard at my own undergraduate graduation ceremony. Surely something in that speech might give me a starting point for today’s talk. The only problem was that not only could I not remember a single word of that speech—I couldn’t even remember who gave it! Which I quickly realized was fantastic news, as it lets both me and all of you off the hook. Five years from now, you too will probably not remember a single word of my speech or even my name, so as long as I don’t confess to a federal crime, anything goes. 

Why then are we here today? What is the purpose of a commencement ceremony? The brilliant writer on mythology, Joseph Campbell, says the point of all ceremonies and rituals is “to concentrate your mind on the implications of what you’re doing.” A ceremony is a way of paying attention-- of meditating on the meaning of a particular moment. So what is the meaning of this particular moment and this particular ceremony? It’s always been interesting to me that events like this one are called “commencement ceremonies” not graduations. The word “graduation” puts the emphasis on the past, on what’s ending. On what you’re graduating from.  The word “commencement,” however, puts the emphasis on the future, on what’s being brought into existence. On what’s commencing. 

Ceremonies like this are rife with clichés--every ending is also a beginning, one door closes, another door opens, every graduation is also a commencement—however the ending of your college experience today, once the celebrations (and hangovers!) are finally over, is about to usher in a beginning unlike anything you have ever known. Today, a door is closing not just on your college years but on the entire arc of your life up to this point, and the door that’s about to open opens on an enormous expanse—the rest of your life. You have reached a moment for which no amount of reading, lectures, or knowledge can possibly prepare you. The moment when your life truly becomes your own, and you—and no one else--must decide what to do with this terrifying and thrilling opportunity. That is the real meaning of a commencement ceremony. It’s an opportunity to pay attention to this extraordinary moment of transition: to meditate on the meaning of what’s about to commence, and that’s what I want to talk with you about today.

As all parents discover, from the moment a child is born, parenting is one long process of letting go.  From the child’s point of view, growing up, both physically and psychologically, is all about independence: about gradually leaving one’s parents behind. A child leaves its mother’s arms and begins to crawl on its own, feed on its own, walk on its own, sleep on its own (eventually!), then goes to school on its own, and finally leaves home altogether to go to college. Each of these physical steps of independence is accompanied by a greater and greater psychological independence, as each child gradually begins to make their own choices and takes on more and more responsibility for their own lives. Yet from childhood through to the end of college, all of these decisions and choices are made within a context defined by others. In elementary school, middle school, and high school, what you learn is fundamentally determined by school administrators and teachers. You might choose an elective or two in high school, (within the school’s pre-selected offerings) and possibly a topic or two for an independent project, but the material and the approach to it is in someone else’s hands. You might even have an extracurricular life outside of school—play an instrument or a sport, act or dance, do volunteer or church work, cook, tutor, or sew, but the very word “extra-curricular” defines the place of these activities in the overall scheme of things. They’re extra. They’re subsidiary. The curricular is central. School—run and defined by others-- is the air you breathe, the playing field on which you operate. 

Though college is an enormous leap forward in independence—you live away from home with basic daily living now your own responsibility (thank God for meal service and linen service!), and you now have a vastly wider range of course options, still your choices are made within the University’s framework: within their distribution requirements, major requirements, and academic offerings. But the moment that you graduate—today--everything changes forever. For the first time, and from now on, it is your life. There is no degree to work towards, no carefully delineated course of study, no mandatory curriculum, no requirements, and no built-in social network. Where you choose to live, who you choose to know, and what you choose to do with your life is now completely up to you. People can and will offer you advice, whether you want it or not—parents, career counselors, friends, even commencement speakers--but there are no rules or guidelines. It’s all up to you. 

So how do you move forward? How do you choose what to do with this extraordinary moment? In Anne Lamott’s brilliant book, Bird by Bird, a book that’s ostensibly a manual on how to write but is actually a profound manual on how to live, she talks about beginnings. About how you know where to start, and she says, “…eventually you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.” Learning to listen for that soft inner voice, the voice that knows what’s right for you though it may not be right for anyone else, the voice that feels when an idea, a quotation, a situation, an image, or a person suddenly resonates with something fundamental in you--learning to listen for the “Hmmm,” I believe, is the key to an authentic and rewarding life. But how do you actually do it? It turns out not to be nearly as simple as it sounds. 

My first major “listen-for-the-Hmm” experience occurred during the summer of my sophomore year of college, when I went to France to study with the most famous composition teacher of the 20^th century--a legendary woman named Nadia Boulanger. By the end of my sophomore year, I had finished all the undergraduate music theory courses Yale had to offer, yet I had a vague, uncomfortable sense that there was still infinitely more to learn. This couldn’t be all the training that Bach and Beethoven had had.  A professor of psychiatry once said to me that “most of us know what we know, and even know what we don’t know, but what’s really interesting is what we don’t know, that we don’t know.” At 19, I didn’t really know what I didn’t know about music, but I had a sense that I was missing something crucial, and since Boulanger had taught Stravinsky, Gershwin, Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Elliot Carter, Philip Glass and nearly every other major composer of the 20^th century, I went to Fontainebleau, France to study with her—I thought--for the summer, assuming I’d go back to Yale in the Fall.  

Then came one of those decisive moments that can define a life—a moment where, as Robert Frost might say, “two roads diverge in a wood” and the path you choose makes all the difference. At my last lesson of the summer, Boulanger (who was about 150 years old at the time) said to me, “Kapiloff—you have great, great talent for music—no skills. You stay with me you get skills, you leave, you will be nothing.” And something in me went “Hmmm.” And I suddenly understood what Joseph Campbell meant when he said, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, in order to have the life that is waiting for us.”  So in spite of my parent’s frantic protests (“How can you drop out of college? Are you crazy?”), and without the slightest idea of where I would live, how I would pay for it, or where it would lead, I decided that day to “listen to the Hmm”--to stay in Paris and not go back to college--and that decision, and the knowledge I gained from studying with Boulanger became the basis of everything I have done in music since then.

But though I learned an enormous amount in Paris, it took an upsetting Amtrak train ride and two “Hmm-inducing” quotations to give that musical knowledge a purpose and a meaning. I eventually did leave Paris and finish college and was very fortunate to get my first job right out of graduate school back at Yale as the conductor of the Symphony and as an assistant professor of music. Toward the end of my six-year stint at Yale, I got the opportunity to conduct the Tony Award-winning musical Nine on Broadway, and for a brief period of two months, I foolishly tried to do both jobs at the same time. I would teach and conduct in New Haven during the day, race to the train, conduct the evening show on Broadway, and then take the 11:20 train home after the show. Going back and forth on that train each night gave me time to think about the enormous differences between the musical words of Broadway and Yale, and forced me to recognize some uncomfortable yet unavoidable truths.

Anyone who has ever spoken to an audience, even an audience of one, knows what it feels like when their message is getting across, when the listener is “getting it.” On Broadway, not only were large numbers of people eager to pay considerable sums of money night after night to see the show, but they also “got it.” The show clearly spoke a musical language that America understood. Unfortunately, I could not say the same thing about the classical concerts I conducted or attended. Though there were certainly some individuals who were as fluent in the language of classical music as they were in the music of Broadway, by and large, audiences in America simply did not “get” classical music the way they got Nine. Each day, the train ride between the two worlds became more and more painful. The difference between the wildly-enthusiastic Broadway audiences that “got” the music they were hearing and the largely-polite classical audiences who didn’t became almost intolerable. 

Then, in the midst of my frustration, in quick succession, two sentences changed the course of my career. For several weeks, we had been rehearsing a new actor to take over the lead role of the show, and on opening night our brilliant director, Tommy Tune, offered the star one final piece of advice.  He said, “Self-expression doesn’t happen here, it happens out there.” “You may think that you’re acting up a storm, expressing all kinds of passionate emotions, but if it doesn’t happen out there, you aren’t expressing anything. Self-expression happens out there.” 

Suddenly my inner voice screamed, “Hmmm!” That was it! That was the problem with classical music. We were spending all of our time on the wrong side of the footlights, focusing on what music we wanted to play and how we wanted to play it, while completely missing the key point—that if they don’t get it out there in the audience, we’re not expressing anything. And then, still reeling from this realization, I happened to see a quotation posted on a message board on the front of a church that crystallized the whole thing for me. A quotation from Walt Whitman that, in a sense, has come to define my entire career: “To have great poets, he said, there must be great audiences,” or in my particular version, “To have great music, there must be great audiences.” That was it! It wasn’t the musicians I needed to work with, it was the audiences. I needed to put what I had learned from Boulanger in the service of others. I needed to be in the audience business, not the music business. 

Now, when something in you goes “Hmmm,” you need to act on it, even if you don’t have a clear sense of exactly where it will lead. What E.L. Doctorow says about writing is equally true about life: He says, “It's like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t need a clear outline or a five-year plan of where “Hmmm” will lead, you just need to do the next thing and trust that if you’re on the right path, each step will lead you to the one that follows. So without really knowing what I was doing or where it was leading, I began trying to create listening programs to help people hear more in all kinds of music ranging from Gregorian chant, to Beethoven, Duke Ellington, and Stephen Sondheim. The “What Makes it Great?” series I started 18 years ago on National Public Radio focused on a tiny amount of music each week--often no more than 20 or 30 seconds per program to see what made it tick and what made it great. One of the things I discovered while doing these programs is that the difference between good and great is both enormous and infinitesimal. It’s hundreds of small, inspired choices made by a composer; note by note, chord by chord, and rhythm by rhythm. Sometimes all you need to do to get an audience to “get it,” is to change a little detail. For example, let’s change the first four notes of the famous opening of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus together.  Let’s make all four notes have the same rhythm. I sing you copy. (Rob sings Ha-le-lu-jah, then audience.) Square. Wooden. Utterly un-ecstatic. Now let’s make it slightly more exciting by speeding up the last two notes. (Rob sings with last 2 notes fast then aud.) Still nothing special. But what makes it magic is lengthening the first note so that the “Ha” grows in energy and then spills over into the excited ending. (R sings then aud.) Not only a fantastic musical idea, but a perfect depiction of the ecstasy that the word “alleluia” is all about. 

And that’s all it takes. I gradually realized that music didn’t need to be explained; it needed to truly be heard. Once people were encouraged in a focused way to, “Listen to this chord, pay attention to this rhythm, notice this variation,” they “got it” effortlessly, in as visceral a way as they “got” the music of Nine. 

What I’m trying to get across here is that I had no grand plan, or thought-out career path of any kind.  I simply kept listening for the “Hmmm,” and the project of creating great audiences gradually grew larger in scope. The short NPR programs got expanded to become full-length evenings in concert halls around the county, as well as CD’s, video podcasts, a PBS television special, and a book, but all along the way new moments of “Hmm” kept suggesting new possibilities, even in the midst of what seemed to be complete failures.

In 2002 I was commissioned by three orchestras to write a symphony to commemorate the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. My initial thought was to set key passages of Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition diaries to music, so for nearly a year I read through the diaries, dutifully selecting and grouping excerpts, and set several segments to music. The process made me more and more depressed with each passing day. Though I didn’t want to admit it, the more I read these diaries, the less I wanted to set them to music. The diaries may be important historical documents, but they are about as musical as the phone book. [SING] “Last night we were all alarmed by a large buffalo.”  (You see the problem!) Even worse, the more I read about Lewis and Clark, the less I liked them. In spite of my best efforts at historical empathy, their racist attitude towards Native Americans and Blacks was simply sickening. Writing a symphony to celebrate them seemed utterly ludicrous, not to mention hypocritical. Scrapping the project, however, was not an option, as not only were three orchestras already committed to performance dates for the piece, but in addition the whole project was being followed by an independent television company intending to turn the material into a documentary film! 

At the height of my frustration, I happened to be in St. Louis, where the Symphony had scheduled a polite, courtesy lunch for me with Bob Archibald, the head of both the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial and the Missouri Historical Society. I asked him how he had begun his work on the Bicentennial, and he told me that he had started by creating a Circle of Tribal Advisors made up of representatives from many of the tribes that Lewis and Clark had visited 200 years earlier. He told me that the group had completely changed his entire approach to the Bicentennial. The original title had been the “Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Celebrations,” but the first thing the Circle of Tribal advisers told him was that as long as the word “celebration” was part of the title, no Indians would participate, since from their point of view there was absolutely nothing to celebrate. From their perspective, Lewis and Clark was the beginning of 200 years of genocide—the beginning of the systematic destruction of the Indian way of life. (The Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Celebrations quickly became the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commemorations!) Bob said that the ongoing participation of the Circle of Tribal Advisors had changed his entire approach to the Bicentennial, and though he had no idea if their point of view might be relevant to my project, perhaps I might want to speak with some of them. And once again, something in me went “Hmmm.” 

As I mentioned earlier, once you hear your inner voice go “Hmmm,” you need to act on it, so I found out that the next meeting of the Circle of Tribal Advisors was in Great Falls, Montana, and used a bunch of frequent flyer miles to get myself to the meeting, having no idea of where it would lead. That weekend in Montana was a life-altering experience for me. After spending several days with the tribal advisors, I quickly realized that I was not only completely ignorant about the Native American perspective on the Lewis and Clark journey, but also about the entire Native American experience in our country, both past and present. I realized that what I wanted to do was completely revamp my project and shift my perspective 180 degrees. I wanted to tell the story of Lewis and Clark, not from their point of view but from the Native American point of view—from the banks of the river so to speak, not the boat. 

To make a very long story short, without any clear plan, over the next year and a half I made several trips to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in Montana, attended other conferences on the Native American perspective on Lewis and Clark, began to study Native American history and music, and completely reshuffled three orchestra’s performance dates so that I could throw out everything I had written and begin again. This time, I decided to collaborate with an extraordinary Blackfoot poet and writer named Darrell Kipp from Browning, Montana, and after an amazing year of visits and dialogue with him about Lewis and Clark, Native-American history, race, religion, music, culture, and the challenges of being a Blackfoot Indian in 21^st-century America, Darrell wrote a brilliant seven-page libretto that became the central text for my orchestra-chorus piece Summer Sun, Winter Moon, and that piece became the core of a huge educational outreach project for inner-city kids in St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans on the Native American experience, as well as the focus of a documentary film, called Summer Sun, Winter Moon which will air this fall on PBS.

What I’m trying to get across to you here is not my particular story, which is not important, but rather the point that if you continually pay attention to your inner voice, an entire life and career can grow out of nothing more than “listening for the Hmmm.” Without a detailed blueprint or five-year plan, it is possible to make a future for yourself out of what you truly and most authentically have to offer. I believe that everyone on the planet has a unique gift, and a unique contribution to make to the world, but that not everyone is fortunate enough to discover what that gift is and allow it to flourish. Only you can know what makes you go “Hmmm” and have the courage to create a life based on that. Joseph Campbell put it beautifully when he said, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” Not who your parents, friends, colleagues, or teachers think you should be. Not even who you might think you SHOULD be. But who you actually are. 

In the end for better or for worse, who you are is all that you can ever authentically offer. What you need to do is offer it. Become who you are. Whatever your field of endeavor, write the music that you hear, whatever that music may be. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” It’s all that you need to be, and if you listen for the “Hmmm,” I promise you, it’s more than enough. Thank you and congratulations to the class of 2009!