Pablo Casals

Yeah.

Right? Yeah, and I don't know about you, if you ever listened to musician-musician players, but obviously a big record for me was Pablo Casals.

He was a cellist, and he did the Bach cello suites.

Okay.

Chuck, anything to say to the team before we get out of here?

Pablo Casals was the greatest cellist in the history of the world.

[laughs]

He was playing, practicing, and teaching till his death at 96 years old.

Every day, that's-

What was his name again?

Pablo Casals.

Pablo Casals.

So they don't realize that we do have homework.

And Pablo Casals, the great cellist, was in his 90s, and he was being interviewed, and they said, Maestro Casals, I hear that you get up and practice for three hours every morning, and you're 96.

Why do you do that? He says, I think I'm getting better.

So it's also a justifiable escape mechanism.

[laughs]

Uh, also I heard with, with Pablo Casals, and there's a, like, a rich lady in London always inviting, uh, him for tea.

Um, and, uh, but he always had something to do.

He did not have time.

I think-

Did you know Pablo Casals?

Yes.

He was my childhood hero and, and he still is, uh, my hero in, in many, many ways.

Okay.

When I see somebody in a restaurant, this is the fork, you know, normally the fork, right? When I see this, Kind of like the Pablo Casals playing the cello.

When I see this or this.

This is a new one.

From that burning comes real heat, heat you can apply to your craft, to your work, to your life.

The cellist Pablo Casals practiced continually late into his life, even long after he was widely considered a master, because he believed he was still making progress.

In fact, we might say that progress and practice are synonyms.

You can't have the former without the latter.

You can jam with other talented musicians.

You can put all those sessions together to learn new songs.

But before all that, as Castles did, you can simply practice your scales in your bedroom for hours upon hours.

What are those scales for you? You better know and you better be doing them.

And you'd have these beautiful, lovely dinners in the East Room.

and Pablo Casals would show up to play the cello, or Ella Fitzgerald would show up to sing, and it was these very elegant, elegant, quietly extravagant social events where the great intellects of the Kurt Vonnegut would be sitting there having dinner with Saul Bellow, you know, and famous historians would be Arthur Schlesinger would be hobnobbing with you know, Cary Grant or whatever.

They were very elegant dinners.

People remember that aspect of Kennedy as well.