This morning when I awoke, I found that the music I had listened to yesterday was still in my head and my heart. My husband and I had attended a concert the night before where we heard a tabla drumming master perform.
I often think about what in my life leaves the most memorable impressions. If I sit in a meeting for an hour, what am I left with? Often, it’s the expression on someone’s face, or something they said that resonates with me, or the way the light filters into the room.
I also wonder about what goes unnoticed, slipping away as the seconds click by on the clock. Unfortunately, many moments pass when I’m drifting in my own imagination, distracted, or just in a state of dullness I refer to as “a low hum.”
But music wakes me up, even when I don’t like it. It soothes me when I do love the sound and transforms my state in ways that are a mystery to me.
What transforms you, gives you that feeling of being uplifted and inspired and changes you in the moment?
My associate Kate Dwyer sent me the following article about music. It’s an excerpt from a speech by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, welcoming the freshman class.
“The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: The Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible, moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
“One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.
“He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
“Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music?
“And yet from the camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen: Many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, ‘I am alive, and my life has meaning.’”
Whatever it is that gives you that spark of life, realize that it’s not just worth doing, it is essential to your physical well-being and emotional survival. Find time to build it into your day. It will change you, I promise!
Kathleen