 About five years ago I was walking home in New York City one evening and I was attacked by three young men, probably in their late teens, and beaten up pretty badly. My face was smashed up, nose broken, lips hanging down to here, needed to have some reconstructive work done on the lower part of my face and generally in a bit of a bad state. And at some point during this mugging they said give us your stuff. And I emptied my pockets and a collection of stuff came out and among them this metronome, this clicking, beeping thing that musicians all over the world know as a timekeeper. And they wanted to know what it was. So I said it's a metronome, keeps time. It's, you know, keeps the beat for music. Music? What? They were yelling. I was yelling back. It keeps the beat for music. You know, it turned it on like this. And it turned it on. Can it go faster? Yeah. Can it go slower? Yes. Can you make it go faster than the fastest it's got? Yeah. You know, you beat two clicks to the pulse instead of one. Anyway, there it was. Suddenly we were having a lesson. I was, you know, soaked in blood. My glasses were broken. But more importantly, it suddenly dawned that there they were again three kids who were about to kill me. Halfway through the process they sort of said, we're going to shoot your ass. And the point here is that suddenly in the face of the raw rhythm, the music of the metronome, they became three kids who were just interested in music, like kids anywhere. These three kids who had maybe fallen through the cracks of society, fathers in jail, mothers, maybe even worse off, had suddenly just become kids, like kids anywhere, who loved music. And I went away and I thought, hmm, you know, music, what's that all about? About eight months later, there was a very powerful earthquake which devastated great parts of Kashmir. And I watched it happen in New York. It flitted across the television screens and then it was gone. And I thought, maybe we should do something with music. And so I did. We put together a concert. It was a long story. One thing led to another. The whole thing snowballed. And in about six weeks, we did a concert of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall for the people affected in Kashmir. And as you can see, musicians came from great orchestras of the world. And we had this lovely concert. We raised a lot of money. The BBC showed up and broadcast the thing all over Asia. But that's not the point. The point is that as I was preparing for this, suddenly Beethoven came alive. Came alive with a kind of mystic yogic sort of energy. And just one example of this is this spot in the finale of the Ninth Symphony where Beethoven treats the familiar Oat to Joy tune, which I think you all know, in a variety of different ways. But in this place, let's give it a listen. He treats the tune as a German drinking song of the time. And the protagonists have drunk so much that they're having a bit of difficulty getting just on. And at that moment, he introduces some unusual percussion support. You heard the cymbals and the drum and the cimetars crashing in the background. That's Turkish music. That's Turkish instruments. Music of the Ottoman Empire, with whom they were at war. Music of the Islamic world. And it seemed that at that moment, Beethoven was suggesting that music of the Islamic world, of the Turkish world, could possibly be bringing security and safety to the German setting of that music. And in that moment, it seemed that Beethoven was no longer an individual, but rather what was coming out was the voice of a civilization in a rare moment of embrace of another civilization. It seemed that he was suggesting, perhaps, that the act of embracing another culture, of engaging the spirit of the other, might be actually rather more interesting than being afraid of it, making other people afraid of it, declaring war on it, perhaps, or deporting it. This was 200 years ago. And sadly, we seem not to have learned all the lessons that 200 years could have taught us. Our other concerts have also come from similar resonances in the music. In the Requiem of Verdi, resonances of fear, resonances of community rising, resonances of fear of death, fear of violence, sexual violence, led us to our next humanitarian concert, the Requiem for Darfur for the people affected by the conflict in Sudan. In the third symphony of Gustav Mahler, there appears in the fourth movement a lone woman who comes out and says, oh, man, oh, human kind, oh, mankind, pay attention, give heed, or simply put, shut up and listen. And when we did listen, this is what we heard voices of children saying, well, nothing really, they're singing Bim Bam, which is the German equivalent of Ding Dong, nonsense syllables. It's almost as if Mahler were suggesting that these are children so young as to not really be able to say proper words. And that is such a powerful resonance for the millions of women and children struggling with HIV AIDS all over the world. And so it was that we were able to hear that in that moment. Where am I going with this? You might wonder. I'm going to a place where music and ensemble music in particular might be able to resonate with some of the most pressing issues of our time, perhaps in tandem with some amazing ideas that we've heard here. Dragonfly effect. Consciousness of the universe manifesting itself when we quiet ourselves to listen. And I think that music can possibly serve us in any number of ways, but these are just three, one you've already heard, the extraction of messages from between the notes by listening to the spaces between the notes and the sound of the silences. The second is that in the act of music making, it appears that our identities frequently fall away and new identities are created that can resolve and frequently dissolve conflict. The conducted Daniel Barenboim and the scholar Edward Said created an extraordinary orchestra of young Jewish musicians from and Arab musicians from all over the world, the East West Divan Orchestra, fabulous young orchestra. And while this orchestra has not necessarily brought peace to the Middle East, it has created an extraordinary understanding between these young people and, and a kind of contact that we have a lot to learn from. Because you see, when two people come to make music together, they have to listen to each other with in an extraordinary way that is rather unusual in our world, when two or three or four people make music together, they have to listen with the assumption that what the other person is doing is at least as important, if not more important than one's own part. The narrative of the other is in fact what enables me to be. I am because you are. In Africa, they call this Ubuntu, which brings us to the third, which is that the education of young people in the science and art of ensemble music, of focusing this when we are at the stage when we are biologically specialized for learning can actually trigger the tools of mutual esteem and mutual understanding, mutual discipline, self-discipline, and actually accelerate in our young people the process of human evolution. And Venezuela and Costa Rica have led the way with this, with their extraordinary programs, El Sistema, which we've heard about in, at TED and elsewhere, this program that has brought young people together in the thousands to create new possibilities. And in India, I was hoping a couple of years ago to maybe share this with the millions of our youth. And when I got here, I found out that El Sistema inspired projects were already underway. And one of the first of these is a remarkable project in Goa called Child's Play, India, led by a remarkable human being, a doctor, a journalist, and a musician, Dr. Luis Diaz.