In my twenties, I decided on my life’s goal.
To improve as an artist and a human being through my daily practice of music, every day until my last.
I decided that I needed three things to accomplish this goal.
- A community to which I can contribute, and from which I can learn and be inspired.
- To practice daily, and to perform often.
- To be happy.
I now have another goal to add.
To promote music as a healing and uniting agent in this world.
My conviction that music has the power to heal and unite stems from a research I have partaken and what I learned from it, at the Houston Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine. There, I met many researchers who are working to quantify the benefit of music through the uses of fMRI and EEG.
Music does make us happier, healthier, and stronger.
And the communal experience of music enhances our human quality as a social animal. They inspire our innate ability to empathize, and love/support/help each other.
However, I am equally convinced that the traditional Western concert format is not the most effective way to achieve its full potential as a healing and uniting agent. This conviction is based on the discoveries I made through the research for my doctoral dissertation on the genesis of memorization as a piano performance practice. It required me to look into the historical background to the establishment of our performance practice in the nineteenth century. There, I found out that behind the foundation of our concert format was the establishment of music as a branch of fine arts, and aesthetic as a branch of philosophy. Fine arts made it necessary for the music to disassociate itself from all social function, and present music as an abstract pursuit of the notion of beauty. Kant and his followers promoted music as the most abstract of all arts and tasked it with a philosophical mission to help us transcend our own perception.
Music was not to be enjoyed anymore but to be worshipped.
Thus, the ritualization of concerts and strict protocol as to how it was to be performed and listened to.
What I will propose as an alternative way of experiencing music communally will go against roughly 150 years of tradition. What do I need to keep going?
- I need to write – writing helps me keep my faith, develop my ideas and spread my thoughts.
- I need opportunities to try my ideas.
- I need allies – in the form of friends, collaborators, advisors and sponsors.
Please consider being my ally. Right now, everything helps! Nothing is too small.
Engage me to have me try my ideas: at your home, your children’s schools, hospitals, nursing homes…
And thank you for reading.