Guest
For
Thursday April 14,
2005
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JOSEPH EGER
CONDUCTOR FOR
UNITED NATIONS
&
Author:
Einstein’s Violin:
A
Conductor’s Notes on Music,
Physics, and Social Change
www.symphonyun.org
suneger@bellsouth.net
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More About: JOE
EGER and "Einsteins Violin"
ABOUT MAESTRO EGER
Maestro Joseph Eger is Music Director/Conductor of the Symphony for
United Nations (SUN) in New York and Florida, and Guest Conductor for
Life in Beijing, China. In addition to countless guest conducting
engagements around the world, Maestro Eger has been active in the
movie industry and in commercial radio and television.
Keith Emerson
of
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
with Maestro Eger
Eger toured through the U.S. and internationally
as a solo concert artist on the French horn and was called "the
greatest French horn player alive" by the New York Times. In addition
to numerous world class recordings, Eger has initiated city-wide
festivals and free concerts in New York City, winning two NYC Mayoral
Awards and the prestigious "Eleanor Roosevelt Man of Vision Award".
Maestro Eger continues to work
tirelessly to promote world peace and understanding through an
appreciation for other cultures. SUN is deeply concerned with human
rights and is active against war, poverty, and the deterioration of
the environment.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tarcher/Penguin
publishers set March 17, 2005
release date for new book by SUN Founder
Einstein’s Violin:
A Conductor’s Notes on Music,
Physics, and Social Change
by Joseph
Eger, founder and musical director of
the Symphony for United Nations (SUN)
|
To read about the book, including an excerpt,
scroll below the book jacket cover. |
|
FROM THE BOOK JACKET
Joseph Eger’s life
is a testimony to the power of music. Among the most widely traveled
and venerated classical conductors of his generation, Eger has
discovered within music a universal language that not only unites
people across cultures but also suggests something about the physical
rules of life itself.
In Einstein’s Violin: A Conductor’s Notes on Music, Physics, and
Social Change (Tarcher/Penguin hardcover: March 17, 2005), the
internationally renowned conductor looks back on more than half a
century of music making and what it has taught him about individuals,
the world, and the very nature of reality.
“For me,” writes Eger, “music, physics, and social concerns are
intertwined tightly together like a Navajo rug. This book is woven
from these three threads into patterns illuminating the effects of
each on the other.” Eger shares the lessons learned from his
70-year-long romance with music:
•
The symphony orchestra as a model both for society and for the entire
universe.
• Music as a force for change across enemy lines in the Middle East.
• Classical music as a bridge between peoples through fusion concerts
with musicians
such as Keith Emerson (Emerson, Lake & Palmer) and John Lennon, and
through
performances at venues such as Harlem’s Apollo Theatre.
• The sources of music, the unifying language of the universe, found
in the ancient
music of the Hebrews, Egyptians, ancient Chinese, and the schools
of Pythagoras.
• Music’s uncanny similarity in design to “string theory” so popular
in today’s
theoretical physics. Instead of just using music as a means of
illustrating the concepts
of string theory, perhaps the universe itself is music, as it
expands and contracts like
the waves emanating from a plucked guitar string.
• As well as Eger’s intimate portraits of such celebrated figures as
Leonard Bernstein,
David Bohm, Albert Einstein, Queen Noor al Hussein, and, above all,
Beethoven.
Einstein’s Violin is an astounding survey of music’s tremendous
power—from cultures using it to improve harvests, cure the outbursts
of the mentally ill, and worship God; to Eger’s personal experiences
of bridging nations; to its far-reaching implications for twenty-first
century physicists.
"Einstein's
Violin is an extraordinary -- and richly entertaining -- look at
how music reveals the inner workings of our world. Maestro Joseph
Eger, one of the pioneering classical conductors of the twentieth
century, shows how music, science, and social issues are intimately
connected -- and how the structure of music unites each. Whether you
are interested in classical or other forms of music, leading-edge
quantum physics, or the social issues facing our warring planet,
Einstein's Violin will teach you to look at each in a different
way -- indeed because it is the same."
MARVIN
HAMLISH
AN
EXCERPT FROM EINSTEIN’S VIOLIN
Music Opens the Door
Here I must give some background. Shortly after a series of my
articles on Middle East peace appeared across the country, the Arab
American Cultural Foundation, realizing that I was not an inveterate
Arab hater, asked me to visit Lebanon to meet with the most popular
musical star in the Arab worlds and, if I found her worthy, bring her
to the U.S. for a tour. Even the Israelis enjoyed her music. The
foundation sent me to Beirut, Lebanon, where I met the famous singer
Fayrouz.
After hearing her music, I invited her to the States. She readily
agreed, and I subsequently became her music director for sold-out
concerts at Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and in the United Nations.
At the UN, her troupe of seventy dancers and singers joined my
Symphony for United Nations orchestra in musical exchanges and
performances. For that performance, I arranged, with difficulty (the
Arabic musical scale is different from ours), the works in which our
two groups collaborated. The international audience of diplomats, UN
personnel, and invited VIPs applauded enthusiastically, for was not
that what the UN was about? The Arab delegates beamed with pride.
Now
let us fast-forward to the Jordanian military hut.
Seeing that we were acquainted with Fayrouz’s music, the soldier
dropped his gun to the table, perked up, and in halting English, “You…like…Fayrouz?”
We
nodded our heads, yes.
The
soldier had no idea I actually knew Fayrouz and had been her music
director. It was enough that we liked her music. His face became
wreathed in smiles. To put it in American vernacular, we immediately
became soul brothers.
When the commander returned to the hut, the soldier spoke to him in
Arabic, and now his formerly sour face was also transformed. He became
friendly and cooperative, though he regretfully informed us that he
could not reach an official in the palace and so had no authorization
to let us continue that day.
But
the moral of the story is clear; music had come to the rescue with its
powers to cross the artificial barriers that keep peoples apart.
# # #
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 |
|
|
Einstein's Violin
|
|
|
A Conductor's
Notes on Music, Physics, and Social Change
Joseph Eger - Author |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Joseph Eger's
life is a testimony to the power of music. Among the most
venerated classical conductors of his generation,
Eger has discovered within music a
universal language that not only unites people across cultures
but also suggests something about the physical rules of life
itself.
In
Einstein's Violin, Eger
distills more than half a century of personal experience and
what it has taught him about how music is uncannily similar in
its design to the concepts of "string theory" that have become
overwhelming popular in today's theoretical physics.
Eger deals with how music relates
not only to the physical world but to the social one as well. He
was among the first classical performers to see music as a force
for change, leading him to cross enemy lines in the Middle East,
to perform fusion concerts with rock stars including John
Lennon, and to become a voice for social advocacy from the
hearing rooms of the House Un-American Activities Committee to
the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater.
Eger's life is a tour through the music
and science of the twentieth century. In
Einstein's Violin, readers
encounter intimate portraits of prominent figures such as
Leonard Bernstein, David Bohm, and Albert Einstein.
Eger also probes the origins of ancient
music in the hands of the Hebrews, Egyptians, Hindus, ancient
Chinese, and the schools of Pythagoras to plumb the sources of
this unifying language of the universe.
|
________________________________________________________________________
Thursday
April 14, 2005
/ 10:30 - 11:30 AM / (NYC Time)
Channel 34 of the
Time/Warner &Channel 107 of the RCN
Cable Television Systems in Manhattan, New York.
The Program can
now be viewed on the internet at the time of cable casting at:
www.mnn.org
NOTE: You must adjust viewing to
reflect NYC time & click on channel 34 at site
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
