Tuning Slide 5.1- The Important Moods of Music

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.
— Leonard Bernstein

I had already started this week’s post, the first of year 5 of The Tuning Slide. I wanted to look back and see what I’ve learned over the first four years of the blog and where music is taking me. When I woke up Sunday morning and checked the morning news on Google I was forced to face another day of mass killings, the third in a week. I decided I needed to do something else. I needed to search my own soul and find a place of peace and hope in this endless news stream of senseless violence and death.

My first thought was the quote above from Maestro Leonard Bernstein. They were part of words he spoke a few days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. It was a difficult time. Bernstein, like the nation, was in shock and mourning. He said it was made worse by the violence involved. He asked..

And where does this violence spring from? From ignorance and hatred…

By saying that, Bernstein knew that the response to such violence can often be calls to even more violence. The anger and sadness of a mourning and shocked people can lead to finding ways to make the situation worse instead of better. The Maestro knew that was not the way of people of music and art!

But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art…. This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

Our reply to violence, he ended with the top quote, will be to devote ourselves more fully and more deeply to our music! By making beauty in music and art perhaps we can move the world a little more distant from the feelings and actions of hatred and violence. Music may be unique among the arts, it can touch us without words, move us without saying anything, surround us with hope with a depth and intensity unknown in other ways. Again, from Bernstein:

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

Music’s connection with life is at the level of experience. Music causes synapses to fire in our brain and nervous system; it starts a process that can flood us with important neurochemicals that change our mood. It prompts awareness of things we never can explain and inspires us to actions of hope. Yes, there is angry music that can do the opposite, that can incite violence and fuel rage. There is also music that can be used as a sedative, numbing us to the world around us. It is the responsibility of the musician/artist to be wise and mindful of all the consequences of what we produce.

A few years after Bernstein’s words at John Kennedy’s death, the group The Rascals were in a similar situation when Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles. They penned their immortal words- "All the world over, people got to be free." Many were inspired. At the same time singer Dion reflected on this history of violence in Abraham, Martin, and John. These gave voice to people’s emotions and allowed people to both grieve and move forward.

Bono, of U2 understood this when he said:

Music can change the world because it can change people.

Will your music or mine change the world? Yes, it can. If we are willing to be devoted to the music, seek to make it as beautiful as possible. We may only start with changing ourselves when we pick up our instrument and play. But isn’t that where all change must start- within each of us as we dare to think and act differently? We then learn to live with the promise of peace and the reduction of violence. As we live it, as it becomes part of us, others can be touched, if only momentarily, but it is a start.

Musicians and artists are important. Don’t lose sight of your gift- and use it well.

When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me,
speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me,
speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree,
there will be an answer, let it be.
For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see,
there will be an answer. let it be.

Let it be, let it be, .....

And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light, that shines on me,
shine until tomorrow, let it be.
I wake up to the sound of music, mother Mary comes to me,
speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be, .....”
― Paul McCartney