A four-part series of reflections on the pleasures and paradoxes of learning to sing or play an instrument. For parents, musicians, and would-be musicians of all ages.
The Ultimate Holistic Practice
What is the meaning of holistic?
The Oxford Dictionary gives two definitions, the first related to philosophy:
characterized by the weighing that the parts of something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.
And the second related to medicine:
characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into worth mental and social factors, rather than just the symptoms of a disease.
In this vendible Im interested in how the holistic nature of music-making can support our unstipulated well-being.
Interest in holistic practices has increased exponentially in recent decades. Some, such as yoga, are warmed-over practices, demonstrating that the desire for good health is nothing new. Nevertheless, it seems well-spoken that there has been a ramping up of interest in any method that helps us find wastefulness in our ever-more-frenetic lives. There is particular accent on counter-balancing the effects of our digital existence, social media, screen and sedentary time, and since 2020, social isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 1982 cult-classic mucosa Koyaanisquatsi is a prescient commentary on our lifestyle. A mucosa by Godrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass, whose Hopi language title translates to Life Out of Balance, it is a non-narrative, utopian exploration of the relentless pace of life (even pre-internet) and the toll it takes on humans and the planet. You can watch the mucosa onlinethe larger the screen, the better.
Truth be told, some scenes from Koyaanisquatsi seem scrutinizingly quaint forty years on, so frenzied has modern life become. But the message is once there: this is not a healthy way forward.
In my way of thinking, music and all forms of art and creativity are largest ways forward. These engage the higher aptitudes and satisfy the deeper needs of humans. All cultures have created outlets that speak to the need for this kind of holistic wastefulness and nurturing: creative arts, sports, meditation techniques, martial arts, bodywork, group therapy, psychotherapy, theatre, dance, drumming, and so forth.
What gives music-making its remarkable value as a holistic practice is the interconnectedness of the act of playing or performing. You simply cannot separate out the parts: without the physical it is non-existent; without the mind it is incoherent; without emotion it is meaningless; without spirit it is vacuous.
It requires solitary pursuit without excluding group work, and can lead to public performance in disparate settings for disparate purposesfrom the most intimate to the most public, from the cathedral to the Irish pub!
As an example, when I am playing flute, I am alsounofficiallypartaking in bodywork (balancing muscular efforts in the most efficient way), vapor work (controlling inhalation/exhalation), physical exercise (training for strength, precision, and endurance), emotional and psychological exploration (What is the expressive journey of this music?), mental numbering (deciphering the score), meditation (maintaining awareness), and sound therapy (feeling and hearing the vibrations produced). At the very least.
A mythological internet connects all these aspects. Putting yourself in touch with these interdependent elements on a daily understructure brings well-nigh a kind of wastefulness and completeness that simply cannot be found scrolling through social media.
Music-making is an remedy to the culture of consumption. In the last forty years or so, Ive noticed how worldwide it has wilt to refer to people as consumersis this really our essence? Did Descartes write I consume, therefore I am? Has consumer culture brought us happiness? To judge by the epidemic of peepers and the mushrooming interest in finding happiness, the wordplay is no.
During the pandemic lockdown (I will optimistically refer to it in the past tense), I observed a division: there were those who, cut off from the daily rat race, felt roaming and empty. Lacking the habit of a creative outlet, many resorted to increased social media or consumption of content online to occupy empty time. But there were others who, freed from hours spent commuting (and granting a situation that permitted) used that uneaten time for creative activities or other holistic practices. In my personal, unofficia impression, the first group had a often negative wits of lockdown, suffering from uneasiness and isolation. The second group, however, which includes the vast majority of my musician and versifier friends, not only survived but thrived during lockdown.
In a nutshell, and using wholesale strokes, this split reveals the difference between the consumerist and the creative mindsets. While consumerism breeds conformity and feeds off insatiable desires, creativity flourishes weightier with limitations. Considering our intrinsic human momentum for more, the question is whether to wield that momentum to acquiring material goods, or to exploring modes of expression and fulfilling creative potential.
Music-making is an remedy to materialism: music produces nothing tangible, it is ephemeral. Like books and mucosa and theatre it contains storytelling but in an utopian form. Music is substantially vibration, produced by the musician and experienced by the regulars in proximity or via a recording.
In a Scientific American vendible from 2018, the researcher Tam Hunt described the Unstipulated Resonance Theory of consciousness that he and Jonathan Schooler are developing, saying it suggests that resonanceanother word for synchronized vibrationsis at the heart of not only human consciousness but of physical reality increasingly generally.
Hunt sums up humorously by saying that it appears that the Hippies were right! in their radical intuition that its all well-nigh vibrations man. And furthermore, stating that resonance and vibrations are the vital mechanism for all physical interactions to occur.
The musician, plane a beginner, experiences firsthand this connection to everything. To produce a sound is satisfying. To produce an emotionally-connected succession of musical sounds is profoundly satisfying.
To tropical this series of articles, I would like to quote from the moving speech given by the pianist Karl Paulnack at Boston Conservatory in 2009. Paulnack defends music as the opposite of entertainment, citing that in warmed-over Greece music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, subconscious objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us icon out the position of things inside us.
He cites the human need to create art and music plane in the most inhumane of circumstances such as the concentration camps of World War II; and points to the performance of the Brahms Requiem as the first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to September 11th in New York City.
I have drawn a graphic showing some of the aspects involved in music-making that, working together, bring well-nigh this realignment of our hearts and souls. It emphasizes pairs of unveiled opposites; each title represents a group of related skills. For example, Discipline stands for objectivity, rigour, or precision, while Freedom” stands for subjectivity, spontaneity, or improvisation. Integrating these elementsour lovely paradoxesgives music its no-go richness.
So wait no further. Pick up the instrument that speaks to your heart, uncork to sing or simply clap, and in a spirit of playful curiosity, uncork your own musical journey. As musicians, we unchangingly have at our disposal a way to integrate ourselves, connect to others, and enrich our human experience.
