On Friday night, the Harker Speaker Series hosted a special evening with legendary composer David Amram. During his nearly 70-year career, Amram has collaborated with many of the 20th century’s most influential cultural figures, including Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson and Leonard Bernstein.
The event began with a scintillating performance by the upper school jazz band, which was joined by Amram on flute and percussion, demonstrating that his skills as a soloist remain sharp. He then sat down with Harker English teacher Charles Shuttleworth for a live interview, during which Amram shared his incredible life story, beginning with his interest in classical music, which he discovered at age 11. He later became enamored with jazz, gospel and folk music from around the world. Amram described much of his life as “serendipity,” having been repeatedly blessed to be put in contact with (and subsequently work with) top musicians. After serving in the military, he was introduced to jazz bassist Charles Mingus, with whom he began playing while studying at the Manhattan School of Music. He later met Thelonious Monk, who complimented Amram on his French horn playing. “I almost fainted,” Amram recalled.
After concluding the interview, Amram joined the Harker upper school orchestra to perform Franz Schubert’s haunting “Unfinished Symphony,” as well as an original work he wrote as a tribute to Afro-Cuban percussionist and composer Chano Pozo during a 1977 cultural exchange trip to Cuba. Titled “En Memoria de Chano Pozo,” the piece incorporates audience participation, and the audience happily clapped along toward the finale. Following the event, Amram participated in an audience Q&A session before signing copies of his books in the lobby for the appreciative attendees.
On Nov. 8, the Harker Speaker Series will host “An Evening With David Amram,” one of America’s most treasured composers and conductors. A professional musician for nearly 70 years – starting out in 1951 as a French hornist in Washington, D.C.’s National Symphony Orchestra – Amram has performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus, and composed the scores for the classic American films “Splendor in the Grass” and “Manchurian Candidate.”
Amram’s career throughout the 20th century led him to collaborations with influential figures including beat writer Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Betty Carter, Tito Puente, Hunter S. Thompson and Leonard Bernstein, who in 1966 appointed Amram the New York Philharmonic’s first composer in residence. Several of Amram’s compositions – including 2007’s “This Land, Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie” and 2002’s “Giants of the Night” – have become some of the mostly widely performed pieces in contemporary music.
“An Evening With David Amram” will include an interview with Amram conducted by upper school English teacher Charles Shuttleworth, a sit-in performance with Harker instrumental groups and an audience Q&A session. Amram’s famous wit, talent for storytelling and perspectives on the current music industry are sure to make this an event not to be missed!
On Nov. 8, the Harker Speaker Series will host “An Evening With David Amram,” one of America’s most treasured composers and conductors. A professional musician for nearly 70 years – starting out in 1951 as a French hornist in Washington, D.C.’s National Symphony Orchestra – Amram has performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus, and composed the scores for the classic American films “Splendor in the Grass” and “Manchurian Candidate.”
Amram’s career throughout the 20th century led him to collaborations with influential figures including beat writer Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Betty Carter, Tito Puente, Hunter S. Thompson and Leonard Bernstein, who in 1966 appointed Amram the New York Philharmonic’s first composer in residence. Several of Amram’s compositions – including 2007’s “This Land, Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie” and 2002’s “Giants of the Night” – have become some of the mostly widely performed pieces in contemporary music.
“An Evening With David Amram” will include an interview with Amram conducted by upper school English teacher Charles Shuttleworth, a sit-in performance with Harker instrumental groups and an audience Q&A session. Amram’s famous wit, talent for storytelling and perspectives on the current music industry are sure to make this an event not to be missed!
On Nov. 8, the Harker Speaker Series will host “An Evening With David Amram,” one of America’s most treasured composers and conductors. A professional musician for nearly 70 years – starting out in 1951 as a French hornist in Washington, D.C.’s National Symphony Orchestra – Amram has performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus, and composed the scores for the classic American films “Splendor in the Grass” and “Manchurian Candidate.”
Amram’s career throughout the 20th century led him to collaborations with influential figures including beat writer Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Betty Carter, Tito Puente, Hunter S. Thompson and Leonard Bernstein, who in 1966 appointed Amram the New York Philharmonic’s first composer in residence. Several of Amram’s compositions – including 2007’s “This Land, Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie” and 2002’s “Giants of the Night” – have become some of the mostly widely performed pieces in contemporary music.
“An Evening With David Amram” will include an interview with Amram conducted by upper school English teacher Charles Shuttleworth, a sit-in performance with Harker instrumental groups and an audience Q&A session. Amram’s famous wit, talent for storytelling and perspectives on the current music industry are sure to make this an event not to be missed!
On Nov. 28, the Harker Speaker Series relaunched after an extended hiatus with an appearance by entrepreneur and author Magdalena Yeşil, a first investor and founding board member of Salesforce. Interviewed by junior Mahi Kolla, a student in Harker’s incubator program, Yeşil discussed her latest book, 2017’s “Power Up: How Smart Women Win in the New Economy.”
The book was spurred by stories Yeşil read of women having bad experiences in the tech industry. Fearing that more women would not want seek a career in technology, she decided to take action. “I felt that it was my responsibility to tell my story as well as other women’s stories,” she said. Yeşil interviewed 27 women for the book, sharing challenges and success stories of women in the industry in what she hopes to be a “very pragmatic, very practical book to inspire young women.”
Yeşil also shared some instructive stories, such as the time she had dinner with her 31-year-old niece, who asked what Yeşil was doing at the same age. Yeşil responded that she was unemployed at the time. “I became an entrepreneur because I couldn’t find a job,” she said. “I had to create a job for myself.” After interviewing at several companies, she decided “to recreate myself by making myself an expert in an area where a lot of people were not experts.” That area turned out to be the internet, which at the time was primarily the domain of universities and the government.
After the talk, Yeşil took some questions from the audience and offered advice to young entrepreneurs on what challenges they could expect in their careers. She stressed the importance of finding co-founders and advised students not to get discouraged when generating funds, explaining that venture capitalists will predict incorrectly “no matter what or how brilliant the idea is.”
Yeşil also spoke briefly about her latest startup, which uses artificial intelligence to upload loan documents via smartphones, drastically improving the approval process.
The Harker Speaker Series and an audience of about 80 welcomed author and historian Dennis McNally on Jan. 14. McNally’s biography of Jack Kerouac, “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America,” was first published in 1979. He then spent much of the 1980s and ’90s traveling with the Grateful Dead, publishing “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead” in 2002. Prior to the appearance, he met and conversed with a group of Harker students who are currently studying Kerouac’s work.
McNally began his talk by sharing how he came to be an authority on Kerouac. “One of the fixed rules of reading history is that to a considerable extent, you learn more about the time the book was written than you necessarily do about its subject,” he said.
Although McNally did not experience the 1960s counterculture up close, he held a fascination with the period and the many cultural changes it brought. Upon arriving at graduate school in the early ’70s, he quickly became bored with the typical graduate student’s routine of “learn this, regurgitate that and so forth.” He decided to choose his dissertation topic early, and because the ’60s were too recent, settled on the Beat Generation.
“What came to fascinate me about Kerouac … is that he did something incredibly noble,” said McNally. Having published his first novel to some critical success in 1951, Kerouac then set out to write something he believed would never be published. Those writings would later become his seminal 1957 novel “On the Road.”
That novel, McNally said, caused an uproar in American culture because it represented a growing challenge to the status quo. “The status quo social life of America in 1957 was fixed and as rigid and as boring as really any time in American history,” McNally observed. Massive disruptions of the previous decades, including the Great Depression and World War II, had led Americans to treasure this stability.
Juvenile delinquency, McNally argued, was a significant concern for many Americans, and the popularity of “On the Road” only exacerbated those fears. The book subsequently became popular with many influential figures of the 1960s, including Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia.
Funnily enough, none of this may have happened had the famously grumpy New York Times book reviewer Orville Prescott not been on vacation when “On the Road” was published. A writer named Gilbert Millstein was assigned to review the book, which he praised, giving Kerouac his first big boost into the limelight. “Sales took off and never stopped,” McNally recalled.
“’On the Road’ also brought fame and notoriety to the so-called ‘beat generation,'” McNally continued, “which shunned the conformism that dominated so much of American culture at the time. [Kerouac] saw that, and I would argue that it was a demand for a spiritual regeneration of what had become a very boring and conformist and utterly consumer-addicted country.”
Critics of Kerouac mistook this message for a call to violence, which McNally remarked “says more about the critics than it does about Kerouac.”
Following the talk, McNally took questions from the audience, discussing such topics as the beat movement’s influence on the San Francisco counterculture and his thoughts on the future generation of writers.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2015 Harker Quarterly.
About 70 guests attended Larry Lansburgh’s talk, “Into the Amazon: How One Presentation Changed My Life,” in early April in the Nichols Hall auditorium on the upper school campus. The event was co-sponsored by the Harker Speaker Series, the middle and upper school debate departments, and the business and entrepreneurship department.
Lansburgh, an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning documentarian and author of “The Simple Key to Great Presentations,” told how he ended up in the Amazon.
“It was a presentation – just several people speaking to us in the audience – that led me to a life-and-death struggle in the Amazon rain forest,” he said, noting how the power of a presentation can literally change lives.
Lansburgh received an Emmy for “The Hidden Struggle,” a one-hour PBS documentary on the inspiring achievements of developmentally disabled young adults, and an Academy Award nomination for “Dawn Flight,” a dramatic short, and has also produced documentaries on the indigenous cultures of Alaska and Hawaii.
The Harker Speaker Series, co-sponsored by the communication studies and business and entrepreneurship departments, presents documentarian Larry Lansburgh in a talk titled, “Into the Amazon: How One Presentation Changed My Life.”
This talk is especially appropriate for middle and upper school students, so bring your kids! It will be held on Thursday, April 9, at 5 p.m. in the Nichols Hall auditorium. There is no entry fee, but RSVPs are required; just email communications@harker.org.
Lansburgh is the writer, producer and director of “Dream People of the Amazon,” a documentary about the Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. In his talk, he will share how a single presentation dramatically changed his life and how he went on to make a real difference in the lives of the Achuar people.
“It was a presentation – just several people speaking to us in the audience,” said Lansburgh, “that led me to a life-and-death struggle in the Amazon rain forest. … The power of presentations – your presentations, your standing in front of a group and speaking – can literally change lives.”
Lansburgh received an Emmy for “The Hidden Struggle,” a one-hour PBS documentary on the inspiring achievements of developmentally disabled young adults, and an Academy Award nomination for “Dawn Flight,” a dramatic short. He also has produced documentaries on the indigenous cultures of Alaska and Hawaii.
Come hear this fascinating speaker!
The Harker Speaker Series (HSS) was launched in 2007 to bring leaders and visionaries from a wide variety of fields to Harker to share their expertise or unique experiences with Harker parents, faculty and students as well as the greater community. For more information, contact communications@harker.org.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
Education activist Kakenya Ntaiya, Ph.D., founder of the Kakenya Center for Excellence, gave an eye-opening and inspiring talk in early May as a guest of the Harker Speaker Series. After being introduced by young activist Aliesha Bahri, grade 8, Ntaiya first took the audience back to Kenya, where she was born into one of 42 tribes, each with different languages, customs and traditions. Her tribe, the Maasai, “are very, very famous,” she said, known for the jumping dances performed by the tribe’s warriors and their red attire.
By the time she was 5, Ntaiya’s marriage had already been arranged. “They put a [necklace] on my neck, and that was always a reminder for me that I have a husband,” she said. Ntaiya attended school as a child, because she remembered that her mother had wished she could have stayed in school longer. “She would tell us, ‘Do you see the member of parliament? I was smarter than him in class,’” she recalled.
At the age of 12, Ntaiya realized that her days of attending school could soon end, as she was nearing the day when she would undergo the Maasai’s female genital cutting ritual – a painful and often life-threatening procedure – and would soon thereafter be married. “I had to come up with a way of escaping that,” she said. Ntaiya normally would have to send her mother to inform her father of her intentions to continue school. However, fearing that her mother would be beaten for delivering bad news, she delivered the message herself as tradition forbid him from beating her. She told him she would go through with the cutting if she could be allowed to continue her education. If he refused, she would run away, bringing shame upon on him. Her father agreed.
During high school, Ntaiya applied and was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. Initially, she faced resistance from the other villagers, but managed to convince them to pay for her trip overseas to begin her college career. She later learned much about the plight of girls around the world who did not have access to a good education. “I started questioning every little thing because what I was reading in books was my life,” she said.
Her newfound purpose led her to work at the United Nations after finishing her undergraduate degree. She also visited home on a number of occasions, often hearing “horrible stories” about the people she once knew in her village. Moved by these accounts, she decided to build a school for girls.
In May 2009, the Kakenya Center for Excellence opened in Kenya for girls in grades 4-8. It now serves 170 students in grades 1-8. The school provides uniforms, books and other materials, but it was the added importance of providing lunch that caught Ntaiya by surprise. “It had never registered in my mind that that actually made a difference,” she said. Normally, girls would only have a cup of tea in the morning, walk anywhere from 2 to 5 miles to school and not eat until the evening, “because you can’t just run another 5 miles to go have lunch.”
Qualified teachers were also very important. “We had teachers who are very, very caring,” she said, “teachers who came there, who knew that it’s a girls school and all the girls have dreams and we’re going to cultivate those dreams to become a reality.” This was crucial because girls are often neglected at school, as they are assumed to be getting married. Toward the end of her talk, Ntaiya spoke briefly about her work with Girls Learn International, which partners schools in the United States with those in other countries where girls struggle with access to education. “If you look at me, if I got the mentorship that I needed when I was 12 years old, where do you think I would be?” she asked. “If we can give these girls that mentorship, if we can mentor them … you will see a different world.”
This story originally appeared in the spring 2014 Harker Quarterly.
The Harker Speaker Series brought renowned Shojin cuisine master Toshio Tanahashi to Nichols Hall on Feb. 20 to share his wisdom on the Zen Buddhism-inspired cooking philosophy. Brought to monasteries in Kyoto from China in the seventh and eighth centuries, principles of Shojin cooking were further codified by the writings of Dogen Zenji. The form greatly matured by the 13th century.
Tanahashi trained as a Shojin chef and opened the acclaimed Shojin restaurant Gesshinkyo in 1992, and went on to oversee food preparation for the Japanese TV series “The Real Thing.” He has been featured in Vogue Japan, The New York Times and other publications.
A purely vegetarian cuisine, food made in the Shojin tradition uses authentic ingredients cultivated locally and without the use of industrial methods. Ingredients include vegetables, fruits, sesame seeds, nuts, fermented foods and other organic elements.
Shojin adherents hold these ingredients and the methods used to craft them into Shojin foods in high regard. As Tanahashi began solemnly grinding sesame seeds with a mortar and pestle at the foot of the stage, he kindly asked the members of the audience to close their eyes and breathe deeply. This practice, he later said, could take up to two hours.
Tanahashi discussed how he communes with his ingredients, studying the vegetables to see what he believes are the “many messages” they are telling him. He uses this, he said, to decide what to make with them.
One example of the reverence for the ingredients used in Shojin cooking is the vinegar he prefers, which takes six months or longer to ferment. By contrast, the fermentation process for store-bought vinegar takes a mere eight hours.
Tanahashi invited attendees to grind sesame seeds the Shojin way. Trying to use proper mortal and pestle technique, audience members traded off slowly grinding the seeds into a paste. As they worked, Tanahashi instructed them to keep their backs straight, shoulders relaxed and eyes closed. “It’s not just finishing the job,” he said, “It’s the process, the journey.”
After volunteers ground the sesame seeds, Tanahashi added salt, vinegar, sugar, ginger and sake. “I’m sorry, but I do not measure,” he joked as he added and mixed ingredients. The audience did not seem to mind, as they exuberantly consumed the resultant paste as it was passed around the room with a variety of vegetables.