Here is the second part of Ruika Lin's guest post on the importance of music to her growth as a student and a person.
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(IV)
“Music is so powerful that it
needs to be used for some kind of redeeming work, you know, to lift people’s
spirit, lift their souls.”
- Bobby McFerrin, vocalist,
conductor
“Now a fundamental and really
viscerally important experience for me, in terms of music, has been my
adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet
in my view, but a country which, through its musical culture, has
taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music making can come
deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust… Where there is trust, there
is music, and by extension, life. Where there is no trust, the music quite
simply withers away.”
-
Charles Hazlewood, conductor, advocate for broadening access to orchestra music
“The conductor of an
orchestra doesn’t make a sound…He depends, for his power, on his ability to
make other people powerful… I realized my job was to awaken possibility in
other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. And you
know how you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you
know you’re doing it… And I say, it’s appropriate for us to ask the question,
who are we being as we go back out into the world? And you know, I have a
definition of success. For me, it’s very simple. It’s not about wealth and fame
and power. It’s about how many shining eyes I have around me.”
- Benjamin
Zander, conductor, educator
 |
| Charles Hazelwood |
Music can often seem individualistic. We chat
with others about our different tastes in music, but as individual performers
or listeners, we interpret music, or any creative genres for that matter,
through our own lenses and thought processes. However, just as Charles
Hazlewood said: “music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to
places where mere words cannot”. Because in the moments of musical experience, musicians
and audience are all connected through an unshakable bond that is based on mutual
trust and respect. The bond, amazingly, is music itself. When we immerse
ourselves in the presence of music, trust grows and friendship blossoms; and as
connections are established, musical performance fundamentally progresses to a
new level.
For many years, I have been deeply moved by
beautiful musical performances, but struggled to interpret the similar level of
emotional influence through my own performances, at least as I heard myself
play on the piano. Technical skills aside, sometimes even a simple piece, I
found it difficult to be moved by my own performances. I thought to myself, if
I can’t even inspire my own thinking through my music, how can I inspire the
audience? The inconsistency in my listening and performing has baffled me quite
a while, until the concept of trust came to mind. All these years, the
inconsistency does not exist in my ears – I have yet to developed trust in my
music that will ultimately touch people’s heart, and although hard to admit, I
probably have not learned to develop trust in my audience either. The reason
was possibly years of technical training, which established that making
mistakes is not excusable – I had forgotten or more likely, been unaware of why
I loved playing music in the first place.
And what’s leadership without trust? Leaders
empower, inspire, and serve by establishing trusts with and among others. And
as music is so power that it “lifts people’s spirits”, I can only imagine the
tremendous opportunity of leveraging music to contribute to something bigger,
be it conflict resolution, leadership development, or simply, meaningful human connections.
(V)
“Describing music and musical
performance is deceptively difficult. Unlike writing about theatre or art,
where the writer can include plot summaries or reproductions of images, music
is abstract and elusive. Writers resorting to historical facts about composers
rarely give us a sense of the music. Writing that is so technical that the
reader needs a companion score and dictionary to decipher it is even worse.
Then there is the “oh my, isn’t it wonderful” school, who feel that
classical music is beyond emotional or intellectual explication.”
-
Dr. Thomas Wolf, musician, author, Principal at WolfBrown
I’m not
sure in which school does my writing lie. I am not even attempting to write
about a piece of music or musical performances, knowing that it’s nearly
impossible to convey, in words, the emotional experience of listening. My only
hope is that I have done a decent job sharing my thoughts on why music matters.
(VI)
“But every once in a while,
very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually
become transcendent. And I know you know what I’m talking about, because I know
you’ve all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was
like time would stop… And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be
merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on
fire with divinity.”
- Elizabeth Gilbert, author
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