What does music mean?

A rather dramatic start to the day: I wake up in my Cambridge hotel to discover my alarm hasn’t gone off and my train leaves in 30 minutes - I still have to pack and get half-way across town. One tremendous flurry of activity later (sorry hotel neighbours!), I make it to the station with 10 minutes to spare, only to discover that the hotel staff hadn’t changed the time on the TV clock last month and I’ve actually got 70 minutes to wait. So I’m sitting in a local café and it occurs to me I could use the time to write my first blog post in years (oh, and now that my phone has a little charge in it, the alarm has just gone off - thanks!). 

Why the long gap? Well, I have a horror of banality (I’ve never been good at small talk), and the idea of repetitively posting cities and repertoire seems like an exercise in futility. I need to have something to say - actually, same as in the music I play - and somehow I had largely exhausted the topics I found interesting in previous posts. However, as I sit here, I feel the after-effects of some deeply satisfying concerts and can sense how the ground has shifted in recent years.

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Last year I gave a lecture at the St Magnus Festival called “What Does Music Mean?”, an attempt to  explore the mysterious and wonderful phenomenon of that shared silence which can build up in successful concerts. (I’m giving it again in a couple of weeks in Glasgow under the RSNO’s auspices). This has been a central concern for me over the years, how to create this sense of shared spare with the listener, and as I get older it seems to become simpler to achieve. Broadly, I think 3 areas are profoundly implicated in this process. Most importantly, there is one’s concept of the music, how one finds a sense of meaning in what one plays; this is a huge topic, involving the fullness of one’s intellect and emotion. There is the ability to convey that sense of meaning through one’s technical command of the instrument. And finally there is the ability to remain calm and centred in performance. 

In my experience, the first and third of these topics tend to be rather under-explored in the training of musicians and it’s easy to understand why. For the first, teachers have to regularly withhold their own opinions to encourage students to get in touch with what the music means to them; this is not easy - it’s very satisfying expressing one’s own convictions about music, especially when a student doesn’t seem to have strong convictions of their own, and leaving an open space in which a student might initially flounder can be uncomfortable for all concerned.  In the third area, we’re dealing with some of our deepest drives and fears, and often teachers haven’t found a productive way to deal with their own anxieties. Even if they have, how appropriate is it for a teacher to be delving into the kind of territory more usually explored in psychotherapy? These are not easy questions.

I’ve written more than once on this blog about performance anxieties, and it’s in this area that things seem to have shifted for me in recent years. I’m reading a book which I think goes to the core of the issue - “Self Compassion” by Kristen Neff. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read in relation to performance anxiety even though it hardly addresses the topic at all. Instead, it examines the habits of self-attack which it seems to me are the driving force of excessive nerves. I wonder if the broader significance of this is clear? Far from navel-gazing, it is a very practical issue - a performer is greatly hampered in expressive their feelings through the music when they are very nervous. Imagine trying to get to know someone who is desperately hoping to impress you - maybe a job interview - and their nervousness is tangible. You can’t get a proper sense of who they are because their nerves are what you viscerally feel. Something similar can happen in concerts, with the true flow of feeling being choked off by nerves. Because the music is an intermediary, the audience may not be aware of the nervousness, but they are much less likely to feel connected and engaged with what the performer is doing. After years of work and thought, I’m happy to say that these issues seem to become clearer; it’s not that anxieties don’t emerge, but that it is becoming simpler to settle them down. In short, I’m not quite so hard on myself. Simple to say, but if someone was able to bottle that quality they’d be a billionaire.