Author: beatinginair

“With great power, comes great responsibility”

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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.

Naming What We Leave Behind

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by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

This new undertaking had its origin for me over eight years ago, during my last sabbatical leave from my academic position. There was no thought at the time of starting a blog. I scarcely knew what a blog was, and certainly had never read one (as far as I was aware). I was just standing on the street on a beautiful, clear Pacific Northwest summer evening looking at a blue sky crisscrossed with contrails, the thin white cloud-like lines that trace the paths of passing jets at high altitudes. I walked the two short blocks home and wrote this:

I caught myself looking up at the sky tonight. It is nothing that I have not done in the past, but I have allowed myself this year the luxury of looking more intently, longer, and with less distraction. I saw line after line across the sky, some thin, some thick. It seemed to me that these were perhaps not clouds at all, at least natural clouds, but rather the remains of contrails left by airplanes passing across the sky.

At first, the thought that these lines in the sky were phantom-like shadows of human passage crossed my mind. Then it occurred to me how inaccurate this characterization was, and how inapt the metaphor would be.

Contrails are not made up of phantoms; of nothing. They are not shadow. They are substance. They are air disturbed. They are moisture that was hiding in that air forced to change its position, its status, and its aspect, and to show itself.

What I found attractive at that moment was the romantic notion of the thing that in passing, leaves nothing of itself, but the effects of which can be seen in all that it touches in its pathway. It seemed to me an apt metaphor for both a teacher and a conductor. And so, I concluded…

Hopefully, I am, or will leave more contrail than shadow. I hope that I will, in the coming years, disturb lots of moisture, and cut a wide, but gentle swath in the air through which I pass.

Of course, that’s not really the nature of a contrail. While some of the white, icy fog that one sees from the ground is made up of moisture that was already there in the air before the plane went by, the larger portion is apparently a toxic soup of condensation from the engine exhaust, carbon dioxide that will help to further change the earth’s climate on our behalf, and residual droplets of jet fuel. No matter how attractive the image of the contrail was to me as a musician, a teacher and a conductor, it’s one thing to privately harbor romantic notions based on scientific fallacies. It’s quite another to announce them to the world. Having learned something about the actual nature of a contrail, it became obvious to me that to use it as a title would conjure up less than appealing images for some and perpetuate my own ignorance for others. It’s at this point that the quote with which I began that musing nine years ago seems most appropriate.

“It’s clouds’ illusions I recall. I really don’t know clouds at all.” (Joni Mitchell)

Accordingly, I have chosen a title for my cyber-soapbox that is much closer to my experience and that I do (I think) understand.

Beating in Air is a bit of wordplay that recalls a more common expression, “beating the air,” which means an effort without effect; a pointless pursuit. In a musical context this phrase, and more often its variant, “beating in air,” has multiple meanings. It has been used as a metaphorical description for a repetitive gesture that engenders much ado in a musical surface, but creates little or no structural motion. It has been used to describe the physical phenomenon of sound itself, especially in the way that its waves crash against our ear drums. And it has been used as a literal description of the conductorial gesture, one that creates no sound, but nevertheless embodies and imparts a musical conception.

The phrase, “beating in air,” therefore carries a tinge from its original version of something that is essentially futile. In fact, it puts me in mind of my recurring fantasy about performing a recital of works for solo conductor. Perhaps that’s just what this blog will be.

Yet the beating in air that a conductor does is useful when it becomes the object of the attention and cooperation of a community of skilled musicians. As they open their minds and hearts to her, and she reciprocates, her silent gestures can flower into a dialog. Where there is a dialog, all sorts of things can change.

Thus, my hope for this little region of the cyber-sphere: that in the fleeting moments you spend here, you will find something to pique your thoughts and set you off on your own flights of fancy or contemplation. Some of what you will find here will be about music and musicians. Some will be more about life in the world today. While I won’t promise not to be political, I will endeavor to ask questions more than I make judgments.

While I have rejected the image of the contrail as the best metaphor for what I hope to accomplish, I still hope to cut a wide, but gentle swath in the air through which I pass.