Thursday, August 25, 2011

Mercury Manifesto: Commonwealth Edison, EPA, and the Poisoning of Chicago

The press release caught my eye.

“The US Environmental Protection Agency will hold a public hearing on May 24, 2011 in Chicago on the proposed national standards for mercury pollution from power plants.

“New power plant mercury and air toxics standards would require many power plants to install pollution control technologies to cut harmful emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and acid gases."

I couldn’t overlook this for a bunch of reasons.

First, I knew that it doesn’t take much mercury to poison a person.

Second, it’s hard to fathom quantities at the extreme ends of the measurement spectrum, given that the universe is as small as quarks in the particles that make up an atom of matter and as big as the space needed to fit billions of galaxies with plenty of room left over.

Third, as a high school science teacher, I have used EPA statistics on mercury poisoning as a means to teach the methods for putting into proper perspective what amounts to extremely large and extremely small quantities of things.

Midwest Generation Crawford Station coal burning power plant on Pulaski in the Little Village neighborhood.  <br><i>John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative</i>Midwest Generation Crawford Station on Pulaski, Little Village neighborhood

Fourth, I have known that two of Illinois’ oldest and dirtiest coal-fired electrical generating plants, Fisk and Crawford, are within the city limits of Chicago where I have worked for over four years.

It’s been widely publicized just how dirty these plants are. For instance, Fisk and Crawford, together, cost neighboring communities $127 million per year in hidden health damages, according to a report released in October, 2010 by the Environmental Law and Policy Center. The Clean Air Task Force found that air pollution from these two plants causes more than 40 deaths, 720 asthma attacks, and 66 heart attacks annually.

Finally, I realized that the hearing was just a brisk walk from the school where I teach, at the Crowne Plaza Chicago Metro, located at 733 West Madison Street in downtown Chicago.

Midwest Generation Fisk Station coal burning power plant in the Pilsen neighborhood.  <br><i>John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative</i> Fisk, located in the Pilson neighborhood, and the downtown Chicago skyline

So never mind that the hearing was to be held right in the middle of my proctoring final exams. I felt I had to show up. And I knew exactly what I would be taking to the hearing if I was allowed to speak: classroom lesson demos of my mercury unit conversions.

epa

Though a typical lumbering governmental bureaucracy, the EPA holds a tenuous place in national public affairs. Mandated to protect the health interests of citizens when they're faced with potential environmental hazards caused by industry, it’s been buffeted back and forth by bureaucrats who occupy both sides of the isle. Instituted by the most quintessentially Republican president, Richard Nixon, in 1970 (wait, Ronald Reagan holds that distinction), it’s been Republicans who lately have been out to emasculate its ability to enforce such things as the Clean Air Act. The EPA is bad for industry profits, held dear in the hearts of the many Republican owners of the means of production.

But the EPA is a good cop who, like a Boy Scout helping an old lady cross the street, might get a laugh from this Joe Citizen whose health they are mandated to protect. Even so, getting into the queue to talk to the EPA folks at the hearing took some back and forth with its handlers.

“The public may register to speak at a specific time at a hearing by contacting Pamela Garrett at garrett.pamela@epa.gov or registering in person on the day of a hearing. EPA also will accept written comments on the proposed standards until July 5, 2011. EPA will finalize the rule by November 2011.”

Pamela G. Garrett, US EPA, Research Triangle Park, NC 27711
Dear Ms. Garrert:

Please give me a 5 minute slot sometime after 2 pm to speak at the Hearing regarding mercury pollution.


Dear Mr. DePrez:

Atlanta
is the only hearing location that has open slots. You did not mention which location, Atlanta, Chicago, or Philadelphia.

If you would like to show up at Chicago the team will try their best to work you in to speak. They are willing to cut into the lunch and dinner hour and possibly go beyond the 8:00 conclusion to give everyone a chance to speak. If you decide to try to be worked in, I need to know in order to have a list for the team, and you will need to plan on possibly being there for several hours to be worked in. Please let me know as soon as possible if you think you will be in attendance.

Dear Ms. Garrett:

Chicago, sorry. Work me in. I would need an overhead projector to make my points. It would take 2 minutes.

Dear Mr. DePrez:


You are on the wait list. Would you provide me with your address and phone number for our records? Thank you.

The smoke stack of the Fisk Generating plant, a coal powered power plant, is located in an urban setting near Dvorak Park in the Pilsen the neighborhood.  <br><i>Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative<br></i>  Midwest Generation Fisk Station in the Little Village neighborhood

The walk downtown was on a brilliantly sunny day in May, and it was hard to think that such pristine air was passively aggressive in its pernicious program to poison me with mercury. But the horror stories come from the EPA itself.

A concentration of 0.0005 mg (milligrams)/L (liter) of mercury is lethal. (That's five ten- thousandths of a milligram. There are 1000 mg in a gram and about 16 grams in an ounce.)


For fetuses, infants, and children, the primary health effect of mercury is impaired neurological development.


Symptoms include: tremor, emotional change, insomnia, neuro- muscular changes, headaches, disturbances in sensations, changes in nerve response, performance deficits on tests of cognitive function.

Chicago

Smoke stack of the Midwest Generation Crawford Station coal burning power plant on Pulaski in the Little Village neighborhood.  <br><i>John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative</i>

Such grim reaper statistics couldn’t put a pall on the frolic by the “baby buggy brigade” of moms with their kids in strollers protesting outside the hearing. I reminded myself that humor is a great way to habilitate the horror that we often end up facing as we navigate the uncertainties of life. I went in and started bugging the folks at the folding tables to get me onto the list of presenters. “We’ll try to work you in,” they said. “Sign up here.”

No they didn’t have an overhead transparency projector. Sigh. Underfunded education can’t give every teacher access to a laptop computer and projector, which the EPA had set up for presenters. So I had to find a way to photocopy my calculations to just hand the EPA guys if I got a chance. The hotel clerk was great helping me out.

The hall was packed. Kids were everywhere. Environmental groups sure knew that kids in costumes carried a rhetorical advantage. Mardi Gras at the Mercury Muck Musings. Electric utility industry reps were noticeably absent. But I got in! And it was just an hour later.

The four panelists looked bored. I was paired with a presenter who discussed the health statistics for possible mercury-induced ailments at a local city free health clinic. When it was my turn, I handed the four EPA panelists a set of calculations. They smiled wanly.

img071

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for a chance to share with you how I teach my science students to make sense of statistics.

“In this case, it’s you guys who give the lethal dosage of mercury, which is 0.0005 mg/L. And here’s the stated annual amount of mercury in pounds, 1,700, that the the seven Illinois Com Ed plants produce as a byproduct of burning coal.

“We fight a losing battle converting kids to metric, but metric is the rule. So, in milligrams, it looks like the plants annually put out 3,700,000,000 mg of mercury (Hg is the chemical symbol).

“We will now merge the milligrams to the toxicity concentration of mercury. We will solve for x through cross multiplication and canceling units so we can scale up to the number of liters this much mercury would pollute to human toxicity if it were somehow allowed to diffuse to that level of concentration in the blood of a human.

“We must follow the significant figures rules for handling measured amounts. We must also be sure that it’s set up to cancel units of measure so the answer is simply in liters. Notice the use of scientific notation so that we’re not having to write out long, unwieldy numbers.

“So the answer is 1 x 1013 liters. It’s hard to visualize that much water, so let’s convert it to gallons. A liter is the equivalent of 0.25 gallons or 2.5 x 10-1 gallons. Cancelling liters and converting to standard notation, yes, it’s 3,000,000,000,000 or 3 trillion gallons.

img072

“But here’s the clincher. How does one fathom that much water? It’s kinda hard. So lets imagine how much of Lake Michigan this much water would fill.

“Lake Michigan is one of the Great Lakes and is right next to Chicago. It’s filled with 1.3 x 1015 gallons of fresh water. The water that could be polluted by Com Ed’s annual pooping of mercury is 3 x 1012 gallons. That’s 0.2% of Lake Michigan, or two tenths of one percent.

“Aw, what’s so bad about that? Doesn’t seem like much, but wait. The great Lakes are the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. So let’s do one last calculation. How many years would it take, at the rate of Com’s Ed’s polluting, and imagining that all of it ended up in the lake fully diluted, to raise the level of concentration to human toxicity?

“Answer: 500 years. Oh, the potential power that a couple of smoke stacks command!” Some nervous laughter broke out in the audience.

Fisk coal-fired electrical generating plant, Chicago

I excused myself politely at that point, thanking the panel, which returned the favor. At the break, I was surrounded by moms in funny costumes who wanted to know more about my programs with the kids. One mom, who home schools her kids, asked me for copies of any materials I might offer for teaching simple unit conversion and cancellation methods.

I shared with them how, ironically, I had noticed for years, when living 50 miles west of Chicago, the daily “coal train” of 100% hopper cars filled to the brim with Wyoming coal that passed through Geneva near my home, bound for Fisk and Crawford.

“I felt grateful for NOT living in Chicago at the time,” I said sadly. “Just last week, like the proverbial insult to injury, I counted 147 cars in the train when stopped at an intersection in Chicago on my way home."

So it was good to get all that off my chest in front of an appreciative audience, fellow citizens exposed to silent, inconspicuous, and insidious particles of death.

Then it was “back to the mines” filled with final exams to grade.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Rambles on the Rocks: Terror and Triumph in the Goddard Quadrangle

Mt. Goddard 1South face of Mt. Goddard G. K. Gilbert, 1904

One of the most isolated places in the world is in proximity to some of the densest populations in the world in metropolitan California. Located, technically, in Fresno County, California, its canyons and peaks, part of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, defy the imagination. I’d like to record a few recollections of my saunters through this veritable terre incognito.

Maps made of the area date back to the first surveys by William H. Brewer and Josiah Whitney of the California Geological Survey in the 1860’s. Hikers and climbers use modern descendents of these first maps, some of which are configured into 15’ x 15’ quadrangles and show contours, trails, and lakes, peaks, and valleys. For years I have called the aforementioned place, simply, the Goddard Quadrangle.

img070Evolution Valley that drains north into South Fork San Joaquin River; Mt. Goddard at extreme lower left; Sierra Nevada crest outlined in stark red from NW to SE

Titles of notoriety befitting the historical era of its original mapping dot the rugged watershed that the “quad” illustrates. Most names were given by Theodore S. Solomons in 1895 on an expedition for a route from Yosemite Valley to the Kings River Canyon. Included are Mts. Darwin, discoverer of natural selection, Huxley, Darwin’s evolutionary theory bulldog, Wallace, codiscoverer of natural selection, Lamarck, an evolutionary theory predecessor, industrialist Spencer, “social Darwinist” profaner of the theory, and Emerson, transcendentalist. Mt. Goddard itself is named after civil engineer George Henry Goddard, who surveyed the Sierra Nevada during the 1850’s. All of them are over 13,000 feet in elevation. Evolution Valley forms a swath of descent to forested parts. A first professor of geology at fledgling University of California, LeConte, lends his name to another canyon.

john-muir1

In his first trip through the area in 1873, chronicled in John of the Mountains, pioneering Sierra explorer John Muir journaled about his passage up Evolution Basin to the high peaks on the crest. “The first tributary of any size is a bright active stream coming down in a foamy cascade of one thousand feet,” he wrote. “…had a glorious view of the Owens River and Valley, and of the Sierra, one broad field of peaks upon no one of which can the eye rest. They are gothic near the axis, a mass of ice-sculpture. Mount Emerson is imposing with its evenly balanced crest and far-reaching snowy wings.” Muir then describes the party’s encampment in the South Fork of the San Joaquin River canyon. “Up early and went with Clark to a point on the divide to view the landscape and plan the route. The view is awful- a vast wilderness of rocks and canyons. Clark groaned and went home.”

Mt. Goddard 2 North aspect of the Goddard Divide; Wanda Lake on left; Mt. Goddard on right

I too have crisscrossed this region of gargantuan granite grandiosity many times over the years. For instance, I hiked over Muir Pass on my way from Giant Forest to Yosemite. I scrambled off trail up Goddard Canyon through exhaustively boulder-strewn Davis Lakes Basin to the lakes named after Muir’s daughters Wanda and Helen. I approached the ungodly, remote Enchanted Gorge from its gateway summits, a pair of metamorphosed volcanic rhyolite peaks named after mythological creatures from Homer's Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis. I attempted once to gaze down Spanish Peak, located in the “quad” kitty-corner to Goddard, to the stream bed below where the Middle and South Forks of the Kings River meet, and would have succeeded in visibly penetrating the view for its full 8,000 foot drop, 3,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon, were it not for the now famous smog generated by 28 million vehicles in a state of 35 million, or 0.8 vehicles per person. But the most memorable was a scramble to the top of the quadrangle’s namesake, Mt. Goddard, first climbed by Lilbourne Winchell and Louis Davis in 1879. It’s set off west of the Sierra crest and is therefore isolated at 13,568 feet in the middle of it all.

It might be interesting to note that all my trips into the region have been solo except this one. A fair lady accompanied me on her first “Fifty Miler” in the mountains. She declined, however, to scale the summit with me, which was the primary objective of that trip. The following is a description of the climb, made alone, and written in 1981.

Mt Goddard f w Wanda Lake

“Picking the instruments of survival out of my backpack and tossing them into a rucksack, I marked off to myself, 60/40 parka and first aid kit, yes, granola bars, water bottle, bible, yes, yes, and yes… and strolled away from my partner’s tented encampment in the talus.

“The morning crispness breathed a kind of languid mien and framed expectant heart and soul with excitement spiked with dread. I trudged toward the mountain of tortured rock that catapulted another 2,300 feet into the sky. I eyed my objective. Separated from the spine of the Sierra proper, Mt. Goddard rose up in stark solitude, an apex down which some of the deepest creek canyons in the world are gouged. The Goddard quad map indicates how escaping snowmelt spills toward the south up to a total vertical distance of 11,000 feet to the canyon bottoms along the incredible Middle Fork of the Kings River.

“I bounded back and forth across the many streamlets that laced together the glacial runoff coming down from old and worn glacial icepack. The permanent ice rested on a nearly vertical slope and was haphazardly broken by the season’s heat and smudged by markings made when debris fell out of crevasses above it and came tumbling down the mountainside. Its appearance was like an old and tattered shawl blanketing the lap of a woman sitting with long, gray skirts, knees spread, and shawl spilling down pleats to languish at the hemline. Water gurgled under the steep wave of talus that had been knocked down by the expansions and contractions of the ice above.

“I parceled out a continuous litany of mini-goals, looking only to the one ahead, trying to suppress the merciless compacted collection that attempted to imprint itself onto my struggle. I scouted for some of the plants listed by Muir when he came through the area in 1873, Ivesia, Plemonium, and yellow Compositae. “I found larkspurs, columbine, Spiraea, and Dodecatheon,” he had written.

Starr's Route 12,200

“Before me was a wall of rock hewn by erosion into vertical slabs that looked like pickets on a fence. I contemplated each move of extended, clasping appendage before feeling confident that a hold would contribute to my ascent. I felt grateful for each secure grasp on colorful crustose lichen-splotched granite in the vertical tumult of rock. I traced the toothy ridge carefully, following its disheveled sharpness south and around to the west to where it came brawling together with the great hulk of the mountain’s north face. Here, the granite splinters of the Goddard Divide reminded me of shark’s teeth ready to snap up into surprised flesh, sending me off balance and tumbling down into the gut of the range where I would be ground apart by gizzard talus and digested by enzymatic glacier waters a thousand feet below.

“SWOOSH! A few feet before my astonished face a falcon, no, two falcons, raced by, chasing each other around the top of the mountain. Effortless, even at 13,000 feet, these wedges of confident freedom were suddenly gone, having drilled away a thousand feet of altitude in seconds. Welcome to the island in the sky.

“Piles of dark gray cumulus began to assemble on the western slopes of the range. But I tried not to notice, thinking I’d be soon up and off the summit, heading back to the lady of the canyon down below. I was soon on top and attempted to absorb, in Muir’s words, “glorious” and, at the same time, “awful” views in all directions.

“Billowy masses of cloud began to obstruct the views. My whiskers and wisps of wool of my cap sparkled and crackled atop this natural lightening rod. I was ready to fry in any second. I tumbled head long down the talus, initiating a mini avalanche. I cowered under a ledge. Flashes of bolts slammed into the mountain. Thunder reverberated off canyon walls after crashing into them like boxcars against brick walls. Blizzard flakes drilled into nylon attempts to ward off cold and fear. I stared into gaping grayness, a merciless murk of wind and snow blowing past me. Awe and dread enveloped me, remembering how September storms can last well into the night. Socked in, I waited.

img068Gorges that drain south into Middle Fork Kings River; Mt. Goddard at upper left

“Finally I caught glimpses through the gray of peaks above the Ionian Basin, cast in crimson before a rapidly advancing dusk. Misty corridors revealed the slash of Goddard Creek below Ragged Spur. I began making my way slowly down slippery talus, checking my advance carefully against memories made before socking gray cloaked the mountain again. I waited while eating raisins and reading Proverbs. I had to backtrack more than once to a point where I thought a route down ought to begin. I felt the namesake of an area west of Lake Tahoe I hiked once, Desolation Wilderness.

“I decided on a descent down a coullar that would effectively be a point of no return. Surrounding me were Promethean shafts of iron oxide-stained granite that impaled a fiery red Olympian sky. I clutched at damp and slippery rock with numb fingers. A cracking sound startled me, and I peered over a ledge toward glacier specks coming into focus. An avalanche! Boulders far away tumbled in slow motion down the ice fields of the glacier on Goddard’s north face.

“Exhausted legs, caught like prisoners between the freedom of gravity and the slavery of resistance, counted out uneven periods like a broken metronome. I could see a network of rivulets that collected the waters of Upper North Goddard Creek that, in the darkening mist, lacked any kind of definiteness, more like seeing a Martian canal system through clouds and torment with a telescope.

David Lakes BasinDavis Lakes from the north face of Mt. Goddard Divide; camp below; lakes drain down North Goddard Creek to South Fork San Joaquin River in Goddard Canyon

“Suddenly I saw a speck of red in the darkened moonscape, a pinprick in an expanse of madness. Camp. Then back again to obscuring cloud-choked depths. I blessed each vertical foot of drop.

“Once in the darkened basin below the glacier, I passed granite monoliths that seemed to ponder my stumbling gate with rather benign indifference. A silhouetted figure came out to greet me. I wondered if my eyes appeared wild and prophetic. I don’t remember saying anything at first. We walked together back toward camp.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

From the Soul of the World: Ravinia Festival and the Song Interpretations of Jackie Evancho

Watching Jackie Evancho sing is a religious experience. The vocal virtuosity of this young performer from Pittsburgh had “gobsmacked” me early on with incredulous astonishment that produces tear-filled sobs of smiley joy, a reaction that no one else has ever caused in me. So my visit to Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL to hear her sing in person on August 7, 2011 was like a visit to the sacred mysteries of Eleusis or Mithras in ancient Greco-Roman times.
 
2011-8-7 Ravinia

Neither pouring rain nor screeching cicadas could drown out the effect that seeing this prodigy’s performance was going to have on me. I, of course, already knew what that effect would be. But I went with an inordinate desire to know why. A hypothesis provided by others is Evancho’s interpretive genius. But more important in my thinking is the psychological state she enters when she sings. Evancho says she is taken possession by the music. So I went to get an inside look at the genius of Jackie’s interpretations, especially when under the influence of her music in front of a live audience.
 
2011-8-7 Planted at Ravinia Terry Baker Mark Rhein

Due to the patient work of a key member of “Jackieville” and another who coined that title for Evancho’s facebook page and made a banner blazoned with its moniker, I was able to get a second row center seat. Unlike other venues, the spot set up for her on the stage was just a few feet back from the edge. I spent part of the interminable wait while the Chicago Symphony Orchestra warmed up speculating on what Evancho would seem like at her place there just 15 feet from where I sat. The height of the pair of microphones set up for her meant that she must be petite, a very tiny girl. How she, being so small, commands the power that I know she has made me wonder.
 
Then the prelude to the opening number began, during which she appeared from stage right, smiling and waving with one hand while carrying a water bottle with the other. She was resplendent in a beautiful purple dress. She was not overly “done up” like in so many of her talk show appearances. With grace and poise, she positioned herself behind those microphones. As I suspected, Evancho exhibited a diminutive stature with a porcelain delicacy as if a figurine atop a music box, that is, until she gathered herself in preparation to sing. In that moment of truth, Evancho underwent a physical transformation from a pretty little girl, kissed blond by summer sunshine and chlorine at the pool, all smiles and “angelic adorability,” to a strangely adult-like diva who takes complete command of her artistic performance.
 
img064Ticket to the Soul of the World

I observe this transformation regularly in the best artists where I teach, a high school for the creative and performing arts in Chicago. The head of school says our students have a passion for their art, one that they discover early in their lives. Jackie discovered hers at the age of seven, turning eight years old. From that point forward, parents, like Jackie’s, have to put up with their student’s peculiar and sometimes aggravating initiatives and prodding that, in the case of my school, compel parents to come to our open houses, children in hand, to listen to us offer a way to channel that passion to its rightful fulfillment.
 
Lovers by Shigeru Umebayashi is Jackie’s favorite song on her CD Dream With Me because “It’s so powerful; there’s so much emotion in it.” The theme from the film House of Flying Daggers, it was first on the playbill. The memory of a loved one lost, the “you” of “You ARE my true love,” is a universal experience. Perhaps all she needs is the memory of the loss of her pet duck MoMo to a hawk in order to evoke it. The accent is on the ARE, when she tilts her head back, eyes closed, clutching the fist she makes with the other hand with which to beat her breast, and the verb is exhaled with such force of her breath that she makes the microphones on Ravinia’s stage undulate. It’s the end of the stanza. She opens her eyes, lets her arms fall to her side, and gazes with a dreamy sadness out over the audience while the orchestra continues on with an interlude. That look is priceless. One can observe her render the same look of ethereal melancholy after each high note in Dark Waltz, a crossover classic popularized by New Zealander Haley Westenra on her first internationally published album Pure in 2004, and produced as part of the video marketed to PBS contributors, Dream With Me In Concert. Now comes the last line, which she begins a cappella. “Your voice still echoes…” She stops abruptly with a hard consonant “s” after she effortlessly raises the pitch ever so high with her light lyric soprano skill. The pause is pregnant. Then, “in my heart” escapes her chest as she lets her diaphragm and intercostal muscles relax. The orchestra reenters on the last word. I finally stop shivering and dry my eyes. She just has it.
 
2009-6 Debra Crosby Talent Quest TV O MioAgreeing that “angels” are the source of her inspiration to sing in the classic style

Starting with the aforementioned moment of truth prior to each song, Evancho’s passion apparently gives her permission to surrender to a possession by the music that is in her mind and soul. The words aren’t important. Music is a more universal language of passion. She made that obvious at the age of nine when singing the Puccini aria O Mio Bambino Caro without being able to tell Debra Crosby of the Talent Quest TV show beforehand what the title to the song meant. She grasps the music and appropriates it into the center of her being. As said before, she wasn’t taught that. “Nobody can teach you that,” said Ehkzu. “She just has it.” She closes her eyes feeling it. She must communicate it or suffer deprivation. Though the words aren’t important, it helps that she has a seeming photographic memory for lyrics and perfect diction. If she could, she would look you directly in the eye, like she does in so many of her early YouTube videos.
 
I lately made friends with someone who became a fan in March of 2009 after seeing one of her YouTube videos. He proceeded to donate to the family’s fund drive to support the production of her first CD, said to require about $20,000. In June of 2009, on a live computer feed, he watched Debra Crosby brought to tears as little Jackie softly sang O Mio. He went on to buy 35 copies of Evancho’s CD Prelude to a Dream when it finally came out. Before her “discovery” on the TV reality show America’s Got Talent (AGT), he helped raise money for a second family-produced CD. Then he helped get Evancho’s YouTube audition tape that the family submitted to AGT voted number one. For his efforts he is named in the credits on her second CD O Holy Night, which debuted in the number two position on Billboard’s Top 200 and earned her the distinction of usurping Michael Jackson as the youngest performer to put out a CD in the top ten of Billboard’s charts.
 
The “Jackie Effect” that had so thoroughly converted this fan, even though it was only in its nascent stages, was clearly visible in the video that snared his heart and subsequent devotion. It was the YouTube video of Evancho’s cover of Britney Spears’ song Everytime.
 

This homemade video, filmed in a corner of the Evancho’s house, let’s call it “The Love-Lost Laundry Room Lament,” shows Jackie’s emotional connection to the music she sings and epitomizes her latent genius for interpreting it. Study this video. A cute sports cheer, “Go Pittsburgh Steelers,” gives way to a total immersion into her fast becoming characteristic mental and emotional “zone.” Watch her. She looks down and gathers the folds of her mouth, closes her eyes, then looks up right at you and begins her soulful rendition of this heart-torn love song. It’s all there. She shakes her head in dismay and sways back and forth with eyes closed. The tone of her voice indicates that the impact is wrenching the words from her. Then she raises her hands up so you can see her flared fingers and laments like a propitiating preacher, “You seem to move on easy…” then turns her head away as if blind struck by the corporeal emotion of it all. Study her at the 2:45 second mark when, between verses, solemn glances around her give way to a sad, downturned demeanor. She is waiting to go on, though it looks like she just can’t. At the end of the need for lyrics, the music still playing, she is visibly wracked by the meaning she has so effectively made of it. Suddenly it’s over. The spell is broken. She makes furtive glances as if she doesn’t know where she is and needs to get reoriented. Then she smiles sweetly and says, “Thank you.” A child has just come back from a journey to the soul of the world.
 
11tao-conrad-performance
I felt humbled upon realizing that piano prodigy Conrad Tao would be featured at Ravinia. In the words of Piers Morgan of AGT, “I know what is going to happen here, we’re going to wake up tomorrow and America is gonna be going CRAZY...” I was “feeling goose bumps” well before 17 year old Conrad walked out onto the stage. This performer does not press piano keys. Rather, like a harpist, he pulls at them, rhapsodically plucks at them from his heavenly lyre with gentle, graceful flourishes of his hands, as if they held the conductor’s baton in order to coax heaven-sanctioned sounds from the soul of the world. In the midst of Imaginer by Walter Afanasieff and Lara Fabian (the words arranged more appropriately for Jackie’s young age), I had to pinch myself. There these two prodigies were, teamed together, in the words of conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, giving us “hope for the youth of America” through music.
 
I don’t know much about opera, though Evancho has put me on a steep and rapid learning curve, but I’ve watched my niece who just graduated from the classical voice program at Notre Dame. She appeared stiff at her senior recital, saying afterward that holding onto the piano of her accompanist with her right hand “was allowed.” I had given her copies of Jackie’s music but never heard back from her. I feel sorry about that, how rule-laden operatic performances must be in order to best exemplify intentions in the minds of the genre’s composers. But classical crossover has a more universal appeal. It’s more approachable. Imaginer marries the masses and thus made me, a member of the class of commoners, marvel and melt in the midst of these two young performers. Not opera, Imaginer “allowed” Jackie to do something else that I appreciate, being a school teacher who is well versed in the theories of educational psychology. Though behaviorists say, “prove it,” the branch generally called “cognitive structuralism” describes how one’s mind constructs its percepts of the world into seemingly three dimensional concepts like arranging furniture in a living room. Evancho’s hand and arm gestures, just like Conrad’s sweeping pectoral pronunciations, corral the mind’s musical meanings into intended arrangements. The result is a pleasing sense for the evocative expression that the mind wants to make out of the music. It may be only suggestive, but Evancho’s fluid stance and undulating hand gestures kept time with the unfolding of the song’s magical mystery of “old wars dissolving, a world without hunger, the extinguishing of all fires by a single God.” Did she need to study the words or only learn to pronounce them in flawless French? Did it matter? Their meaning flowed out of the sung soul of the world, especially the verse that she raised up to Conrad’s crescendo, “ouvrez les yeuxxxxxx!!!! (Open the eyes!!!), her hands in fists pounding the word’s compelling command out of the center of the living room, her heart, and up and out of the ceiling above it, her head, with eyes closed and larynx channeling its soaring energy like a rocket launch.
 
I now understand what Dr. Clark Rosen, director of the Voice Center at University of Pittsburgh Hospital means when he says her genius is not simply that voice; rather, it is her brain that constructs a virtuoso performance of Imaginer by expertly coordinating all her physical apparatus, lungs, throat, and skeletal and muscular gesticulations.
 
After coming back down to the soul’s center at the end, Evancho croons softly as she gently shakes her head, like brushing one’s self off after the exhausting physical exertion of an athletic performance. Yes, Jackie can croon like the Las Vegas rat pack. She did at eight years old in Everytime at the end, at nine years old in Teaching Angels How to Fly before and after the last refrain, and here at age eleven in Imaginer. They may merely have been in the body, but these two performers created for me an out-of-the-body experience.
 
Dante Cosmos

Making the closest encounter with the soul of the world, at least for me, were Evancho’s renditions of The Lord’s Prayer by Mallot and arranged by Nicholas Dodd, and of To Believe by Jackie’s uncle Matthew Evancho. I sense that the Evancho’s are very spiritual people, and it is no accident that these two pieces were included on Dream with Me. It is worth noting that BOTH of these gospel-hinting songs were chosen for Evancho’s road tour. This decision effectively forced the exclusion of other, less “spiritual” songs because the play list had to be kept to a maximum of eight or nine to better preserve Evancho’s voice. Perhaps piety becomes a more suitable attitude the closer in proximity one is brought to the soul of the world.
 
2010-10-7 Jackie Evancho The Prayer LA On the AGT Tour in LA singing the spiritual “The Prayer,” written by David Foster

David Foster wrote the spoken prayer part for her in To Believe, and I think it is the fulcrum upon which Dream With Me and its concerts are balanced. For me it is the most powerful point in Evancho’s performance. She stops, publically faces the world as her witness, and tells God that she intends to do the very best that she can. And she does so without the dour solemnity of a penitent; rather, with the singsong cadence of a raconteur. She’s telling a story about her arrival at the center of the soul of the world. She told David Foster, who asked her what is going on in her mind when she sings, “when I sing something just overpowers me and makes me very comfortable and very happy.” It also makes her very courageous, offering her a conviction that grants her command of the soul of the world, and I was struck to the core of my being hearing her recite this prayer at Ravinia.
 
Like a switch that completes an electrical circuit, Evancho needs an audience with whom to reciprocate the intense emotion she elicits from the music. Heart to heart communication must come full circle. Her experience of that emotion is personal. She then communicates it in a manner very personal. At Ravinia, it seemed as if Miss Evancho sang just for me. It was like I was the only one in the audience. I knew I wasn’t, but she possesses the power to reach out to individual hearts. Someone said, “This little eleven-year-old girl is expressing feelings that only I have ever experienced, and I don’t really know how to comprehend that.” Perhaps we all help make up the soul of the world, and she has been gifted with an innate understanding of its universal nature and how to connect each one of us to it.
 
Double Wave

When I gave her a double wave, a gesture that has become the trademark for her effervescent charm, she gave one back to me. That is because Jackie feeds off her audience. Authentic artists are not so much concerned with the effect the art has on them as they are about the effect it has on their audience. Many aspiring artists must learn to move past mere potential in which it seems as if they are in their art rather than their art is in them. Good art leaves the artist behind and stands alone, shimmering, mesmerizing, drawing the audience in, beckoning to be received. It is noteworthy that Evancho’s meteoric success is primarily based on performances in front of live audiences. Like a good entrepreneur, she knows the customer is everything. She needs to connect with “you guys” out there who are watching her and for whom she sings. It began with the YouTube videos. “Hey, it’s Jackie, and I’m here to sing….” When she connects, the effect it has on her is part, parcel, and reciprocal with the cause, the passion, with which it began. Only then can there be those endearing, wide-open smiles and clutched hands extended straight down. The audience’s response finishes a cycle and serves as positive feedback with which to accelerate the system. When I yelled, “We love you, Jackie!” she literally hopped into the air. I remember Howie Mandel, after her inaugural AGT rendition of O Mio Bambino Caro, exclaiming, “Jackie, you’re amazing!” This elicited from her an absolutely priceless giggle. Such positive feedback makes her interpretations for the songs she sings gain in power, passion, and perfection over the course of the concert. This is what made the last two songs at Ravinia, Sarah McLachlands’s Angel and Lloyd Weber’s All I Ask of You the best of the best. Evancho’s sense that her audience successfully empathizes with the passion with which she communicates through her singing fortifies her genius and accelerates the maturation of its expression.
 
2011-6 NZ Brain of an adultEvancho describing her ambitions and fears at Dylan’s Candy Bar in NYC

Strangely enough, it is not the quality of her voice that matters to her. While in New York City last June promoting Dream With Me, Jackie told TVNZ reporter Tim Wilson, “Whenever I sing I sound like a normal kid, almost. I don’t see what’s so special about my voice. When everyone says, ‘Oh my goodness, Jackie, you have such an amazing voice,’ I go ‘I don’t really understand.’ I mean I just sound like a normal kid. I mean I hear a lot more maturity to it, but I don’t hear, like, I don’t hear what everyone else is hearing and why it’s so amazing.”
 
Why Evancho can’t understand this had puzzled me until now. It is true that such a nonplussed reaction is appropriate for a genius and also a kid who just wants to fit in with her peers. This was illustrated in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon’s mathematical genius character Will Hunting refuses to leave the construction jobs of his working class buddies from south Boston, with whom he grew up, for jobs with the intellectual big leaguers. Stellan Skarsgard plays the role of the brilliant mathematical Fields Medal-winning professor Gerald Lambeau who takes Will under his wing when he gets into trouble with the law. When Professor Lambeau critiques an even more brilliant paper that Will writes for him, Will expectorates, “Hey! This is so easy that it’s a joke. And I’m sorry, I really am, that you can’t do it.” I can thus take Evancho’s word as a “truthful girl,” as well as a preternaturally intelligent one, that she can’t acknowledge that she has a voice so awe-inspiring that even adults can only describe it as the voice of an “angel.” Even her parents initially misunderstood. Their suspicions required testing. In their own words, “after her showing in the competitions, we thought there might be something here…” But Evancho just sees the music, her experiences of it as it seeps out of the soul of the world, and her desire to communicate it.
 
Jackie Evancho 5 bubbly ten year old and angelic diva

Now I know that the driving force of Jackie’s genius is her passion for the music and having an audience feel it too. Matt Damon’s character gave himself away in that he plied his blue collar janitorial services at MIT, one of the most intellectually prestigious universities in the world. Being where it matters, picking the place where passion can be communicated most successfully, explains how and where one can find Evancho’s interpretive genius-in front of a live audience. When asked during AGT where she would most want to perform, she said, “on a stage, any stage.” There, she doesn’t hear herself sing. She’s too busy. Called by her muse to the center where the music is, she, like a siren, a savior figure with outstretched arms, palms up, is busy beckoning us forward to join her at the center. What she hears, what she can take to heart, what spurs her to improve in her use of her gifted pipes every time she sings, is the praise of an appreciative audience. It affirms that she has successfully gotten us there. Out of that little girl then, like a sipapu on the floor in the center of a Southwestern pueblo kiva, has come the soul of the world.
 
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