There is no doubt that music’s power to influence our emotions is real. One need look no further than a contemporary advertisement to see its use in motivating potential customers.
At our music school in Midland, Texas we encourage our students to participate in the wonders of making meaningful music.
The mystery of how this works remains unanswered.
How is it possible that emotions can be conveyed in such detail and nuance, and meaning can be felt that defies words to explain?
Music, like the art of painting, has its core elements. The primary colors of red, blue, and yellow are pigments with which he is well-acquainted. As simple as these three pillars of his art seem, the possible hues that can be created when mixing them together in various proportions are endless.
In a like manner music has its primary colors, a Holy Trinity of emotions. Struggle. Assurance. Celebration.
As teachers at our music school in Midland, Texas we help students connect to their emotions in ways that help them express their own unique voice.
My father taught me many things about music. His research into the subject of emotions may be the most important.
As a symphony conductor for decades, he felt the weight of leading eighty professional musicians, the time they spent preparing concerts, the concert-hall filled with a ticket-paying audience hoping for a meaningful experience, and emotions that seemed fleeting, at best. Not all concerts were inspired. Not all moments of music-making evoked a touch of the divine, and this bothered him.
He set himself on a path to find out how emotion in music worked and how to employ it in the concert hall. After years of study, some literature came across his desk analyzing how to structure liturgy and church services, that became of interest to this question. The article drew an analogy of these foundational emotions to the Trinity of worship found in most church services.
The word Trinity is not actually found in the Bible, but the patterns are ubiquitous. Jesus taught His disciples about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And the pattern of His own journey, from crucifixion, to resurrection, to returning King is universally proclaimed throughout Christendom.
The Scriptures show that Jesus struggled against sin and was nailed to the cross to appease the Father’s judgement on the human race. Jesus was then raised from the dead because of our justification. He ascended to the right hand of God, and is seated there until all of His enemies are put beneath His feet and He returns in Glory.
These three aspects of Christian worship equate emotionally to the three elements of Struggle, Assurance, and Celebration, noted in this study suggesting how to structure church liturgy successfully.
These thoughts resonated with my father’s aggregate of study, and he began to work with how he could apply them directly to his musical preparation. Treating these three emotional pillars like a painter, by mixing colors together in different hues, he created a system of analysis that would essentially reverse-engineer the emotions found in any musical composition.
At our music school in Midland, Texas we demonstrate and explain how to do this kind of analysis with our students.
He would take a piece of music phrase by phrase, section by section writing a one, two, or three over it, to indicate what emotion it was conveying. He would combine the numbers in ways that would reflect the emotions happening in the music. For example, if a section had an aggressive percussive war-like element happening underneath a beautiful soaring melody, he would notate a ‘two’ over a ‘one’ (Assurance over Struggle). He was very emphatic, in discussing these subjects with me, that moments of music combining all three emotions simultaneously were particularly meaningful and transcendent.
When going through an entire piece of music this way, larger pictures began to become evident as to the overall emotional message, giving him insight into how to interpret the work, shaping it to enhance certain strategic areas, to help highlight its meaning. In fact, he mentioned that using this kind of analysis helped him identify sections of the music that, if not handled properly, could cause the work to completely fail.
At our music school in Midland, Texas we believe that the use of this kind of analysis is crucial for successful music-making, that makes a difference in what our students convey in their craft.
You may wonder why someone would go to such lengths to interface with a composer’s composition. Why not just play it, do what the score dictates, and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe the audience ‘gets it’ or maybe they don’t. It’s just a replication of the original moment the work came about in culture, and we can simply appreciate it like a museum-piece, finding some beauty in it.
That mindset is why Classical music in our culture is waning in its relevance.
Music is more than sound, it is relationship. This is my coined slogan for our music school. But, in the context of this discussion on emotion, there is a special relationship a performer must have with the piece he is playing, to carry it successfully. The performer must find common ground emotionally with the work. In other words, the performer must find a place of agreement between his own life-experiences and the emotions that are embedded within the composition he is playing.
It is a place of consent.
We expect students at our music school in Midland, Texas to find this place of agreement within themselves, so that they can communicate honestly with their audiences.
Analyzing a piece emotionally is a good place to start. Most music schools, even at the highest level, have no understanding of how to do this. Technical analysis is what fills most classrooms, but dealing with the emotional content is seen as too esoteric.
I once attended a masterclass with the well-known conductor, Benjamin Zander, as he was working with a local voice student performing an aria. He was at the piano accompanying her. Her first performance in the class was adequate, all the notes were in tune, her diction was good, but it was static. Zander explained that this particular aria was about a woman who had lost the love of her life, and he asked her if she remembered any time in her life that she could remember losing a loved one. She acknowledged this. He then encouraged her to sing the same aria, remembering her loss.
I will never forget what happened next. When she sang, she connected with the music in a way that became personal. When she had finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room, mine included. Somehow, this touched a part of each one of our lives, personally. The entire room was not only touched, emotionally, we were changed forever.
“Music begins where the possibilities of language end.” (Jean Sibelius)
At our music school in Midland, Texas we believe the power music has to change our communities and culture for the better has yet to be fully explored.