At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I am Quint Smits, Longitude fellow from Tilburg University, and today I will be presenting a sound byte by Jon Kimura Parker, a Canadian pianist and professor at the Rice University Shepherd School of Music, and he will be speaking to us about one of the biggest turning points in his life. It’s quite a wholesome story; have a listen.

In 1995, I was still living in New York. That was a sort of time when I was out of school, performing a lot, travelling the world a lot. There was a war in Bosnia, and there was a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio. It was called the Dayton Peace Treaty. It was signed in early mid-December of 1995. So that’s part of the backstory.

There was a man that I had met once, he was on the board of an orchestra that I played with somewhere, and I’d talked to him at a reception, and I barely knew the guy. He was the vice president of an American relief organization based in Connecticut called Americares. He called me up a couple of days before Christmas and he reintroduced himself and told me about the company. He said they had gone into Bosnia 35 times during the war, delivering food, medicine, and clothing. Now that the peace treaty had been signed, the Sarajevo Philharmonic, an orchestra that had disbanded for a couple of years because of the war, had announced they were going to play a New Year’s eve concert to celebrate the new peace. And Americares was doing an airlift over New Year’s Eve, and so they apparently contacted the orchestra and said, “We would like to bring in, as a symbolic gesture, a soloist for your concert.” And he said to me, then, he says, “And we think you’d be the perfect guy.”

I was 35 years old, I was single, and I didn’t have any particular reason to say no, except it sounded vaguely terrifying, but he said “We’re good at being safe.” So, I agreed. I mean, I thought about it for two days, and I agreed. So, a couple of days after Christmas, we flew over and it was exciting for me because I’m not a daredevil person at all, with C-130 military transport planes and all this stuff. We arrived in Sarajevo. We were taken to the hotel, and everything was chaotic. We had a rehearsal, and I played a Beethoven Emperor Piano Concerto with the Sarajevo Philharmonic on New Year’s Eve. CNN was there. I mean there was tons of media. I met all these media people at a media party. Anyway, we played the concert and this very elderly lady, Bosnian woman, came backstage afterwards, and she was looking for me. She didn’t speak any English, so she found our translator, and the official translator came over with this lady and said, “She wants to tell you something.” And I said, “What?” And this lady said, “During the slow movement of the concerto,” (And this is a very, very beautiful nocturne like slow movement, incredibly atmospheric and contemplative in a special sort of way. It was one of Beethoven’s most beautiful moments) and she said that during that movement, she realized that a couple of minutes had gone by and she had actually realized that she had not been thinking about the war, like it had actually gone out of her head. And she just wanted me to know, and she said just, “Thank you,” and that was it. And I was just sort of stunned, and it took me literally a couple of days to process that, but I thought that really is why I would want to be a musician. It’s not that I would want to be technically the best player there ever was. I mean, I always want to improve myself, I always want to aspire to that high standard, but that isn’t at the end of the day why anybody should be a musician. You should be a musician because it affects people very directly. People have emotional responses to music that they don’t actually always understand. And that was a turning point, because at that point I was going through a state of, you know, kind of analysis and self-criticism and like, “Am I really good enough to be doing this?” and all that. And it just didn’t seem relevant anymore. It just didn’t matter. I thought, “That’s not the point.” If I’m so lucky that I have a chance to play a concert and people are actually going to have a response like that, then obviously that’s a special circumstance, but that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, and that became a very big turning point, without question.

Quint Smits, Longitude fellow, Tilburg University: