Mr. Adams addressed the graduating class at Juilliard and his words resonated deeply with me. I have found, especially in political discourse, it is of paramount importance to control which issues are discussed because you want the issues raised where your position can be clearly expressed in as few words as possible. If your position requires any nuance whatsoever, you're sunk.
From the address:
But by choosing a life in the arts you’ve set yourselves apart from all that and from a nation that has become such a hostage to distraction that it can’t absorb a single complex thought without having it reduced to a sound byte.
Human beings like simple solutions and simple, binary answers. Reality is rarely so neatly compartmentalized. Often I've lamented our inability to embrace ambiguity.
John Adams continues:
A life in the arts means a life of sacrifice and tens of thousands of hours of devotion and discipline with scant remuneration and sometimes even scant recognition. A life in the arts means loving complexity and ambiguity, of enjoying the fact that there are no single, absolute solutions.
I've often said that great composition has a lot in common with humor. You have to set up an expectation and break it.
John Adams:
In order to achieve that element of surprise you have to set up expectation. The quality of the surprise—what Melville called the “shock of recognition”—depends on how carefully, how knowingly these expectations have been set up.
The entire address is 110% full of artistic wisdom (some contents may have settled during shipment), so I encourage you to read the full address here.
John Adams portrait used under a GNU Free Documentation License.
