While the origin of this quotation is a little murky, it’s often thought to have come from eighteenth-century France. To be honest, I think I may have first heard it from Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. But that doesn’t diminish its power for me. It still seems like something that we all should keep in mind. So, I thought it would be good to spend a little time in this post explaining how I believe this aphorism applies to musicians.

More than ten years ago I signed up for a wonderful faculty seminar at Pacific Lutheran University as part of a new campus-wide focus on vocation. The Wild Hope Project, as it was then called, was funded by a grant from the Lily Foundation. That seminar and subsequent ones have increasingly focused my mind on the ways in which we musicians think about or don’t think about our work. While it is clear that musicians generally feel deeply a sense of calling and mission, it also seems that there are aspects of our work and its implications that we rarely, if ever address.

It has been gratifying to see in the last decade or so a flowering of research and writing on the power of music to help us tap into our spiritual selves and even to heal us. I have especially enjoyed the series of three books by James Jordan, The Musician’s Soul, The Musician’s Spirit, and The Musician’s Walk. All three explore the spiritual nature of rehearsal and performance – especially for the conductor. There has also been a great deal of energy among both musicians and neuroscientists around the effects of music in the brain, and through it, on healing. Recently I became aware of a book titled Waking the Spirit by professional musician, Andrew Schulman, in which he gives vivid and riveting accounts of the healing power of music in his life and the lives of others.

This focus is wonderful and gratifying for me. As a life-long musician I have long been convinced of the power of music even if I could not at any given moment describe how that power works. Yet in the context of my exploration of vocation, it seems to me that there is more to be said.

If merely hearing music can have the powerful positive effects on individuals that Schulman describes in his book, then there must also be ways in which music can have negative impacts. I realize that saying this runs counter in an essential way not only to the direction of recent literature on the subject, but to centuries of human observations about music’s beneficial nature. I also realize that I might fairly be seen as trying to resurrect some old, simplistic and largely discredited notions about music’s ability to directly control our passions, even our personalities.

To be clear, I don’t assert that music has some chemical, electro-magnetic, sono-kinetic or even magical ability to manipulate physical states, thoughts or emotions. I truly believe that music is a kind of communication; a language that requires reception and cognitive processing to have any effect. That its effect is primarily emotional seems clear, but it is an emotional effect to which we mentally agree, not one that is directly induced. Given that layer of mediation, music becomes something that can help us process emotional states, or provide emotional context for the things that we experience. As Suzanne K. Langer described it, “[works of art] are projections of ‘felt life,’ as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures. They are images of feeling, that formulate it for our cognition…”

At the risk of seeming to throw cold water on our celebration of the wonderful benefits of music for human health, I do have a concern. Like all things that have the capacity to make us feel better, we can seek that benefit even when feeling better is not what we really need. There are times when we are confronted with things that are worthy of our disdain, our ridicule, our disgust or our fear; times when pain and revulsion are the appropriate responses. Musicians, and all artists, can mitigate or soften those responses, or help facilitate them. Knowing which is needed – or knowing when to be silent – is as much a part of our charge as knowing how to soothe or heal. Schulman realizes that even in his work as a medical musician, that the wrong music, or any music at all, is sometimes not appropriate or helpful. He remains mindful of the bedrock principle of medicine to avoid harm.

It’s wonderful to see the growing confirmation of what I have long intuitively believed – that music is a fundamental part of our being. I rejoice especially that our technology-obsessed culture is becoming more and more open to tapping its power. My concern is that all musical practitioners meet that openness with a clear-eyed understanding of the power that they have, and a commitment to using it appropriately.