5. Music-Mind: Making Music in Difficult Times
A dear friend and musician with one of the deepest and most open hearts imaginable, the phenomenal pianist Richie Beirach, sent me this message the other day in response to the onslaught of difficult world news last week coming from Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, and even Maine, of all places :
„Oh, on the outside I’m ok. It even looks like I’m in perfect control, I’m sure like you.
But UNDERNEATH I AM A SEETHING MASS OF MURDER AND ABJECT DEPRESSION, ANGER, AND DEEP ABYSMAL SADNESS.”
Richie, a veritable life-philosopher, went on, describing his process in encountering the difficulties of the world: “The truth, even if it’s tough, hurtful, and raw, is BEAUTIFUL because it exposes the inner core, which I believe, is LOVE ! Sounds conflicted right ?? No, I don’t think so, because there is a wonderful, if painful, realization when the truth about something finally COMES OUT even if it’s A HORRIBLE TRUTH. Why ?? It’s a big RELIEF, Relief from ‘petty daily bullshit’, lost time with illness, the tragedy of dear friends passing way too soon, etc., etc.“
This all got us talking about how musicians process being in a world with one devastating event happening after the other.
Inevitably, we spoke about …
THAT BERNSTEIN QUOTE.
You know the one…
Leonard Bernstein on JFK, following his assassination in Nov. 1963: “This will be our reply to violence : to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly, than ever before. And with each note we will honor his spirit, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the triumph of the mind.“
I first started seeing THAT BERNSTEIN QUOTE being thrown around in c. 2010, just as social media memes were becoming a thing.
People used it for Natural Disasters. They used it again for Mass Shootings. They used it when Wars Started.
It comes out so much, in response to so many things, that it starts to ring hollow. Maybe it always was hollow. Maybe it was just the affable and sympathetic Leonard Bernstein just trying to make people feel better.
Sometimes the world just does seem irreparable.
Sometimes we just don’t know what to say to that.
In the face of something big, sometimes the words don’t measure up.
Sometimes the music can’t heal the wounds.
(…but sometimes it can and does )
This is a humbling realization: sometimes music helps, but sometimes not… or… sometimes it can’t help right away.
Healing musical experiences often happen spontaneously and unexpectedly.
Composer Charles Ives described an episode in New York of spontaneous communal musical processing of the immense fear and uncertainty arising from the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 which dragged the USA into active participation in the First World War:
„Leaving the office and going uptown about 6 o'clock, I took the Third Avenue "L" at the Hanover Square Station. As I came on the platform, there was quite a crowd waiting for the trains, which had been blocked lower down, and while waiting there, a hand-organ, or hurdy gurdy was playing on a street below. Some workmen sitting on the side of the tracks began to whistle the tune, and others began to sing or hum the refrain. A workman with a shovel over his shoulder came on the platform and joined in the chorus, and the next man, a Wall Street banker with white spats and a cane, joined in it, and finally it seemed to me that everybody was singing this tune, and they didn't seem to be singing for fun, but as a natural outlet for what their feelings had been going through all day long. There was a feeling of dignity all through this.“
So many profound music experiences occur without foresight or planning. But many of us musicians feel compelled, even pressured, to say, sing, or play something in response to massive world events, often as quickly as we can get our tooshes to our instruments (and to our Instagram feed), without giving ourselves much-needed time for processing and reflection.
Are We Needed?
Many musicians suffer from the belief that they are unable to make a tangible and meaningful contribution toward addressing urgent societal and geopolitical issues.
For some, nothing short of “Going to Moscow and Punching Vladimir Putin in the Balls” would be enough in “Doing something Real in the World” (an actual quote from a counseling session).
An article yesterday in the New York Times highlighted the tensions arising from these kinds of issues in the Barenboim-Said Academy, a music conservatory in Berlin whose aim is to not only train excellent musicians, mostly coming from the Middle East and North Africa, but to create an educational environment fostering peaceful coexistence and reflective world citizens.
Full article here.
In this article, Katia Abdel Kadar, a 23-year-old Palestinian violinist from Ramallah said: “We will not bring peace, and we will not solve the world’s problems as much as we might want to, but we create a space, and that’s what is missing in the world, not only in the Middle East. Places for people to be accepted by the other.”
What a beautiful way of describing a tangible and achievable effort in healing the world, from an individual artist’s perspective.
Music Instrumentalized
Musicians have a heavy load to carry.
Google “How Music Can Heal the World” and you’ll get 111,000,000 ways of instrumentalizing music: as a means of social cohesion, as a component of health care, as a ‘mood-booster’, as a vibrational tool generating communal harmony, etc., etc., etc.
This is all wonderful. Music IS a powerful tool. One of my favorite examples of how powerful all of this can be is in the documentary “Alive Inside” in which elderly people with dementia are enlivened through contact with music:
At the same time, instrumentalizing music can backfire. When we constantly assert the need to quantify and qualify the good deeds achieved by music, we make music jump through hoops in order to justify its very existence, applying an onerous pressure and weight onto a mysterious process.
Composer John Cage wrote: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry”.
Can we allow music to exist on its own terms, or does music have to do more in order to ‘earn its bread’, to earn its right to continue existing in our world?
Music has been with us since we’ve been human, as the 60,000-year-old bone flute shows:
To have less music in the world means to have less human-ness. Music asserts our humanity just as much as walking upright does. Do we constantly need to justify the need to walk upright? Of course not. Then give poor music a break! It’s simply part of who we are, homo sapiens!
Sometimes music contributes to creating world peace. Sometimes it accompanies us as we have a moment on the toilet.
It’s just what we do as upright apes.
I’d like to now speak from the perspective of a former professional musician who experiences music nowadays with more distance and perhaps more of a sense of perspective.
In the throes of a professional musician’s life, I was often plagued by feelings that I was not contributing to society. Wrapped up in the ‘everydayness’ of a musician’s life, which included (alongside transcendent experiences) mind-numbing repetition and shocking pettiness, I often imagined what my sense of life purpose would feel like as a climate scientist or journalist covering war, which seemed, to me, more ‘relevant’ undertakings.
From my perspective now, as a psychologist and passionate hobby musician, I can confidently say:
Music is essential.
Without music we would be less human.
Musicians… We NEED You!
You don’t believe me? Okay, fair enough.
Maybe some of these quotes can help drive that message home:
“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”
Confucius, The Book of Rites
“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
Alphonse de Lamartine
“Where words fail, music speaks.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Music acts like a magic key, to which the most tightly closed heart opens.”
Maria von Trapp
“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..”
Pablo Casals
Convinced yet? ;-)