Music in community, human connections and transcendence

Choral music, or music created in community, gives us a unique means for personal discovery, and provides empathetic connection across groups and through time.  I’d like to share some everyday examples and some published explorations of music’s varied effects on human emotions and interactions.

Ragazzi boys are interested in more than their own personal experiences.  They often talk of their joy in being able to move audience members with their music.  They seek meaning through (and for) the work they do.  Like all of us, the boys look to connect experiences with emotional truth, thus transcending the everyday.  I hear so often how even rehearsals provide an escape from the worries of the world.  There is power in music - in community - to change lives.

In the August 27, 2012 New Yorker, biologist and neurologist Oliver Sacks recalls experiences from his youth.  Known for his brilliant work on the brain and most recently for his book Musicophilia, Sacks describes how he became interested in this subject.  In his early experimental years, he indulged in some questionable drug use as he searched to transcend the everyday. But then, drug free, he attended a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City where he was transported by music.  He heard…”a glorious river of music, hundreds of years long, flowing from Monteverdi’s mind into my own.”  He achieved this transcendence through music.

As Sacks continued to explore the brain, he was fascinated by how there can be a disconnect between perceptions and feelings.  When this occurs one can correctly identify an event or situation, yet fail to connect it with the appropriate feelings.  As Sacks himself continued to search for a combination of intellectual excitement and emotional engagement, he discovered joy in his life’s work, much of which explores the effects of music on human neurology. Sacks realized he had a talent to share, discovered personal meaning, and was able to transcend the mundane world.

Sacks’ experiences show how we long to find beauty and meaning in the world.  David Byrne, of the Talking Heads, writes in Smithsonian about the mirror neurons that have been discovered in our brains. Mirror neurons can be seen to fire in response to other people’s emotions and so when someone feels an emotion, people around them experience the same feelings in parallel. Empathy is built into our neurophysiology.

When music is created in community, there is a combined intellectual and emotional shared experience among the musicians that then projects into the audience. As we hear from Oliver Sacks, listening to great music can lead one to sense a power and a freedom, totally beyond the ordinary.

Since we have the capacity to influence each other with our feelings, we want to create beauty and to give our audiences a transcendent experience. To do that requires that we keep working to explore our own perceptions, discovering the layers of emotional truth that reside in our work.  There’s a story circulating around the internet that tells of a woman who complained about her neighbor’s dirty wash hanging on the line outside her window.  She continued to complain but one day said to her husband, “Something’s happened. The wash is properly clean today.” The husband said, “I washed our windows.”  Ragazzi works together to create meaning and transcendence in all our lives and to share it with others.  We seek to be clean windows and allow others to see the beauty in the world that we see when we perform.