The Star News Weekender
10/7/06

Arts, Activism and Robert Bluestone
by Britt Aamodt
Special to the Star News Weekender

A guitar’s construction is simple. Wood is shaped into a hollow body, attached to a neck and head, and strings stretched over a sounding hole. The guitarist uses his fingers or a pick to vibrate the strings and produce sounds that, when added in sequence, form a melody.

Classical guitarist Robert Bluestone, who will be performing at Zabee Theater 7:30 pm, Friday, Oct. 13, envisions his instrument as embodying more than its materials and acoustic properties. On a musical campaign that has evolved over decades and encompassed cities around the world, Bluestone had advanced the guitar as a means of revolution.

Not a government-toppling, building-burning revolution, but a revolution of the mind and spirit. Music, and the arts in general, Bluestone says, catalyze change. The arts have the power to improve lives.

Which is one of the reasons he’s planned to arrive in Elk River Sunday, Oct. 8 and spend the next five days leading up to the concert at Zabee Theater engaging the local community in dialogue, putting on small impromptu concerts, meeting leaders, conducting workshops and putting forth the message that art matters.

“The arts make a difference in education because they reinforce creativity and creative thought,” says Bluestone from Santa Fe, where he and wife Rebecca have lived for the past 30 years. “The arts connect kids to their town and give them something to do at night. They attract businesses. They improve the quality of life. They heal.”

Bluestone calls himself a creativity expert. He’s also the Johnny Appleseed of music, using his residencies in communities throughout the United States to plant the idea that “We all have within us the seeds of our destiny. And our job is to connect up and nourish those seeds so that they grow into a mighty oak tree.”

The arts allow individuals to visualize their potential and to establish the goals that will get them there, he says.
Bluestone wasn’t born with a guitar in his hand. Growing up in Brooklyn, he got his first taste of “destiny” plopped on his stomach in front of the radio. Even as a boy he loved to tune into blues and country and the new-fangled rock ‘n’ roll coming out of the south. In the fifties, an uncle turned him onto Johnny Cash whose “Walk the Line” fascinated the eager listener.

When Bluestone was eight, the same uncle delivered an Andres Segovia record. Born in 1893 in Spain, Segovia was a classical guitarist, and internationally-renowned when the youth first encountered his music. Soon after, Bluestone got a guitar.

“I was pretty much hooked though I didn’t know it at the time,” remembers Bluestone, who entered college still thinking he’d become a lawyer. “I was accepted into law school. I was going to be a lawyer, but it was then I decided that what I really wanted was to be a guitarist.”
Everyone thought he was crazy. But he went ahead and enrolled in music classes, receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in music and studying guitar in Mexico and Spain.

Later, he met Segovia and was with him on his 90th birthday when someone asked, “Segovia, you’re 90 now. Why don’t you retire?”

“Retire? Rest?” the guitarist flared back. “I have all eternity to rest. Now I have to work.”

Bluestone shares his mentor’s unflagging spirit. Besides a grueling performance schedule, he has expanded his duties to include residencies like the one he’ll be doing in Elk River. He and wife Rebecca, a celebrated textile artist, will be traveling to Mayo Clinic this fall to teach health care professionals, patients and caregivers how to use the arts and creativity in healing. This will be their second trip to Mayo.

The couple has also worked with victims of abuse, cancer patients (Rebecca is a cancer survivor) and adolescents caught up in the current meth epidemic. Bluestone knows all to well the cost of drug abuse. He lost a cousin and a friend to heroin.

“I give an assembly for kids, nothing preachy, where I play for them, and we talk. I try to get to this place where they see me as a role model, someone who’s working toward distant goals, playing music every day, disciplining myself because I love what I do.”

This gets back to Bluestone’s theory about the arts: that they reinforce the social fabric of communities and that they foster the creative process that says no matter what the ambition—health, career, good grades, self-acceptance—there are steps to achieve it.

“When people come to my performance in Elk River they’ll have fun. They’ll enjoy themselves,” says Bluestone. “Music isn’t about edification. It’s about sharing something together. It’s about the beauty of the melody and the power of the arts to transform people’s lives.”

Journalist

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