Two recent concert experiences left me feeling particularly full. Though utterly different music from one another, they had a quality that made me (as someone who gives concerts occasionally) think a little more about what a concert is for. The value of live music has always been self-evident to me, but I think I have placed my finger more precisely on why.
Both recent concerts were joyful affairs with energetic music, but generally speaking my own tastes are more austere. I enjoy music like a winter landscape; beautiful, but also harsh and perhaps even threatening. Not necessarily comfortable, though I make room for that as well.
This is all to say, I have felt the same value at lots of different kinds of concerts and the diversity of the recent two reminded me of the many diverse and profound concert experiences I have been able to have. What is it that they all have in common? Why should we insist that attending live music is such a significant part of the humanities education we offer?
My new thesis is that a concert is an affirmation of the goodness of being alive.
But not just the nice parts of being alive. Music affirms the entire range of the givenness of human experience. A problem the philosophers of music have puzzled over for some time is why people enjoy music expressive of negative emotions. We generally avoid sadness and disappointment if we can, it goes, so why should a concert hall fill to see Dido and Aeneas cruelly separated from one another in the underworld? Why listen to Shostakovich’s tenth symphony roil with anger and bitterness?
Though we instinctively avoid the circumstances that lead to those affects, they are an unavoidable part of life. They are (please forgive me) the being of being a being. Life comes with joys and sorrows. These are given as well, some of the gifts of living.
For some of us it is hard to dwell in our emotions. Weddings and funerals (to span the range of social expression) both have a certain number of ceremonial aspects to slow down and facilitate the feelings we should have at such significant moments. Reflecting on our grandfather’s funeral my brother said, “That was one of the best days of my life.” I completely agreed, but it wasn’t until later I figured out why. In facing up to death and remembering a good life we felt so alive.
This is the role of the concert. It is a place to confront your most uncomfortable feelings, experience them in your body and remember, “This is part of being alive. This is good.”
The performer takes the responsibility of choosing some of the various shades of experience and inviting the audience into them. Our greatest performers are like priests of our emotion, ushering us to a space of deep presence with our inner selves.
When you play the searing D minor partita Sarabande (BWV 1004) you say that living people experience embodied sorrow. (JSB certainly did.)
When the subjects unite in the Jupiter symphony finale you say it is good to live together in diverse unity.
When “Freude” erupts from the chorus of Beethoven’s 9th symphony we say living humans experience unspeakable joy.
The concert is a sacred space to claim some small fragment of the human experience and invite your audience to feel it with you and to remember the gift it is. To live as embodied creatures in a state of reflection so that when we step back out to our living we don’t forget to be alive.