12-21-23

In addition to our quarterly newsletter, the musicians of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra thought it could be interesting for the music lovers in our community if we added a monthly blog to our offerings. The purpose of the blog will be to discuss topics we get asked about all the time, with the space to explore them more deeply. 

Sometime during my undergraduate degree, a number of years ago that I am not quite willing to count, I sat in the audience of a friend’s Junior degree recital. Junior and Senior recitals are significant waypoints for all music students; they are graduation requirements—exams that can be passed or failed—but also a kind of rite of passage for young performers. This particular friend was a vocal performance major—a soprano. So as an instrumentalist, I was not familiar with the repertoire she would perform. I listened, my attention gently ebbing, as my friend began the final movement from Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. If you are unfamiliar, Rückert-Lieder is a collection of songs which set the text of poems by Friederich Rückert. The fifth song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” is perhaps one of the most achingly beautiful pieces of music ever written. Mahler was a deeply contemplative man, and the text of this song, which begins by proclaiming “I am lost to the world,” ruminates on the peace offered as the poet withdraws from earthly turmoil and retreats into music. Of course at the time I knew none of this. All I knew was that I had heard this song before. 

I come from a very musical family. Many of my relatives are performers but my father, a stern Canadian man with an unwavering intellectualism, is a Music Theory professor. My childhood memories are webbed with snippets of classical music that he played on the piano while preparing for classes or doing research for articles he was writing. As a result, I grew up hearing a lot of very short fragments of musical works without knowing what they were or what piece they came from. As I went through music school and heard more and more orchestral literature, I one-by-one uncovered the origins of these snippets. It has been one of my favorite small joys throughout my life. “Oh, that’s where that melody is from,” is a discovery that has always delighted me, like finding buried treasure in the annals of my memory. It also has the power to catapult me back in time to where I was when I first heard it. Suddenly, I was not a 20-year-old music student sitting in Oberlin Conservatory’s Kulas Recital Hall. I was a child watching my father excitedly playing his favorite music through his brand new speaker system. 

Even though my life is deeply steeped in music, I know that I am not alone in this experience. Music, perhaps more than any other art form, has the ability to evoke powerful sense memories. Listening to music can trigger a type of memory called “episodic memory,” the sort that allows us to revisit the sensations of a specific event. When recalling a childhood Christmas, for example, we may remember the smell of cookies, the twinkle of the tree, the carols on the radio, and the anticipation we felt as we sneakily shook the gifts. Episodic memory takes us right back to the time and place of the original experience; we don’t just know that it happened, we remember how it felt. And because music evokes such strong emotions, it also has the ability to transport us to realms beyond our own memories. 

I have never been in the midst of a city under siege as Shostakovich was, nor have I been desperately in love with the wife of a cherished mentor like Brahms. I have not lost a child as Mahler did. I certainly have experienced neither the tight social constraints nor the florid beauty of the eras of Mozart or Beethoven. But because the music of these men provokes such vivid emotional memories, I am invited to step into my own recollections of great sadness, joy, longing, contentment, and to viscerally experience these great feelings alongside them. 

The vast orchestral canon has gifted us with the ability to peer into an almost infinite array of human experiences—a living museum of sensation. From the stage, these artists reach out across hundreds of years and draw a connection between composer, listener, and performer that invites us to empathize with them, to understand them, and to recognize a piece of ourselves in them, and in each other, though we may be greatly dissimilar. What an incredible way to view history through the eye (or more accurately, the hippocampus) of the beholder. 

I have no doubt that as I sat in that recital hall watching my friend sing Mahler, I was not the only one having a remarkable experience. Knowing that I might be creating that same experience for our audiences is a large part of the reason my job is so special. I can think of no better argument for the importance of live music than the opportunity for hundreds of people, from many walks of life, to sit in a concert hall and experience humanity together.

If you have any burning questions about life as a musician, or ideas for topics you would find interesting to read about, please let us know! We are reachable through our website and social media platforms.

Thanks for reading and stay connected!