I offer here a reflection on the magical power of music-making to build a joyful resistance to the frequent cruelty and indifference around us.
To live, play, and love music is more than mere solace. It gives us the perspective to imagine worlds outside of our own – a capacity that feels sorely missing from much of the society we inhabit. The arts, and especially live music, deepen our perception and emotional understanding – and most importantly, they open our capacity for empathy.
I often turn for perspective to Maxine Greene, an author introduced to me by one of my mentors, Sebastian Ruth. Greene writes admirably about music’s power to create empathy and the moral attentiveness it calls forth. Her perspective on arts and education inspires our work with young people at Worcester Chamber Music Society.
Greene’s work shows us that education isn’t merely about transmission of information. Its true value is awakening agency, imagination, and human connection. “Imagination is the capacity to see things as if they could be otherwise,” Greene writes in Releasing the Imagination. Through this kind of imagination, she argues, we can make true empathetic contact with others. We refuse indifference and can thereby enter someone else’s lived reality.
That revelation animates not only philosophical thought but also the work of our teaching artists with the young people in Neighborhood Strings. Our job, our calling, is to allow curiosity to flourish. The capacity for human connection that develops along the way is the most meaningful part of our journey.
The power to open the mind to empathetic connection is not limited to youth education. Anyone who engages deeply with music can seek the imaginative capacity to connect deeply with outside experience. Live performance puts us in a space that cultivates care, openness, and the greater good. Music allows us to inhabit another emotional landscape. Chamber music is a lived rehearsal for empathy itself. Discussion, democracy, the exchange of ideas, and the slow work of resolution infuse our art.
Nor is this path toward empathy limited to classical art musics. What matters is not genre, but the awakening that takes place when people attend deeply and listen imaginatively. The work of empathy honors multiple voices and validates diverse identities, and refuses the narrowing of imagination to a single cultural narrative.
To that end, those of us who create and love music need to feel our strength and responsibility. Let’s go into the new year with both – strength in our artistry, and responsibility to one another.
-Ariana Falk