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.
Photographer, explorer, author and filmmaker Denis Belliveau visited Harker on March 22 as the final guest of the 2015-16 Harker Speaker Series season. Using photographs and his unique storytelling ability, he gave the audience a 40-minute summary of his two-year journey to retrace the legendary travels of explorer Marco Polo. This story was told in the 2008 documentary “In the Footsteps of Marco Polo” and later in a book by the same name.
Before explaining why he decided to traverse the path Marco Polo traveled more than 700 years ago, Belliveau briefly discussed Polo’s life. Polo was the son and nephew of Venetian merchants who left Venice for Asia before he was born. Upon returning to Venice, the two merchants met the teenage Marco for the first time and set off again for Asia, this time with Marco in tow.
Polo’s stories of his travels would later become what Belliveau called “the first travel book.” He explained that Marco Polo was the first to leave behind a detailed account of his time in Asia, inspiring many later explorers, including Christopher Columbus. “His personal story reads like a fairy tale,” Belliveau remarked.
In 1992, which marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to North America, Belliveau and fellow traveler Francis O’Donnell observed that many were retracing Columbus’ journey, which they dismissed as boring. “You spend six weeks at sea and then you’re in the Caribbean,” he said.
They realized that 1995 would be the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s return to Venice, and began discussing the prospect of retracing his 15,000-mile trek through Asia and back. It turned out that many attempts at a similar journey had been made in the last several decades, but none had been successful.
Belliveau recapped the journey through select photographs he took while traveling. In one slide, he showed the audience a woodcut of Marco Polo returning to his home in Venice, saying he’d hoped to find this same place in his travels. The next slide showed a photograph of the home, with many features still preserved, including the cross above the archway that formed the front door.
While in Israel, Belliveau and O’Donnell visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Marco Polo journeyed to at the request of Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. There, Belliveau gained entrance by consulting the family in charge of opening the main gate. The same family has maintained this arrangement for eight centuries, he explained.
To get across Afghanistan safely, the two travelers had to make arrangements with the Mujahideen, the guerilla military outfits that fought against the Soviet Union. Their group was ambushed the Hazaras and they were held for several hours before being allowed to travel again. Eventually they made their way to the famous Wakhan Corridor en route to China.
Following his talk, Belliveau answered questions from the audience and signed copies of the book that accompanied his film, which can be viewed in its entirety at www.thestepsofpolo.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 recently appeared in the winter 2012 edition of Harker Quarterly.
Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born best-selling author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” was the honored guest of the Harker Speaker Series on Nov. 30, speaking about the writing process, his experiences in Afghanistan and his humanitarian efforts with The Khaled Hosseini Foundation.Hosseini also attended a pre-event reception for attendees who purchased special tickets to meet the author and receive a personalized copy of one of his novels. Warm and charming, Hosseini chatted with ABC-7 anchor Cheryl Jennings on a range of topics. Jennings also participates in Afghani relief efforts and was a natural choice for this informal, interview-style conversation. Before his appearance, a video of an ABC-7 report by Jennings was shown, briefing the audience of about 400 on The Khaled Hosseini Foundation and briefly mentioning Harker’s involvement. Founded in 2007, the organization raises money to build shelters and provide education, food and healthcare to women and children in Afghanistan, which is experiencing many humanitarian crises after experiencing decades of war. Hosseini’s wife, Roya, is also deeply involved, helping with a program that enables Afghan women to sell crafts to raise money for humanitarian aid. These goods were being sold at a table in the gym the night of Hosseini’s visit. Jennings asked Hosseini about his 2003 and 2007 visits to Afghanistan, during which he saw “a ton of people who had come back to Afghanistan from either Pakistan or Iran trying to resettle, restart their lives in their country and were really having a very, very hard time,” he said. “It shattered me.” Although he watched much of the crises in Afghanistan unfold from outside the country, he nevertheless found that his memories of his childhood in the country were helpful in writing “The Kite Runner.” “It took me by surprise how vivid my memories were,” he said, recalling his time growing up with educated parents and living a somewhat “westernized” lifestyle. He was also surprised by how much the events he had written in the book came to life during his visit. “I started having experiences that I had just imagined this character would have, and I had even written a book about it,” he said. While working on “Splendid Suns,” he took on the challenge of writing from a woman’s perspective, something he at first approached with some overconfidence, despite warnings from his literary agent at the time, the late Elaine Koster. “I have to admit I was a little smug about it,” he recalled. “And then, about three, four months later, I began to see what she meant.” He overcame the difficulty by rendering women in a more universal sense. “I’m just going to concentrate on what motivates them; what do they want from life, what are they afraid of, what are their hopes, and so on,” he said. “It seems trite and simple enough, but all of the solutions in my writing life have always been simple – it’s just very hard to get to them.” Hosseini said he was proud to have changed the perceptions people have of the Afghan people through his writing. “I’ve had letters from people who were really kind of toxic haters of people from that region. And yet, they read the book and they saw something of themselves in the experiences of these characters,” he said. “And they slowly changed. That to me is a tremendous gift as a writer. That’s going to outlive anything that I’ve ever done.” Following his talk with Jennings, Hosseini stayed to take questions from the audience and sign books.
Hundreds arrived at the upper school campus on Sept. 26 to see decorated astronaut Dr. Gregory Chamitoff kick off the 2011-12 season of the Harker Speaker Series with an in-depth talk about his inspiring life. His appearance was spurred by his visit to his alma mater, Blackford High School, now the site of Harker’s middle school campus. Prior to his speech, Chamitoff spent nearly an hour talking to Winged Post and Talon staffers. Once at the podium, after introductions by Chris Nikoloff, head of school, and Paul West, grade 12, Chamitoff began by recognizing some of the teachers who inspired him during his days at Blackford High, and by introducing his family, who were in attendance, as well as some Blackford High alumni. He briefly recapped his years as a high school student, struggling to find the right crowd in which to belong. “It felt to me like in high school, who you were was defined by where you had lunch,” he joked. He found that he was most comfortable among science students. He reminisced about the pranks he and his friends would organize, including one where they built a flying saucer to frighten the neighborhood. For this particular project, the young Chamitoff wrote to NASA to ask how to make it fly. To his delight, a NASA engineer wrote back with an explanation. “I still have this letter from a long time ago, explaining exactly how the lift would work on this flying saucer,” he said. This inspired him to pursue his dream of being an astronaut. Before continuing, Chamitoff touched on the topic of fulfilling one’s dreams. “You have to set your own standards in your work, and the standards that you set are really for you and based on what you can do and what you want to do,” he said. “You can’t compare yourself to the people sitting next to you.” Having many different interests is also an asset, citing the complaint that many high school students have about learning things in school that do not interest them. “It turns out those subjects later on in life could be very important to you,” he said. “The other thing is skills; sports, hobbies, whether it’s music or dancing or anything you’re interested in doing, these are things that you love to do, you have a passion for, and things you have a passion for are things that end up defining you, things that build character and make you who you are,” he added. Teachers also play an important role, he said, explaining that, “in my job right now, everybody is my teacher.” He said he often finds himself in the role of the student. “You can learn something from everybody,” he said. Chamitoff’s most recent mission was as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle “Endeavour” on its final voyage earlier this year. In 2008, he spent six months aboard the international space station (ISS) as a flight engineer and science officer. He fondly recalled the camaraderie among his crewmates, who gave one another amusing nicknames. During the Q&A session following his presentation, Chamitoff revealed that his nickname was “Taz,” after the popular Looney Tunes character, because of the sounds he would make while eating. He told most of his story through photos, taking the audience from the launch of “Endeavour,” which included one striking image of the shuttle bursting through a cloud bank, a thick column of exhaust casting its shadow across the top of the clouds. The object of that particular mission was to complete the construction of the ISS. As “Endeavour” approached, what originally started out as a “dot on the horizon” eventually became a structure the size of two football fields. The “Endeavor” crew was actually delivering two key items to the ISS. One was a palette of spare equipment that would be used to sustain the station through 2020. A photo showed the palette being transferred from the shuttle’s robotic arm to a robotic arm attached to the space station, a job Chamitoff said was similar to a video game, “but if you look out the window, it’s real stuff, and it’s big stuff that you’re moving around.” The other piece being delivered was an alpha magnetic spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion piece of equipment made to look for “dark matter” that may explain why stars rotate at certain speeds around galaxies. It is also designed to look for anti-matter created by the Big Bang. “If they discover an anti-matter galaxy with this, that will be a fundamental breakthrough,” Chamitoff said. Chamitoff took the audience through more amazing photos of him and his crewmates at work on the space station. One wide-angle shot, taken at the end of the final spacewalk, was taken at the highest spot on the ISS, showing it complete after 12 years of construction, which required 36 shuttle flights. “During this spacewalk, we hit the 1,000th hour of spacewalking time,” Chamitoff said. “We were able to announce, ‘space station assembly is complete,’ after all this work by 15 countries for all this time.” The final photograph of the presentation showed the view from the window where Chamitoff slept during his stay at the ISS. “I’ve taken about 22,000 pictures in space, and this is my favorite one, and I took it during this mission,” he said. Upon arriving at the space station, he put his sleeping bag next to his favorite view from the space station. “Every night I would get into my sleeping bag, and I would open up a shutter, and I would look at this view and I would just stare at it until I was forced to go to sleep,” he said. In it, the earth and its glowing atmosphere float below the space station, with thousands of stars visible in the distance. “You feel like you can reach the future from here; you feel like you’re already part of the future, and all you need to do is go a little faster,” he said, “and this space station, which is really comfortable to live on for six months, could take you all the way to Mars.” Chamitoff’s presentation was followed by a video showing highlights from the mission, including several impressive first-person views from the spacewalks, and amusing footage of the astronauts maneuvering about the space station and catching floating pieces of candy and droplets of water with their mouths. Following the short film, Chamitoff took questions from the audience. In response to a question about floating debris inside the space station, he explained that spacecraft have advanced filtration and ventilation systems that keep the surroundings clear. Another audience member asked about the continued delay of a new space vehicle after the space shuttle had been retired. “It’s very disappointing,” he said, saying he thought the space shuttle was retired too soon. “There was this path of retiring the space shuttle, and there was this path of building the next vehicle, and those two paths should have been connected by milestones,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to retire the shuttle until the next thing is sitting on the launchpad.” He estimated that the next vehicle could be ready in five or six years. Until then, American astronauts will have to acquire seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. Responding to a question about physical changes in space, Chamitoff explained that he actually lost 10 percent of the bone mass in his hips and pelvic area during his time in space, and adjustment to life back on earth was difficult as a result. “Gravity feels really strong when you come back,” he said. “You feel like gravity’s not happy unless you’re flat on the ground and every part of you is squished on the floor.” It was several months before he could move normally as before, but his bone mass eventually returned. Chamitoff said he knew from age 6 he wanted to be an astronaut and one particular step in the realization of that dream stood out for him. On his first space walk, as he hung by a hand rail from the very bottom hatch of the space station, the Earth 200 miles beneath him, he paused for a moment at the thought of trusting his life to the tether that held him to the space station, the Earth and his family. “You have to convince yourself that it’s OK to let go,” he said. “Because you have work to do.”
The Harker Speaker Series kicked off its 2009-10 season in grand fashion with the appearance of travel author and television personality Rick Steves, who discussed his newest book, “Travel as a Political Act.” Having traveled to Europe regularly since his teens, Steves began his travel writing career in the 1980s with the publication of “Europe Through the Back Door.” He went on to author more than 40 books that specialize in traveling Europe cheaply and experiencing the less tourist-oriented aspects of European cultures. He now hosts the popular public television series “Rick Steves’ Europe” and organizes European tours for thousands of people each year, in addition to writing a syndicated newspaper column and hosting a weekly radio show. Steves spoke to a packed audience at the Saratoga gym, and was also seen via live video feed by audiences in Nichols Hall. The theme of his hour-long discussion was how Americans can use the experience of travel to improve their understanding of the world and its many different peoples. In so doing, they can help improve America’s relationship with the rest of the world. Learning about the key figures in a country’s history can teach us much about the culture and people, he said, citing El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, an advocate for human rights who was assassinated for his outspoken stance. Steves compared him to the soldier Nathan Hale, who was captured and killed by the British during the Revolutionary War – understand the people’s heroes and you will understand their culture. He covered some of the key differences between Europeans and Americans, such as work habits. Europe, Steves said, is often criticized by Americans because its citizens make less money than those in the U.S. “The full story is not being told here,” Steves said. He pointed out that workers in Europe actually make roughly the same hourly wage while choosing to work less. “Europeans are adamant about not working themselves into an early grave,” Steves said, noting that he was very happy to be an American citizen and would much rather run his business at home than abroad. “Because I love my country and love this way of life, I believe it is good style and patriotic to bring home a few challenges to encourage my neighbors to get it a little better,” Steves said. “We can learn from other people.” Toward the end of his presentation, Steves talked about his recent trip to Iran, saying he wanted to humanize its people. He confessed that he was nervous about visiting the country at first, a fear that was quickly assuaged. While stuck in traffic in Iran’s capital city of Tehran, a man in the next car handed Steves’ driver a bouquet of flowers, saying, “Give this to the foreigner in your backseat and apologize for our traffic.” He also shared the story of an Iranian woman who implored Steves to “tell the truth” about her country’s people: That they were strong, united and didn’t want their children to be “raised like Britney Spears.” These attributes, Steves said, are common among Americans who worry about how culture affects their offspring. “Think about their counterparts here that are most quick to hate Iran,” Steves said. “They’re good people, motivated by fear and love.” Steves said that among young people there is an opportunity to learn more about the world outside their borders and understand it, rather than fear it. “There’s a lot of fear being used against us these days,” he said, “and I’ve learned the flipside of fear so often is understanding.” He closed his presentation with an anecdote about a whirling Dervish he observed in Turkey. Whirling Dervishes are Muslim worshippers known for their distinct method of praying, which involves a circular dance that the Dervish does as a form of meditation. The Dervish explained to Steves that when he prays, he places one foot down to represent his home and family, and the other foot circles around, to praise the wonder and variety of God’s creation. One hand is raised to receive God’s love and another is lowered to bring this love down to his creation. He then begins whirling and entering his trance-like state. Steves said that the Dervish’s reverence of home, family and the world around him made them “fundamentally the same, and if I can go home with that appreciation, and then employ that broadened perspective as a citizen of this great nation, that’s the most powerful and beautiful souvenir, and that’s making travel a political act.” Following the presentation, Steves spent a brief period taking questions from the audience and signed books for his fans. Students interviewed after the event enjoyed Steves’ well-articulated and balanced perspective. Vamsi Vemereddy, Gr. 11, found the presentation “very interesting. I learned lots of different things about Europe, like how they view us.” Fellow junior Priya Sahdev said, “It makes you want to travel a lot more than I expected. I didn’t really know who [Steves] was when I was going in there, but going out of there, I really enjoyed the whole talk and I learned a lot from it.” “It was really educational to learn to learn about all these different places,” said Puneet Sidhu, Gr. 11. “It kind of makes me want to visit these places now, and have the experience myself.” Launched in 2007, the Harker Speaker Series invites inspiring, visionary individuals from a wide variety of fields to share their stories and expertise with Harker parents, students and faculty, as well as individuals from the larger community. For more information, visit http://www.harker.org/page.cfm?p=1307.[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://skylark.harker.org/hno/backups/wp-content/story-slideshows/Rick_Steves_October_29_2009/soundslider.swf” width=”500″ height=”400″ targetclass=”flashmovie”]
