Saving your eyes for the music? Listen to this post instead:
Part Two: Healing
A spiritual wound that comes from a rending of the spirit is like a physical wound, and after it is healed externally, and the torn edges are scarred over, yet, strange to say, like a deep physical injury, it only heals inwardly by the force of life pushing up from within. —Leo Tolstoy
Tragedy has never inspired me to compose. I, personally, am not interested in writing music that represents or directly deals with suffering, be it my own or that of another. (Though I’m perfectly glad that other composers are.)
Pain, however, like the irritant in the oyster, makes an artistically productive starting place. Creativity, an expression of Tolstoy’s “force of life,” heals pain—or at least, it alleviates the suffering that pain generates. When I meet pain (an inevitable feature of life) with creativity (a response I can choose), antifragility and growth result.
Stated simply, I devote myself to music as a healing practice.
Even normal, everyday activities cause a sort of psychological plaque to accumulate in my mental space. Spending part of each day musically engaged is the only way I’ve discovered to really clean it out. When I don’t have the opportunity to practice or create, my mind can’t run this cleaning function, and I begin consuming extraordinary quantities of patience just in the course of ordinary interactions with other people.
This is a fancy way of saying that, without musical engagement, I get cranky.
And something more than cranky.
Without musical engagement, I lose something much more important than just my patience.
I lose some of my well-being, my sanity.
Finishing grad school and moving across the country (already a place of low momentum for a fledgling freelancer) happened, for me, to coincide with the first several months of the pandemic. Even though many simultaneous transitions in my life were joyous (living with my spouse full-time for the first time, fostering a ginormous puppy), I was disconnected from my musical purpose, and…
It’s difficult to put into words what happened. There wasn’t much tangible evidence that something was wrong. I still went about my day and “did stuff.”
But inside, a blanket had been thrown over my curiosity/ambition/energy/confidence/thirst-for-the-experience-of-the-world. I had more time than ever to practice, and less desire than ever. Which was really weird.
I discovered that as important as practicing and composing are for my mental hygiene, they’re not enough. If, over a long period of time, my musical activities are limited to what I do in isolation, I risk descending into a dark space.
Happily, I eventually gained outlets for sharing and teaching in my new location in the country and new place in life, and as I navigated my transition into adulthood and acquired a community of colleagues, listeners, and students, I regained the buoyant, robust “force of life” that presses up from the inside and has indeed healed the “rending of [my] spirit.”
Once again, this is not quite the same as “doing it for myself.” Yes, at the end of the day, I am doing it for myself. (Realistically, that’s the only reason anyone does anything—in an ultimate sense, anyway.)
But the “it” in “doing it for myself” is not an isolated activity. In order for me to receive the healing potential that it offers, my creative practice must result in something that I offer to others.
And happily, based on what others in my community have told me, I’m not the only one who benefits from this sharing.1
. . .
-> continue to Part Three: An Authentic Response
<- back to Part One: Existential Value
- It is my conviction that not every piece of art, music, or writing created for therapeutic purposes needs to be shared. And indeed, to be clear, I don’t share everything I create. ↩︎