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Well when I was asked to do this TEDTalk, I was really chuckled,

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because, you see, my father's name was Ted,

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and much of my life, especially my musical life,

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is really a talk that I'm still having with him,

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or the part of me that he continues to be.

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Now Ted was a New Yorker, an all-around theater guy,

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and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician.

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He didn't read a note,

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and he was profoundly hearing impaired.

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Yet, he was my greatest teacher.

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Because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids,

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his understanding of music was profound.

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And for him, it wasn't so much the way the music goes

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as about what it witnesses and where it can take you.

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And he did a painting of this experience,

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which he called "In the Realm of Music."

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Now Ted entered this realm every day by improvising

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in a sort of Tin Pan Alley style like this.

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(Music)

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But he was tough when it came to music.

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He said, "There are only two things that matter in music:

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what and how.

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And the thing about classical music,

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that what and how, it's inexhaustible."

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That was his passion for the music.

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Both my parents really loved it.

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They didn't know all that much about it,

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but they gave me the opportunity to discover it

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together with them.

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And I think inspired by that memory,

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it's been my desire to try and bring it

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to as many other people as I can,

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sort of pass it on through whatever means.

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And how people get this music, how it comes into their lives,

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really fascinates me.

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One day in New York, I was on the street

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and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants.

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And a tough, slouchy kid got up to bat,

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and he took a swing and really connected.

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And he watched the ball fly for a second,

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and then he went, "Dah dadaratatatah.

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Brah dada dadadadah."

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And he ran around the bases.

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And I thought, go figure.

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How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment

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turn into the victory crow of this New York kid?

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How was that passed on? How did he get to hear Mozart?

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Well when it comes to classical music,

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there's an awful lot to pass on,

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much more than Mozart, Beethoven or Tchiakovsky.

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Because classical music

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is an unbroken living tradition

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that goes back over 1,000 years.

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And every one of those years

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has had something unique and powerful to say to us

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about what it's like to be alive.

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Now the raw material of it, of course,

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is just the music of everyday life.

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It's all the anthems and dance crazes

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and ballads and marches.

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But what classical music does

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is to distill all of these musics down,

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to condense them to their absolute essence,

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and from that essence create a new language,

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a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly

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about who we really are.

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It's a language that's still evolving.

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Now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of,

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like concertos and symphonies,

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but even the most ambitious masterpiece

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can have as its central mission

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to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment --

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like this one from the Beethoven Violin Concerto.

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(Music)

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It's so simple, so evocative.

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So many emotions seem to be inside of it.

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Yet, of course, like all music,

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it's essentially not about anything.

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It's just a design of pitches and silence and time.

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And the pitches, the notes, as you know, are just vibrations.

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They're locations in the spectrum of sound.

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And whether we call them 440 per second, A,

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or 3,729, B flat -- trust me, that's right --

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they're just phenomena.

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But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena

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is complex and emotional and not totally understood.

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And the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries,

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as have our preferences for them.

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So for example, in the 11th century,

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people liked pieces that ended like this.

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(Music)

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And in the 17th century, it was more like this.

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(Music)

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And in the 21st century ...

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(Music)

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Now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord,

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even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you

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or sent some of you running from the room.

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And the reason you like it

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is because you've inherited, whether you knew it or not,

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centuries-worth of changes

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in musical theory, practice and fashion.

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And in classical music we can follow these changes very, very accurately

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because of the music's powerful silent partner,

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the way it's been passed on: notation.

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Now the impulse to notate,

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or, more exactly I should say, encode music

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has been with us for a very long time.

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In 200 B.C., a man named Sekulos

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wrote this song for his departed wife

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and inscribed it on her gravestone

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in the notational system of the Greeks.

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(Music)

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And a thousand years later,

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this impulse to notate took an entirely different form.

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And you can see how this happened

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in these excerpts from the Christmas mass "Puer Natus est nobis,"

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"For Us is Born."

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(Music)

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In the 10th century, little squiggles were used

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just to indicate the general shape of the tune.

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And in the 12th century, a line was drawn, like a musical horizon line,

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to better pinpoint the pitch's location.

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And then in the 13th century, more lines and new shapes of notes

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locked in the concept of the tune exactly,

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and that led to the kind of notation we have today.

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Well notation not only passed the music on,

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notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely,

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because it enabled the musicians

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to imagine music on a much vaster scale.

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Now inspired moves of improvisation

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could be recorded, saved, considered, prioritized,

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made into intricate designs.

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And from this moment, classical music became

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what it most essentially is,

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a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature:

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instinct and intelligence.

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And there began to be a real difference at this point

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between the art of improvisation

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and the art of composition.

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Now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move,

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but a composer is considering all possible moves,

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testing them out, prioritizing them out,

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until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design

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of ultimate and enduring coolness.

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Now some of the greatest composers, like Bach,

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were combinations of these two things.

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Bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master.

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Mozart was the same way.

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But every musician strikes a different balance

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between faith and reason, instinct and intelligence.

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And every musical era had different priorities of these things,

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different things to pass on, different 'whats' and 'hows'.

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So in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition

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the big 'what' was to praise God.

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And by the 1400s, music was being written

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that tried to mirror God's mind

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as could be seen in the design of the night sky.

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The 'how' was a style called polyphony,

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music of many independently moving voices

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that suggested the way the planets seemed to move

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in Ptolemy's geocentric universe.

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This was truly the music of the spheres.

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(Music)

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This is the kind of music that Leonardo DaVinci would have known.

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And perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity

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meant that something new had to happen --

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a radical new move, which in 1600 is what did happen.

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(Music) Singer: Ah, bitter blow!

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Ah, wicked, cruel fate!

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Ah, baleful stars!

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Ah, avaricious heaven!

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MTT: This, of course, was the birth of opera,

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and its development put music on a radical new course.

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The what now was not to mirror the mind of God,

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but to follow the emotion turbulence of man.

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And the how was harmony,

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stacking up the pitches to form chords.

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And the chords, it turned out,

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were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions.

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And the basic chords were the ones we still have with us,

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the triads,

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either the major one,

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which we think is happy,

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or the minor one,

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which we perceive as sad.

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But what's the actual difference between these two chords?

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It's just these two notes in the middle.

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It's either E natural,

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and 659 vibrations per second,

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or E flat, at 622.

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So the big difference between human happiness and sadness?

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37 freakin' vibrations.

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So you can see in a system like this

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there was enormous subtle potential

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of representing human emotions.

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And in fact, as man began to understand more

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his complex and ambivalent nature,

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harmony grew more complex to reflect it.

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Turns out it was capable of expressing emotions

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beyond the ability of words.

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Now with all this possibility,

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classical music really took off.

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It's the time in which the big forms began to arise.

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And the effects of technology began to be felt also,

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because printing put music, the scores, the codebooks of music,

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into the hands of performers everywhere.

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And new and improved instruments

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made the age of the virtuoso possible.

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This is when those big forms arose --

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the symphonies, the sonatas, the concertos.

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And in these big architectures of time,

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composers like Beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime.

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A piece like Beethoven's Fifth

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basically witnessing how it was possible

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for him to go from sorrow and anger,

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over the course of a half an hour,

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step by exacting step of his route,

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to the moment when he could make it across to joy.

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(Music)

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And it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues,

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like gripping ones of culture,

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such as nationalism or quest for freedom

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or the frontiers of sensuality.

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But whatever direction the music took,

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one thing until recently was always the same,

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and that was when the musicians stopped playing,

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the music stopped.

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Now this moment so fascinates me.

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I find it such a profound one.

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What happens when the music stops?

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Where does it go? What's left?

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What sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance?

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Is it a melody or a rhythm

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or a mood or an attitude?

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And how might that change their lives?

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To me this is the intimate, personal side of music.

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It's the passing on part. It's the 'why' part of it.

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And to me that's the most essential of all.

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Mostly it's been a person-to-person thing,

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a teacher-student, performer-audience thing,

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and then around 1880 came this new technology

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that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally

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created a new and miraculous way of passing things on,

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albeit an impersonal one.

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People could now hear music all the time,

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even though it wasn't necessary

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for them to play an instrument, read music or even go to concerts.

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And technology democratized music by making everything available.

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It spearheaded a cultural revolution

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in which artists like Caruso and Bessie Smith were on the same footing.

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And technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes,

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using computers and synthesizers

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to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity

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beyond the means of performers and audiences.

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At the same time technology,

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by taking over the role that notation had always played,

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shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence

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way over to the instinctive side.

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The culture in which we live now

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is awash with music of improvisation

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that's been sliced, diced, layered

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and, God knows, distributed and sold.

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What's the long-term effect of this on us or on music?

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Nobody knows.

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The question remains: What happens when the music stops?

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What sticks with people?

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Now that we have unlimited access to music, what does stick with us?

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Well let me show you a story of what I mean

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by "really sticking with us."

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I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home,

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and I spied a very shaky old man

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making his way across the room on a walker.

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He came over to a piano that was there,

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and he balanced himself and began playing something like this.

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(Music)

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And he said something like, "Me ... boy ... symphony ... Beethoven."

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And I suddenly got it,

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and I said, "Friend, by any chance are you trying to play this?"

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(Music)

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And he said, "Yes, yes. I was a little boy.

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The symphony: Isaac Stern, the concerto, I heard it."

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And I thought, my God,

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how much must this music mean to this man

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that he would get himself out of his bed, across the room

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to recover the memory of this music

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that, after everything else in his life is sloughing away,

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still means so much to him?

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Well, that's why I take every performance so seriously,

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why it matters to me so much.

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I never know who might be there, who might be absorbing it

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and what will happen to it in their life.

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But now I'm excited that there's more chance than ever before possible

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of sharing this music.

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That's what drives my interest in projects

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like the TV series "Keeping Score" with the San Francisco Symphony

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that looks at the backstories of music,

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and working with the young musicians at the New World Symphony

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on projects that explore the potential

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of the new performing arts centers

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for both entertainment and education.

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And of course, the New World Symphony

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led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet

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that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world.

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And the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype.

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There's just a role here for so many people --

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teachers, parents, performers --

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to be explorers together.

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Sure, the big events attract a lot of attention,

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but what really matters is what goes on every single day.

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We need your perspectives, your curiosity, your voices.

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And it excites me now to meet people

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who are hikers, chefs, code writers, taxi drivers,

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people I never would have guessed who loved the music

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and who are passing it on.

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You don't need to worry about knowing anything.

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If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive,

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you know all that you need to know.

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You can start anywhere. Ramble a bit.

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Follow traces. Get lost. Be surprised, amused inspired.

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All that 'what', all that 'how' is out there

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waiting for you to discover its 'why',

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to dive in and pass it on.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)