The novelist David Foster Wallace began a commencement speech with this story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning! How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

Musicians’ cultures can be hard, REALLY hard. Very often the musicians don’t acknowledge these difficulties: to themselves and to others.

They may not intimately know any other kind of culture.

They grew up in it.

They swim in it.

They drink it.

They have a hard time imagining that there could be an alternative.

When I speak to people from other professions - medical doctors, lawyers, taxi drivers – and speak about the kinds of difficult things that musicians face in their professional lives, they can hardly believe it.

Here are two glaring and well-documented examples:

A musician was drugged and raped by colleagues. The victim left the orchestra with an NDA. The rape was widely known by her other colleagues and the ochestra management, who chose to continue celebrating and showcasing the raping colleagues for 14 years until, finally, an explosive article exposed this.
A conductor sent dick pics to several of his female colleges, was able to keep his job for 20 years, during which he continued to send dick pics, and was recently rewarded a 200,000 € severance package when the issue couldn’t be ignored any longer.

These are two blatant examples of enabling abusive cultures in musicians’ organisation. There are 1000s of more subtle examples I hear in my sessions and from colleagues:

For example:

a musician feels that her orchestra colleagues sabotage her when a solo is coming. They do this by shifting in their seats, rustling the score, making sudden movements. This is subtle enough not to be perceived by the conductor or audience, but hard for her to not be thrown off in very high-pressure and exposed moments. It’s so subtle, in fact, that she questions herself and wonders if she might be a little paranoid.
A musician tells me that her teacher used to shout her down and tell her that she was a failure and an embarrassment. These episodes were followed by moments in which he fawned over her abilities. When I asked her if she considered this behavior abusive, she seemed emotionally flat, shrugged her shoulders and stated blankly: “That’s just how it is”.
A woman who is facing tremendous health challenges is also struggling to find employment, despite being extravagently qualified for the jobs she is applying for. A former mentor who she had trusted told her that the reason she’s not getting jobs is obvious: she’s just not good enough. Though she knows that this assessment is wrong, particularly for the jobs she’s overqualified for, this savage assessment festers and destabilizes her.

You’ll notice that all of the aggressions mentioned above are directed towards women. This is intentional (though I changed some of the details to protect people’s confidentiality), because the issue is indeed deeply gendered, and there’s no reason to dance around that fact. I have also encountered many experiences that stink of racism.

The Power of Anger

Many of my clients believe that feeling anger is wrong. They assess anger as being morally abhorrent, harmful to one’s health, unjustifiable, out of place, and damaging for others.

I want to state here clearly:

There is nothing inherently wrong with experiencing anger, and

There’s nothing that has more power than anger to change things that need to change

Anger, given the kinds of things listed above, is a perfectly justifiable emotion. We wouldn’t be human (or animal) if we wouldn’t growl (savagely) at these kinds of wrongdoings, exposing our teeth and claws.

We are seeing a kind of “#metoo” moment play out in the classical music industry, spearheaded by Katherine Needleman and Lara St. John. This serves as an initiator for conversations, a meeting ground for sharing experiences, and provides comfort in understanding that one is not alone. I sincerely hope that this movement will create long-lasting impulses for change.

Anger: The Motor or Change

Anger can feel good, or anger can be a tremendous burden, depending on the person experiencing it, and the duration of the emotion’s grip on a person’s mood, relationships, and everyday life.

During my training, I interned with a psychotherapist in Berlin. He had a client who suffered from deep depression. She had a partner who was boundlessly cruel with her. She seemed to internalize this cruelty and weaponize it against herself, continuously feeding layers upon layers of self-loathing and self-destructive behaviors. Over time, the therapist seemed to reach the limits of talk therapy, something that often happens: he just couldn’t reach her anymore. He decided to try something unconventional. He held up one of those big, bouncy exercise balls, and gave her a bat, saying: “This ball is your partner. You can hit him”. She began lethargically swatting at the ball held in his arms. Then the energy began to rise. Her sadness was shifting to anger. She began to earnestly hit the ball, and the energy grew and grew into a fury, which only ended when she was utterly exhausted. The room was filled with energy. I will never forget this charged feeling and this moment, which marked the beginning of fundamental change for her. Her progression from there was certainly not easy, but it was indeed moving forward after years of stagnation. Anger had brought her out of sorrow and self-loathing.

Indifference and Learned Helplessness

Sometimes I find myself wishing that certain musician-clients were angrier.

Some seem beaten down, blank, unresponsive - adults stuck in the trap of having been well-behaved children, continuously praised and transactionally loved for their accomplishments and good behaviors. They don’t seem to see the water they swim in. They’ve been musicians since age 5 or 6, and don’t know any other world. They may cognitively understand that certain behaviors of colleagues, teachers or employers are inappropriate or abusive, but they don’t seem to accompany these thoughts with vibrant, emotional responses. They don’t growl or bite.

They remind me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Panther:

His gaze, forever blocked by bars,
is so exhausted it takes in nothing else.
All that exists for him are a thousand bars.
Beyond the thousand bars, no world.

The strong, supple pacing
moves in narrowing circles.
It is a dance at whose center
a great will is imprisoned.

Now and again the veil over his pupils
silently lifts. An image enters,
pierces the numbness,
and dies away in his heart.

Raine Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

These clients may be caught in cycles of what we call learned helplessness: a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly. If the person believes that they are unable to control or change the situation, they do not continue to try, even if opportunities for change are available.

When Anger Hurts

Anger is a powerful elixer, but it can burn: It can burn oneself and it can burn others. There can be physical manifestations of holding prolonged anger in the body, which can contribute to heart disease, hormonal imbalance, and other chronic stress-related diseases.

Anger can, of course, burn others, and there’s often collateral damage when people get caught in the crossfire of a hot and wild anger.

One can respect and use anger to make necessary changes in one’s life, and at the same time, one must recognize that anger can hurt, and hurt deeply. It’s an emotion that is at its best when it runs its course by being channeled into skilful and reflected action, enabling us to make creative change to a culture or situation made sick by layers of habitual and reflexive exploitation and oppression.

The storyteller and psychologist Sharon Blackie writes:

“At its best, anger is a perfectly rational as well as an emotional response to threat, violation, and immorality of all kinds. It helps us to bridge the gap between the dreary unendurable which seems to exist now, and a more beautiful world of vivid possibility which stretches ahead of us into the future.”

Necessary Anger

Without anger, we would probably never make big changes in our lives and in our society.

Martin Luther King wrote about the learning process needed to channel his anger into activism: "If you internalize anger, and you don't find a channel, it can destroy you… Hate is too great a burden to bear”.

Musicians: we need you to clearly look at the water you swim in and to make the kinds of changes that will make the industry better for yourselves and for others.

I wish for you a productive, non-violent (for yourselves and others), and creative kind of anger, one that leads to a better reality for you and for our industry.

After that, I hope you experience peaceful contentment rooted in your meaningful contributions to the world.

16: The Water Fish Swim In… Musicians’ Cultures and The Power of Anger