This Is Happiness

What was it that first invited me into music’s splendid mansion? What made me imagine that humanity might be a shining beacon of extraordinary beauty? What led me to try to bring the two together in a lifetime of teaching music to children? These thoughts much on mind as I finish the final draft of my new book The Humanitarian Musician.

 

In the course of writing it, more questions arose. Why do I prefer this singer, pianist or composer over that one? Why is it that Jean Ritchie’s singing, Keith Jarrett’s piano-playing and Thelonious Monk’s compositions strum the strings of my heart and some others not so much? Perhaps because all of the above (and many more) share that special quality of digging into the deep center of a song, expressing themselves with that rare blend of vulnerability and command. What is it that allows an artist to do that? What alchemical magic is at work? How can music catapult us from the mundane into the sacred?

 

This eloquent passage from Niall Williams’ novel This Is Happiness says it clearly:.

 

“It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched. That you have been in the company of something alive that has cause you to realize once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.”

 

Just this very day, in my living room with no one present, I played some Bach better than I ever had and felt his divine inspiration flying through my fingers. I then taught two classes of Middle School and at the end of each, after all the precise detail work, the kids played with so much fervor and soulful feeling. My praise to them was not a prize candy that they craved, but an honest speaking out loud what we all felt. “Yeah!!” And it sprinkled on their thirsty souls as a blessing. 

 

From there, I went to the Jewish Home for the Aged and a woman who had silently for a few years just enjoying the music surprised me by requesting the song Lean on Me.  I began to play and she began to sing and on we went without pause into Swing Low, Amazing Grace, Motherless Child. Her invisible black ancestors gathered around and her voice grew stronger and more sure, with some bluesy intonations. Other people requested songs meaningful to them and on we continued, their faces shining beatifically with secret memories embedded in the notes. At the end, one woman said this reminded her of a Leonard Cohen concert, that quality of intimacy and hushed silence he evoked in his performances. A good reminder that the singers who deeply touch me—Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday— were not trained singers in any Western classical sense. Indeed, taking formal singing classes might have ruined them. Niall Williams continues:

 

“Now, I’m not saying Christy was a great singer, or even a good singer. The world has enough critics, and technique, tone, pitch, and the rest were all rendered irrelevant by the fact that the singing stopped your heart. It reached in a seized it and didn’t let go. It said, Listen, here’s a human being who has suffered for love. It said Here’s a heart aching, and that ache was large enough, urgent and familiar enough, for you all to feel it and by feeling participate in something you yourself were either too timid, closed, or unlucky to have known personally or had known in the long ago of your own innocence over which you had since grown the skin necessary to tolerate the loss and stay living.”

 

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach,” goes the old saying. I beg to differ. Artful teaching is its own form of artistic doing and breathtaking epiphanies can be as present in the music classroom as on the concert stage. I’m here to testify that I’ve had as many heart-stopping moments listening to a 7-year-old sing a solo, watching a 3-year-old dance, listening to a 10-year-old stumble into a wholly inspired glockenspiel solo, witnessing a shy child command the stage in the school play, as any concert pianist might ever come to know. Yes, music cultivated with 10,000 hours of practice and intricate virtuosity can lift us up to seventh heaven, but an honest note sung by an honest soul —any age, any place—can do the same. Sometimes, even more so. 

 

That’s the sublime moment when all becomes clear: “This is happiness.”