[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 81 (Wednesday, June 4, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7376-S7377]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         HONORING QUINCY JONES

 Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, 2003 is the officially designated 
Year of the Blues. As we now look to music and the arts to guide us 
through trying times, it is an honor to pay tribute to an international 
monument to music: Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. and his passion for music 
education.
  He is a veritable Renaissance Man, an orchestrator, arranger, 
conductor, composer, magazine publisher, executive, writer--and music, 
film and television producer. In his far-flung enterprises, he is the 
very modern model of a major music mogul. It will take another artist 
decades to approach his record 27 Grammy Awards and Kennedy Center 
Honors. And it can be said without exaggeration that the music of 
Quincy Jones is otherworldly: Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin chose the 
Quincy Jones-Frank Sinatra rendition of ``Fly Me to the Moon'' as the 
first song to be played on lunar soil.
  Quincy Jones's own musical odyssey began earnest in Seattle, where 
his family had moved to seek better job opportunities in the industrial 
boom of World War II America. Still trapped in poverty, Quincy and his 
brother broke into a Seattle recreation hall in search of free meal, 
but stumbled upon an upright piano. Merely riffing on the ivory keys 
summoned pleasure in an instant. Playing the piano, he wrote later, 
enabled him to ``hope and cope.''
  Early on Quincy Jones could straddle styles of music--and the egos of 
musicians. In Seattle, as a student in integrated schools and a band 
member with Ray Charles playing gigs at black and white venues, he 
learned to gracefully balance the cusp between commerce and art. He is, 
as Duke Ellington would say, ``beyond category.''
  Quincy, says arranger Bill Mathieu, is ``a culminator . . . his music 
contains nearly everything of value that has been done before.'' He 
was--and is--an innovator, able as Washington University Professor 
Gerald Early wrote, to shape the world artistically, breaking down 
barriers and moving across boundaries. ``Jones has become a virtual 
epoch in American popular cultural history, a person of such importance 
and achievement that is difficult to imagine the era without him.''
  His greatest contribution to our times may be as a passionate 
proselytizer for music education in the classroom. Half a century ago, 
in his first forays abroad, Quincy made the startling discovery that 
people around the globe knew and cherished American music--sometimes 
more than American themselves did. So in his early twenties, even as he 
was inventing new music, he made it his mission to teach and preserve 
the legacy of our musical heritage.
  Music consists of only 12 notes, yet in its infinite varieties it 
beguiles, bewitches and beckons us. It can, as Leonard Bernstein 
observed, name the unnamble and communicate the unknowable. Music not 
only entertains and uplifts--it edifies and empowers. To know the 
history of American music is to grasp the history of America.
  Duke Ellington divided the entire musical opus into two categories: 
Good and Bad. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most lyrical of the 
founding fathers and himself a composer, believed not only in public 
education, but that music and musical training was an essential 
component of good citizenship.
  President John F. Kennedy knew that arts were good for the nation, 
good for the soul. ``The life of the arts far from being an 
interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the 
center of a nation's purpose--and is a test of the quality of a 
nation's civilization.''
  Widely lauded children's television programming such as Sesame Street 
and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood have long discovered that the lessons of 
learning and of life are best realized when music is attached to them. 
As the late, beloved Fred Rogers often claimed about his early piano 
playing, ``By the time I was five-years-old, I could laugh or be very 
angry through the ends of my fingers.''
  ``If you don't get kids in kindergarten'' cautions Fred Anton, the 
CEO of Warner Bros. Publications, ``you won't get them later in high 
school. If you can reach children when they are young, music will stay 
with them forever.'' To that end, Warner Bros. has spent four years 
bringing together pioneers in music, linguistics, the sciences and fine 
arts and asked them to reinvigorate music education. Music education, 
from pre-K through high school, benefits everyone, says Anton, not just 
future virtuosos: ``You are going to develop critical thinking skills 
and better team players. And this won't be the dreary music programs of 
20 or 40 years ago. This is for today's kids.''
  A classic musical piece such as ``Follow the Drinking Gourd'' 
incorporates the new thinking. Children learn that in the Civil War era 
slaves sang code songs to each other, passing along messages of where 
to escape and find safe houses. The Drinking Gourd was the North Star. 
By teaching the kids the story--the ``Behind the Music'' vignette--it 
brings them into the song, while at the same time teaches impart 
lessons in history, social studies, and even astronomy.
  Whether a genius such as Quincy Jones or an enthusiastic student 
embracing early violin lessons, artists at all levels savor the 
undiluted joy of the musical mind. It is the flow experience, where 
passion and precision unite, and one loses track of time and space. In 
a musical mode, dreamers dream and the impossible seems possible.
  Music stirs our creative impulses--and it invariably contributes to 
our math, linguistic and science learning. The most ardent champion of 
music education today would indubitably be Albert Einstein. When asked 
about the theory of relativity, he explained, ``It occurred to me by 
intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My 
discovery was the result of musical perception.''
  Harvard University's Dr. Howard Gardner, whose landmark research in 
Mind Intelligences was first published 20 years ago, asserts that all 
of us are gifted with music in the brain, an intelligence that when 
tapped--especially when we are young--generates bountiful lifetime 
rewards in all of our other academic and social endeavors.
  We have empirical data linking music education to higher test scores, 
lower school dropout rates, higher cognitive skills and an increased 
ability for students to analyze and evaluate information. A University 
of California School for Medicine San Francisco paper concluded that 
learning to play an instrument ``refines the development of the brain 
and entire neuromuscular system.''
  Other brain research contends that music and arts activities develop 
the intellect, lead to higher test results in mathematics, science and 
history and strengthens synapses and spatial reasoning in all brain 
systems.
  Students exposed to music education are more disciplined, dexterous, 
coordinated, creative and self-assured. They

[[Page S7377]]

listen better, learn better, write better and speak better. Or as 
Charlie Parker would have succinctly put it, ``They get in the 
groove.''
  Yet despite the overwhelming scientific and anecdotal evidence 
showcasting the benefits of music, music education programs throughout 
the country are in peril. Some fine arts education budgets have been 
drastically cut; others have been eliminated entirely. The consequences 
will harm both our music industry and concert halls, but even more 
seriously our nation's youth.
  As Dr. Jean Houston implored 15 years ago, long before the latest 
rounds in budget cuts, ``Children without access to an arts program are 
actually damaging their brain. They are not being exposed to non-verbal 
modalities which help them learn skills like reading, writing and math 
much more easily.''
  Which is why Quincy Jones, Warner Bros. Publications, and other 
titans of the music world are joining the battle. The fight to initiate 
and restore arts and music education to our schools needs a volunteer 
army of teachers, researchers, parents, elected officials, school 
boards and legislators in formation with the arts industries and 
artists themselves.
  For the Year of the Blues, Seattle's Experience Music Project is 
partnering with the Blues Foundation in Memphis and PBS for a multi-
media project that will include a television series, The Blues, 
executive produced by Martin Scorsese, a public radio series, a 
comprehensive Web site and education program, a companion book, DVDS 
and boxed CD set, and a traveling interactive exhibit.
  Today's advanced multimedia technology will seek to capture the 
spirit and times of the blues, an era when at myriad clubs jazz greats 
would come in after working hours and fold into jam sessions. Guests, 
and the musicians themselves, were treated to wild flights of fantasy 
and improvisation. On any given night the likes of Sydney Bechet, Jack 
Teagarden, Louis and Lil Armstrong, and Bud Freeman would sit together 
and play the music they felt. It was the dawn of great female artists: 
Dinah Washington, Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith.
  Music in all its incarnations is one of the most eloquent and 
memorable reflections of our loud and boisterous democracy. Jazz and 
the blues represented the vibrant merger of African music, plantation 
songs, ragtime and the plaintive yearnings of what was then known as 
hillbilly music. It follows that from jazz, the rivers of rock and 
roll, hip-hop and rap flowed.
  The genuis of Quincy Jones is his ability to siphon off music from 
all eras and seemingly reinvent it. It is as if he were a scientist, 
extrapolating findings from all disciplines and effortlessly merging 
them into brand new medical breakthroughs. The challenge for educators 
is to build upon existing layers of history, knowledge and research to 
structure a new paradigm, deftly blending the elements to produce the 
finest school system in the world.
  Artists such as Quincy Jones have a gift for revering music's past, 
while keenly anticipating its future. For as Nadia Boulanger, possibly 
the greatest music teacher of the 20th century said, ``A person's music 
can be no more or less than they are as a human being.''
 Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to Ann 
Reiner from Portland, OR, a former member of the Oncology Nursing 
Society's Board of Directors. Ann has been helping individuals with 
cancer and their families for 20 years. Currently, Ann is the Program 
Director for Cancer Services and the Director of Outreach and Education 
for the Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University, 
OHSU. Ann is also an Instructor at the School of Nursing at OHSU.
  Since 1983, Ann has been a member of the Oncology Nursing Society and 
most recently stepped down from serving on its Board of Directors. The 
Oncology Nursing Society, the largest professional oncology group in 
the United States composed of more than 30,000 nurses and other health 
professionals, exists to promote excellence in oncology nursing and the 
provision of quality care to those individuals affected by cancer. As 
part of its mission, the Society honors and maintains nursing's 
historical and essential commitment to advocacy for the public good.
  Ann Reiner has received numerous awards for her work on behalf of 
individuals with cancer, including a Doctoral Degree in Cancer Nursing 
Scholarship from the American Cancer Society and a Fellow at the 
Oncology Nursing Society's Inaugural Leadership Development Institute. 
In addition, Ann is a member of the Institutional Review Board at OSHU, 
a member of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Program Medical Advisory 
Committee with the Oregon Department of Health, and a member and 
coordinator for the Portland area Citywide Annual Skin Cancer 
Screening.
  A number of studies and articles that Ann has written on quality 
cancer care and the nursing shortage have been published in 
distinguished publications such as the Cancer Prevention, Detection and 
Control: A Nursing Perspective, Puget Sound Chapter Oncology Nursing 
Society Quarterly, Manual of Patient Care Standards, Blood, The Cancer 
Experience: Nursing Diagnosis and Management, Journal of Nursing 
Quality Assurance, and the Regional Oncology Nurses' Quarterly. Since 
the 1980s, Ann has given over seventy presentations and has presented 
thirty papers to national audiences on a host of cancer care, health, 
and nursing shortage issues.
  Over the last 10 years, the setting where treatment for cancer is 
provided has changed dramatically. An estimated 80 percent of all 
Americans receive cancer care in community settings, including cancer 
centers, physicians' offices, and hospital outpatient departments. 
Treatment regimens are as complex, if not more so, than regimens given 
in the inpatient setting a few short years ago. Oncology nurses, like 
Ann, are on the front lines of the provision of quality cancer care for 
individuals with cancer each and everyday. Nurses are involved in the 
care of a cancer patient from the beginning through the end of 
treatment. Oncology nurses are the front-line providers of care by 
administering chemotherapy, managing patient therapies and side 
effects, working with insurance companies to ensure that patients 
receive the appropriate treatment, and provide counseling to patients 
and family members, in addition to many other daily acts on behalf of 
cancer patients.
  With an increasing number of people with cancer needing high quality 
health care coupled with an inadequate nursing workforce, our Nation 
could quickly face a cancer care crises of serious proportion, limiting 
access to quality cancer care, particularly in traditionally 
underserved areas. Without an adequate supply of nurses there will not 
be enough qualified oncology nurses to provide quality cancer care to a 
growing population of people in need. I was proud to support the 
passage of the Nurse Reinvestment Act in the 107th Congress. This 
important legislation expanded and implemented programs to address the 
multiple problems contributing to the nationwide nursing shortage, 
including the decline in nursing student enrollments, shortage of 
faculty, and dissatisfaction with nurse workplace environments.
  I commend Ann Reiner and the Oncology Nursing Society for all of 
their hard work to prevent and reduce suffering from cancer and to 
improve the lives of those 1.3 million Americans who will be diagnosed 
with cancer in 2003. I wish Ann and the Oncology Nursing Society the 
best of luck in all of their endeavors.

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