In the Public Interest
By Ralph Nader 2-20-96
At the Cedar Lane Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland on the morning of February 19, 1996, there was a memorial service to celebrate the life of an extra ordinary musician, Randy Hostetler, age 32.
In a short hour, his friends, younger brother, Eric and his parents, Jim and Zona, through their pastor, conveyed the iconoclastic spirit, creativity, joy and gentleness of a musical prodigy soaring toward acoustical blends and provoking context. His gran dmother, Kate, said of him: “he never heard noise, he only heard music.” While a friend remembered that “Randy didn’t push the envelope, he threw it away.”
What manner of person can be thus described? A young man for whom the world was a sound stage for both his conventional musical instruments and a dazzling variety of other tools — Mennonite bells, the sound of an old honda door opening and closing, the sounds from tapes thrown away on the highway, the rush of nature’s breeze and water, the cries of the animal kingdom, the haunting hybrids of the human voice, piano, stringed instruments, drum and ethnic strains.
He first composed at the age of eight, working off a Mozart creation. By the time he was fifteen and a student at the Sidwell Friends School in the Washington, D.C., he composed a choral titled “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred?” Which was Performed at the Ch urch service by alumni of the Yale a cappella vocal ensemble -“Redhot and Blue”.
Whether bringing, young, struggling musicians together in his “Living Room” every tow months, or gardening and cooking with exotic herbs, practicing T’ai Chi, reading Zen and Japanese poetry, composing and performing on the road, Hostetler was a whi rling, eclectic, humorful, detailed, demanding work in progress — before a sudden bacterial attack took his life.
And how his friends and collaborators responded, directly and by starting a page on the World Wide Web on the Internet to commemorate his ways with music. In a fortnight after his passing, they composed music in his memory, wrote original poems and sonnets “for Randy.” In remembering him, they played his music, notably his haunting composition “There.” They Spoke of his minimal interest in money, his scratching together a small income from part-time piano teaching and piano-tuning.
They told of him teaching for seven years to a talented but severely autistic youngster. But it seems that above all what attracted so many artist to Randy Hostetler was that always, everywhere, he asked the impertinent questions of others and hims elf. He jolted them into imagination and examination.
As the hour at the church matured, the service took on a mantle that went beyond a portrait of an artist as a young man. It became a portrayal of a struggle for contributing to authentic American culture, of artists who created not for any commerci al jackpot but for beauty and truth and the flight of Minerva’s Owl.
What a contrast to the swarming, tawdry, violent corporate commercial video and television culture which blocks their reach toward a larger audience, both participant and spectator. These young people don’t play by the rules of the lucre and its lo west common, sensual denominator supervised by the three piece suits inside the metallic and glass skyscrapers in New York and Los Angeles. To them and thousands more like them an act of artistic creation springs from non-monetized minds. But they live in times when censorious politicians are bent on destroying what is l eft of public support for the arts — already the lowest in the western world of nations.
Back to the congregation at the Church. Many sitting there were successful professionals and their families. One felt they had become more pensive as the service proceeded toward its conclusion — a tape of “What a Wonderful World” performed by Lo uis Armstrong — one of Randy’s favorites. Were they wistfully admiring a young man in vigorous control of his time, his work and his labor of love? For not many people can so live and the world is poorer for it.
John Adams, our second President, once said that his generation became politicians and generals so that their children could become artists and musicians. Perhaps in the present agonies of out planet Earth, the torment can be tempered by that elusi ve progression and those bold enough to lead it, as Randy Hostetler strove to do.
His Yale University music professor, Frederic Rzewski, said about his student: “Surely a part of out hopes for a renewal of the arts in America has vanished. We must carry on.”
