Feeling and Empathy
No matter what you are feeling, it will come out in your music.
There is no way to play a piece of music without revealing the emotions of the player in that moment. Music is reinterpreted every time it is played, for that moment, for that place, for that context, and is largely based on the internal state of the performer. Each performance is as unique as the day the performer is having. As Yeats wrote in “Among School Children”:
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Practically, this is a very important aspect of performing for music teachers to address with their students. If a musician is bored while they’re playing, their music will be boring. If a performer is working hard, their audience will feel the strain. When a music maker is body-and-soul feeling their own emotions as they play, they will give a rich, nuanced performance. When a player is in this music-and-self integration space, it doesn’t make a big difference to their listeners if the music they’re playing isn’t spectacularly difficult or has a slip up or two. As long as there is a soul connection between the music and the player, audiences will respond.
Music is expression. It’s communication. It’s allowing others to understand where you are, who you are, and what you are feeling. It’s the player, having spent time learning about and empathizing with the composer, playing or singing with empathy the notes written, in the same way that an actor on a stage embodies the emotions of the playwright’s words. It’s emotion, joy, pain, and the human experience.
When musicians aren’t taught to connect the sounds they are making to the feelings that are either inherent in the music or that could reasonably be interpreted from it, they lose the purpose of music itself.
Feeling and Empathy in Action
My hands-down favorite example of the power of feeling is jazz singer Billie Holiday.
Holiday was never formally educated in music and famously had an unimpressive one-octave range. She didn’t know any theory. She never sang classical arias. She was merely a music maker.
Despite this (or perhaps because of it), she was one of the most influential musicians of her time—and all time. Referencing the seminal work on her life done by Stuart Nicholson and the recordings of her own account on the records Lady Sings the Blues, Wikipedia tells us about her first performance of the remarkable song “Strange Fruit” in 1939:
For her performance of “Strange Fruit” at the Café Society, [Holiday] had waiters silence the crowd when the song began. During the song’s long introduction, the lights dimmed, and all movement had to cease. As Holiday began singing, only a small spotlight illuminated her face. On the final note, all lights went out, and when they came back on, Holiday was gone. Holiday said her father, Clarence Holiday, was denied medical treatment for a fatal lung disorder because of racial prejudice, and that singing “Strange Fruit” reminded her of the incident. “It reminds me of how Pop died, but I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South,” she wrote in her autobiography.
Holiday put her whole self into her songs. Her life had given her abundant opportunity to feel things deeply. Traumas, tragedies, and personal loss had given her the kind of empathy that filled her performances with feeling from her bones. From the depth of her experiences, she sang. Her listeners, then and now, participate in those timeless emotions.
Artists like Billie Holliday prove that music isn’t just notes. Notes are merely the means. They give you access to the magic of music, which makes you able to feel an emotion in your soul and communicate it directly to the soul of another person. It’s the distinction that music has above all other disciplines. This unparalleled ability of music to communicate is what inspired Kurt Vonnegut to say, “Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.”
As teachers, we have the enormous privilege of teaching students how to connect with what they feel so that they can express those feelings through their music.
If we don’t create feeling and empathetic musicians, we could end up:
Disconnecting actions and feelings in people’s minds. What someone thinks, rather than how someone feels, becomes the paramount value.
Taking away people’s natural abilities to empathize, then make them feel flawed when they can’t.
What we gain from creating feeling and empathetic musicians
When a music student learns how to communicate feeling and empathy, they can:
More easily identify emotions in others and empathize with them.
Become dynamic and sought-after communicators on any topic and in various contexts.
Truly understand the value of emotions.