Music is Love

I spent the last two weeks traveling to DC and Chicago, spending time with family, friends, and arts colleagues. Especially toward the end of my travels, I was struck by the number of folks who candidly discussed experiences of abuse, mental illness, dark times in their lives, etc. I opened the door with my own candor, and it was incredible to see the passion and high percentage of the response that discussing my own struggles encouraged.

The beautiful thing is to see how these people have taken their experiences and channeled what they learned, and all their grief, into improving others’ lives through art and music. As administrators, performers, technicians, even publicists (those crazy kids), each experience and interaction with an artistic experience, bringing the art to life becomes an act of love, positive energy improving the world.  Those conversations energized this bleary-eyed traveler, and gave me new hope and a new perspective and appreciation for what we do.

Let me tell you something I’ve discovered: Life is HARD.  Jelalluddin Rumi is well-known for his treatise on the Open Secret:

“When we hide the secret underbelly from each other, then both people go away wondering, “How come she has it all together? How come her marriage/job/town/family works so well? What’s wrong with me?” We feel vaguely diminished from this ordinary interaction, and from hundreds of similar interactions we have from month to month and year to year. When we don’t share the secret ache in our hearts-the normal bewilderment of being human-it turns into something else. Our pain, and fear, and longing, in the absence of company, become alienation, and envy, and competition.” – Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

The collective, connective experience of art becomes a positive channel for the pain, longing, alienation, and competition. Creating something beautiful banishes the darkness, connects us with total strangers and those closest to us. Rumi addresses the Soul: ‘You dance inside my heart where no one sees you, but sometimes I do. And that sight becomes this art.’

On Thursday, I attended the CSO concert, with Leonard Slatkin conducting: prior to it, I was overwhelmed, tired, overextended, Chicago was kicking my ass. I picked a fight about something absurdly trivial with my host.  Walking into the hall, the Maya Angelou quote popped into my head “Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”

I took a deep breath as Slatkin walked onstage: I have a soft spot in my heart for the man, since he was the conductor at the NSO during some of my formative orchestral experiences as a kid growing up in DC. The program opened with In the South (Alassio), a concert overture by Elgar (many jokes were made about his work being derivative of Strauss). How dramatically, noticeably, my mood improved after just the first overture: Elgar’s sunny positivity, the absolute beauty of hearing the wind and brass of the Chicago Freaking Symphony Orchestra, the composer’s ability to create something lovely despite the fact that the intended inspiration did not materialize as he’d hoped. All of it was energizing, encouraging, joyful.

Benjamin Britten complained: “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love.” And that is precisely why music is so perfect – that poignant beauty proves we’re not alone in our struggles. Tolstoy gets it: “Music is the shorthand of emotion,” but Beethoven says it best of all: “Music is the meditation between the intellectual and sensuous life.”

Karl Paulnack, the oft-emailed speaker at the Boston Conservatory, invites us to “Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects…If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.”

On Thursday night, I was that weary soul. It is our work as administrators, technicians, and especially publicists, to connect people with the art that heals their souls. Music is love. We turn our past pain into something beautiful, and each experience becomes grist for the mill, motivating us each day to wake up and do this impossible thing of creating beauty in a torn world.