Epilogue

Case Study: Art and business for European identity: Illustrating meaningful evolutions in business through classical masterpieces of music

Cheryl Kerr
Faculty of Education, Centre for Creative Learning, Queensland University of Technology, Cleveland QLD, Australia

Lotte Darsø
The Creative Alliance, Learning Lab Denmark, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, Copenhagen, Denmark

PP: 588 - 592

Abstract

We end this special issue with a case study (Darsø 2004) of how Miha Pogacnik, virtuoso violinist and cultural ambassador of Slovenia, works to inspire and engage artful behaviour. Miha's interpretations of musical masterpieces illuminate universal human archetypes, which are profoundly meaningful to individuals as well as to organisations.

Music reaches of all the arts the most, the deepest into our experience. Miha Pogacnik

At a time when pressures for change are at their highest, from globalisation, new technologies, product and process innovations, successful business leaders need to be at their creative best just to survive. Creativity is the hallmark of art, and artists are increasingly a source of inspiration for entrepreneurs world-wide.

Miha Pogacnik's unique contribution stems from this new consciousness, the need for creativity, imagination and perfection in business. Time after time, his input in countless business conferences has been magnificent, unexpected and unique. Through music and art, Miha Pogacnik ignites a new force in us, the power of rising above our old selves in perceiving problems and opportunities in an entirely new light, and thus striking in new directions. Miha is truly at the leading edge of business as we move towards the 21^st Century. Marcello Palazzi, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Progressio Foundation Rotterdam, The Netherlands (Balough 1996)

Miha Pogacnik saw the potential of Art & Business long before anyone else and has worked in the field for more than 20 years. Today Miha Pogacnik[i] uses his violin to decompose and play classical masterpieces when doing his presentations around the world as a business consultant with, among others, ABN AMRO Bank, General Electric, JP Morgan, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, LEGO, Mitsubishi, Nike, Nokia, Novartis, Procter & Gamble, Shell, Volvo, World Bank, World Economic Forum, and many more.

[i] www.miha.mihavision.com

Keywords

deep reflection, transformation, new capabilities

Article Text

The ‘Call'

How did Miha Pogacnik happen to pick such an unusual career? When Miha was growing up in the republic of Yugoslavia (today Slovenia), he wanted to become a violinist. After completing his studies in Germany, he went to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar but, after an initial career as a soloist, he soon realized that he did not really want to pursue this further in the traditional way. He felt the limitations established concert life imposed on artists who wanted to respond to the monumental changes of the 80s. Instead he felt a strong interest for social change. Destiny led him to work with handicapped children, where his challenge was to teach them how to listen. He learned to engage their attention in various ways, always with the goal of helping the participants become at one with the process unfolding in music.

IDRIART

Around 1980, Miha Pogacnik started the IDRIART movement (Initiative for the Development of Intercultural & Interdisciplinary Relations through the Arts), and the following year 1200 people gathered at a festival in Chartres, France. Since then about 170 festivals have been held in Central Europe, Russia, Estonia, East Germany, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand, Mongolia, Tibet, and since 1984, annually in Bled, Slovenia and later at castle Borl, Ptuj.

From the beginning, IDRIART concerts have striven to realize ‘the spiritual meaning of the unity of art, science and religion'. (Tawil, Piene & Henning 1996: 21)

IDRIART may be said to have not a single goal but a number of equally important goals. There is, of course, the wish to bring forward the spiritual side of music and art as a healing force so particularly needed by our times and as a moral force for raised consciousness applicable to all areas of life. Then there is the desire to bring together people of many diverse nationalities in an atmosphere of artistic sharing, thereby transcending political boundaries. (Balough 1996: 25)

With IDRIART, we have set ourselves the goal to work in such a way, that everybody involved participates inwardly so intensely, that new ‘vistas' may open for many in a lucky moment, and not just for the performer... When artists and all participants take on the responsible role of performer, the festival itself becomes a work of art. (Balough 1996: 25)

In 1990, a Dutch consultant went to an IDRIART festival to give a lecture on organizational development, and after seeing Miha Pogacnik in action, said to him: ‘Do you realize that what you are actually doing is organizational development?' Miha realized that this was his ‘call' and his main work since then has been in the field of management, business and organizational consulting.

The Art of Listening

It is difficult to capture in words what Miha Pogacnik is actually trying to do with his violin and his colourful illustrations of classical music. Among other things, he wants to show people the art of listening. People are good talkers, but bad listeners, he says. Miha therefore tries to create a space where listening becomes possible. Most people's minds are so full of material that the created space quickly fills up with their own thoughts and images, and that is not the idea. The idea is to completely open up and to perceive the music, to become one with the process. Through that experience we can awaken and rediscover our senses in such a way that we sense the real quality of what it is to be human. We are suddenly totally present with a different intensity and in an awake state of mind. The music is actually a ‘detour' to take us to that state, because the classical masterpieces of music are so beautiful that we are easily enticed into this learning space. We can, indeed, learn a lot from the classical masterpieces. Miha always arrives very well prepared for a business session. He usually has a meeting or a long telephone conversation with the client about the topic and aim of the session before he selects a piece of music that he thinks will fit the purpose. Then he makes a sketch:

This is my sketch for Brahms violin concert of first movement I did with London Business Forum last March. I drew how the individual journey of the hero, or of a leader, is actually the opening statement. Here is where we are and this is the heavens we want to get to. Everybody would like to go directly there, but you realize that the music must make this painful, marvelous way down below the threshold into another reality and actually die. And then start anew in this very turbulent way. And then crossing the threshold again in a very dangerous moment of cadenza, the ‘supreme trial' of the hero's journey. Then entering the ‘coda', the final statement which is truly heavenly for those who know the first movement of Brahms violin concert.[2]

In the summer of 2003, on one of the last days of the Arts & Business conference at Castle Borl, Slovenia, Miha played the Brahms sonata in Dminor together with Diana Baker on piano. The theme was finding the ‘Coda' in music - and in life. Coda is defined as ‘the final meaning'. He took us, the 80 participants, on a learning journey about death and beyond, about transformation in the dreamland, about life crisis and resolve - and most of all he taught us to listen, not only to the music itself, but rather to the inner meaning, which is the real music. Even though he dissected the musical masterpiece the ‘Miha way'[3] in order to explain the pulse, the breath and the heart of it, the music grew incredibly intensely on us; it went straight to our hearts. When he and Diana finally played through the whole first movement, the atmosphere of the Knights' Hall was truly heavenly. When they finished, there was no applause, but a breathless silence, a holding of the sacred space, which lasted forever and which was a silence so completely full that nobody wanted to break it. Quietly people got up and hugged each other with tears in their eyes. Outside the hall, people stood silently in small groups, hugged each other and wept, and for the rest of the day peoples' eyes had a very serene and contemplative look.

Miha's own words regarding this masterpiece being truly heavenly were an obvious understatement. According to Miha, masterpieces always illustrate meaningful evolutions through archetypes which can reflect back lived experience of one's own life - and even not yet lived experience of the future arising after the masterpiece. Every person who listens and understands the archetypes of the masterpiece will recognize some spot where they will say, ‘Aha, here I am in my life' or ‘Aha, that's where we are with our organization'. Miha believes that experiences like that can gradually call forth new capabilities in people. People learn to see and listen in new ways, which may enable them to suddenly see complicated social constellations in new ways and also to find new ways to resolve them.

When Miha Pogacnik performs and interacts with people, his intention is to develop their existing ‘capabilities' through music, and to grow new capabilities (‘organs') such as sharpening the senses, especially the art of listening, but also the ability to focus and to be part of the process. His aim is to initiate a continuous inner transformation by sending an arrow of music into the ‘solar plexus of learning'. Miha's second aim is to unite people across cultures (as in the many Idriart festivals) through great masterpieces of music.

Aspects of Learning

There are three main aspects of learning in Miha's master classes of classical music, which we will examine more closely: the development and sharpening of the senses; music as a different language for understanding life; and the creation of connectedness across disciplines and cultures.

Regarding the sharpening of the senses, the first step is to wake up the senses, because they are both over-stimulated by noise pollution and the constant sounds of modern society and at the same time under-stimulated by lack of pauses, silent moments and focus. The next step is to sharpen the senses by differentiating the different parts and voices of the music. In my interview with Miha I asked him to expand on the meaning of the senses, and he literally did, when he explained that according to the insights of Rudolf Steiner, who has influenced Miha's thinking throughout his life, there are 12 senses[4], not only 5. According to Steiner, tone lies at the foundation of everything in the physical world[5].

The secret of all great music is that it is the carrier of ideas which embrace all of humankind. Through trained listening the process of this perception can be raised to consciousness and applied in other areas of life. Music is the only art form, which fully embraces the human condition through the visceral or body element (rhythm), heart and soul (harmony), and spirit or intellect (melody) and also is the only art form whose foundation lies in the spiritual rather than the physical world. von Lange (1996: 15)

This explanation can help us understand the first two aspects of Miha's mission and the plausible connection between them. Sharpening our senses, especially by listening to music, can set off inner journeys of reflection which helps us make sense of our lives. As for music being an archetypal language, interesting research is being done on the effects of music on cognitive development. In an interview, Paul Robertson[6] from the Medici Quartet says:

Another important aspect is the role of music in education and learning. We are now beginning to understand and appreciate the neurology of the musical response and its fundamental place as a basic building block that underlies complex cognitive development. Through this work, it is possible to appreciate the role of the arts, and music in particular. Because of its evolutionary history and its anatomical significance within the brain, musical response and the development of musical skill and musical language has a key role in developing other skills for us.

It is not the focus of this text to investigate this claim, but only to point out that music apparently has abundant potential (Campbell 2001).

Regarding the third aspect of learning it is connected to the other two, the main idea being to bring cultures together by grounding conversations in art perception. Art can educate us in such a way that we are able to enter into conversation on a deeper level than we normally do, and the artistic experience creates strong relationships and a feeling of connectedness. The kind of bonding that took place between the participants of the Brahms sonata described above transcends every aspect of separation and enables people to hug and truly feel love even for total strangers, because this shared experience takes us to a different level - to the universal quality of being human. The idea of IDRIART is strongly grounded, but Miha's mission does not stop here. His ‘call of the times' is Art and Business for European Identity.

‘Practical Utopia'

The vision is to identify and examine the most creative artistic individuals of the past 1000 years (or more) in order to discover the ‘forming' principles of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, Rembrandt, Gaudi, etc. and through that process recreate our European identity for all of European society, including politics and business. A different and grounded European management style is needed for the future and this must be a very deep and meaningful co-creation between Arts and Business. Miha calls this project for ‘practical Utopia'.

We are searching to create context in society, a context where art would provide a space in which problems would be dealt with. And of course, it would be important to create this experimental inspirational space in the middle of corporate and organizational development and reality. The art would get a chance to renew itself in its process, which means that artists will learn to look at what they do in a new way. So artists would grow and of course, our hosts, who will discover that the process of immersing oneself into artistic activities would help them to grow new organs, new capacities to deal with the difficult future that is coming. We do not get equipped for leadership at conventional business schools or any other education as they are today. Artists should be where the most important decisions are made. And the artist is the one who is making the decisions - in other words, the artist within. So every human being can in some way be awakened to become an artist in a particular way[7].

[2] Interview with Miha Pogacnik, Borl, Slovenia, June 2002.

[3] Miha Pogacnik plays selected pieces (‘dissects') of the whole in order to illustrate and demonstrate certain features and developments.

[4] According to Steiner these are classified in three main inclinations: willing (the will to act and do), feeling (feeling perception) and thinking (finding meaning). Willing involves touch (to be versus not to be), life (growth versus decay), movement (speed versus form) and balance (deviation versus width). Feeling concerns smell (pure versus impure), taste (genuine versus false), sight (light versus darkness) and warmth (sympathy versus antipathy). Thinking includes hearing (harmony versus dissonance), word-language (clarity versus cover up), thought (doubt versus truth), and the sense of I (confidence versus strangeness).

[5] Ibid.

[6] www.musicmindspirit.org/interview.htm

[7] Interview with Miha Pogacnik, Borl, Slovenia, June 2002.

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