If you have a deep soul need to pursue music but you or your parents see it only as a sure street to starvation, read on. Maybe you will discover its profound importance in our personal and communal lives and find yourself proud to be a musician.

I owe my renewed appreciation for music to a speech by Karl Paulnack, pianist at the Boston Conservatory. I am grateful someone sent me a copy. 

He tells how one of the most profound musical compositions of all time, "Quartet for the End of Time," was written by Frenchman OlivierMessiaen when he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Thanks to the kindness of a guard, he was given paper and a place to compose.

There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist and a clarinetist so he wrote this piece for the four of them. They performed it in January of 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards,

Knowing what we now know about life in a Nazi concentration camp, we must wonder why anyone there would be writing music. They did well to get a little food every day, to avoid being beaten, tortured or killed.

As Paulnack says, the obvious conclusion is that music "is somehow essential for life … a part of survival … a part of the human spirit … an unquenchable expression of who we are."

The ancient Greeks said astronomy and music were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy is the study of the relationships among external objects and music deals with the relationships inside of us.

When education budgets are cut we treat music as a luxury. It is the last thing to be funded and the first to be cut. We forget it is the oxygen of the soul and the medicine that heals relationships within us.

Once I was playing a big dance and a young woman in her mid or late twenties came in and quietly seated herself against the wall in the left rear area of the building, thirty feet from everyone else. She wore a mink coat and enough jewelry to start a store in contrast to the rest of the crowd who wore jeans and plain clothes.

The first two sets, I noticed she turned down every man who asked her to dance so when I was on my second break I walked over and said, "I am not trying to intrude but are you all right?" She answered, " I am now but when I came in here it was my intention to kill myself tonight. But as I listened to your music, I realized there were two people in this world who knew exactly how I feel tonight: the man who wrote your songs and you and your band by the way you squeezed the pain in them right out of the bottom of your souls. I saw if other people could get through extreme pain, surely I could do it, too.""

She spoke of her father. I recognized him as one of the more prominent attorneys in town. She could see I recognized him and said, "Please don't tell him I came here tonight. He would not like for me to come to a nightclub like this and would never be able to understand how it saved my life." As the ancient Greeks said, she had been able to re-arrange things inside. The music had healed her.

I felt the same way when I was a small boy and heard blind minstrel Pete Cassell sing "I Know What It Means To Be Lonesome" at the Pilgrim Holiness Church on Taylor Street. Then Hank Williams came along. He and Dr. Cassell have been operating on my insides ever since.

We all spend some time in our concentration camps and we'd never come out alive without our music.