What am I doing, and why does it matter?

We construct our understanding of the world around us in the way that we assign importance and meaning to things. For many systems of belief, it is crucially important that what we do means something. The majority of our lives are lived in the minute, mundane moments. The way we sing “Happy Birthday” at family gatherings is a small reinvocation of familial ties that harken back to our childhood and a set of memories that are often recalled more as a hazy remembrance of feelings than as a crystal-clear recollection. Kicking a soccer ball or throwing a frisbee in the yard in the dusk of the mid days of Spring, when the air is finally warm but the breeze is cool, can be filled with a nostalgia that is difficult to articulate, but that harkens back to a time when that simple idle connection through recreation was a significant portion of life. Sitting in comfortable silence with a loved one, cups of coffee slowly growing cold between you, the conversation journeying into a natural pause and the kinship of the shared moment of repose bringing with it an overwhelming feeling of belonging and rightness – all because of the value placed upon the moment and the person with whom it is being shared.

Likewise, we so often strive to deny moments, experiences, and people the importance of defining our lives. We take power in rebuking pain and adversity as definitive factors in our personal narratives. While we might use moments of pain or suffering as touchpoints and evidence of the lessons we have learned over time, we strive to rise above them, and think of ourselves in spite of them and not because of them.

I love music. It has been actively present in my life as long as far back as my memory can reach, and the cultural importance that my family placed on music – both in the context of my family itself and in the larger context of how we identified ourselves with the rest of the world around us – was always fostered in me. My family made sacrifices so that I could have a musical instrument, so that I could attend rehearsals and competitions, and so that I could bind my sense of “self” entirely and indelibly through my relationship with music.

Music is an integral part of the human experience – as natural as breathing – that has existed alongside us throughout our development as a species. Like language and visual art, humans around the world express and experience music differently. We conceptualize and experience it through our individual perspectives, through the lenses of our immediately close-cultures, and through the greater cultural lenses of the larger societies with which we identify. As no two people have had identical lives, so no two people have the same musical experience.

Nothing captures the interrelations between different peoples and aspects of society better than ensemble music. Whether that ensemble be a full symphony orchestra or a simple trio, various different voices work together to create a single product. The range of contributing voices is vast – the composer has contributed a “script” of sorts, so their voice is present; the individual performers each bring their own understanding of their instruments and the music itself into compromise or contention in order to create specific sounds; if there is a conductor, their voice is present in mediating the voices and ideas of constituent musicians. The voice of the listener also plays an undeniable role in contributing to a musical performance. The listener can only hear from their own perspective, and with the experiences they already have at their disposal – so each and every one will experience music individually and uniquely. The entire act of making music together is the combined collaboration between disparate and discrete voices working together to create a single unified product, and then that unified product’s fracture into infinite separate parts as it is heard. Without any single constituent piece of this great comprehensive product, no part of it would exist.

Our interrelations with the people around us are exactly the same. We can only be who we are, we can only see the world through our own eyes, and can only contribute what we possess to contribute. Acts of creation – whether tangible products like buildings and infrastructure, ephemeral products like music or dance, or conceptual products like social structures – can only happen societally when we work to combine our voices with the intention of creation. We have to be able to dialogue in the process, to keep using our voices with the express intention of creating in collaboration, and to becoming supremely comfortable with the absolute necessity of other voices joining ours in dialogue. Real, meaningful, and lasting change are accomplished through the sustained effort of creation, not through fragmentation and destruction. We do not create through silencing or erasure. We cannot claim to love the people around us and accept their extermination.

The look in someone’s eyes when we’ve experienced a moment of musical creation together – wide-eyed, unsure of how to articulate the feelings they have, but filled with those feelings in response to their experience. In these moments of shared creation, people realize things. For me, those realizations are often inarticulable, but they always have one thing in common: I feel an increased sense of connection and kinship with humanity at large. In those moments, it is difficult to identify myself as something separate from my fellows, and not to feel our shared existence as complementary constituent parts of a greater whole. That identification, I believe, is anathema to fear, hatred, and division. There is a power when we join together in the shared act of creation, an individual responsibility and a recognition of the necessity of difference in creation. In making music, we can engage each other in that shared act, and in hearing each other, build a better tomorrow.