During my lunch break I couldn’t hold back the tears over my bowl of ramen. Reading the speech from my BlackBerry the waiters and customers must have thought I’d received a breakup email from my girlfriend or something. And still when I’d finished eating and returned to my car, I had to wail the rest of it out.

That guy’s speech did what music (and any effective form of communication medium) was originally intended to do when calling out to and imploring a response from your soul. It “spoke” to me.

A flood of thoughts and ideas subsequently poured out from me, but here I will mention only three:

1)  In ongoing conversations I’ve been having with my colleagues, I’ve been an advocate for the creation of a business model that attributes monetary value to psychological and/or spiritual experiences obtained from listening to music. Not only would this model provide an additional viewpoint to the way we value material goods, it also addresses the recent paranoia that all things digital would eventually be free and musicians would therefore no longer receive financial compensation for their work. Musicians today should be paid for the lasting effects, a much more meaningful royalty, of their music distinct from branding and product endorsements and consumer purchasing power.

2) I believe wholeheartedly the arts in the education system is a necessity and concur with Cornell University president David J. Skorton that it is not a luxury. Just as a working knowledge of math is applied to budget out your living expenses the study of the arts exercise imagination skills to help you design a way of life.

3) On a deeply personal level the speech validated my existence and hits many points that I would hope stirs an awareness for people who were conditioned without. I grew up in a suburban community, for example, that was recently named in BusinessWeek’s 2nd annual Best Places To Raise Your Kids this year. While their achievements in school performance, family income, crime rates, air quality, and diversity helped Arcadia, CA to make the grade I sometimes wonder if that same criterion would also reflect my hometown as a best place to raise minds. I know that in my days growing up there through the 80’s and into the mid-90’s, it most certainly would not have passed as what I was perceived to be doing was trying to be an entertainer–a career short on the respect and financial security end of the stick if I would have instead chosen to become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, or an engineer. The idea of entertainment went against my development and probably even stunted it; many in the community were intensely marketed by this–a force with which the school and family systems were not able to contend–and not really given a chance to think on their own let alone seek it. My biographical account of what people had whispered or secretly considered (including my mother) of my path would fit along with Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave and goes down as an unfortunate consequence of entertainment marketing.

Stepping out from this cave, as it were, I can sympathize with entertainers or wannabe’s who are all “up about it.” As an artist I know what role I have chosen to play–a vital role pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory knows extremely well. And now for his welcome address, follow the blog here.