I am one of those people who says: “I went through some difficult times in my life. And music was always there for me.” I had difficulty with my attention span and staying focused as a child. I would break away and play the piano and it would center my energy and my thoughts.
My Story
I grew up carrying the heavy secrets of my own #MeToo experiences from childhood. The weight of these experiences went into my mid-twenties. Our family endured many tragedies around my father’s terminal illness and passing. Music lessons, and at that time specifically piano lessons, allowed me to have a platform for the release of the continual build-up of emotions. I was able to sort of have a conversation through the piano with myself in a way that only me and the piano could communicate. The piano expressed back at me, what I did not have my own words for.
While my father struggled through his terminal illness, I watched, I cried and I played. My three younger sisters and I would sometimes sing and play together. One night my dad finally did pass away under hospice care in our own home. His legacy was left behind through his four teenage daughters and our brave mother. My younger sisters and I, along with some friends who immediately came to our side on that unforgettably numb night, sat on the floor of my bedroom and sang hymns. Hymn after hymn after hymn. We sang in harmonies. We needed to feel and hear the music in, on, and through our bodies and we needed to hear hope, feel hope.
How Music Helped
It forced us to breathe through the anxiety of the night when we would otherwise have been holding our breaths under the stress and tension. That night was too choking of a night to have in a heavy numbing silence. Singing helped remind us that we were alive. The subsequent financial unknowns came dumping down on us, threatening to wash away everything in the life we had ever known.
Playing music soothed the rising anxieties through the focus of breath and thought. As courage, strength, and blessings began to plant and grow from our tumultuous adolescent years, the music became an outlet of joy. Just like spring becomes the expression of joy and newness after a dark winter. This allowed me to express and process emotions with or without words. The sounds of pure emotion.
That is my story. Everyone has a life story. Everyone goes through SOMETHING. No one gets through life unscathed by life’s sharp edges. Music is the tool to self-awareness and introspection. It is a safe place for anyone to express their thoughts and emotions in a language that can be as private as instrumental music between you and your instrument, or as public as writing a melody and lyrics to the music you wrote and sharing your message to the world around you.
Music Reflects
Music powerfully reflects back at us who we are in that moment. What we are thinking. And what we are feeling. It is a secret language that we can learn, develop, and heighten. It is a secret language that other people who aren’t fluent in the language can still understand. They can sense its meaning even if they can’t lay a finger on why. It is also a secret language that, if you have developed yourself in it, you can read deeply into other people’s music expressions and know what their message is to the world. You will naturally develop a heightened sense of empathy as well and have the ability to enter into someone else’s deep secret world of raw vulnerability.
Three Examples of How Music is a Tool for Checking In:
When talking at a very practical base of how and why the study of music influences a person in self-development and self-awareness for handling life’s ways, I will pull out three examples from my life story:
The First Example
The first example of how music is a tool for checking in with your body and what your body is telling you. Whether you realize it or not, your body speaks to you on what it needs from you and where it stands on all levels of mental, emotional and physical. When you train the singing voice, for example, over time you become heightened in your awareness of what is going on in your throat muscles.
Because of my training, I can tell through the sound of my voice and the sympathetic vibrations, if I am tense, dehydrated, getting sick, or fatigued. Also from my training on the piano, I can tell if I am exceptionally stressed in life because through piano technics I learned that I tend to hold my tension in my upper back, specifically behind my shoulder blades. When playing the piano, I can check in with my body and it will tell me how much stress I am holding onto and internalizing. You’ll also begin to identify these body signals of stress even when you are away from your instrument! This is the developing of self-awareness that we always talk about.
The Second Example
The second example I would like to share from my life story is the practical around how and why the study of music helps with anxiety. Anxiety from stress that is brought on by life. In anxiety, we tend to take shallow breaths. These short shallow breaths lead to all kinds of other symptoms of anxiety. The breath is foundational to managing anxiety and/or panic attacks. Since you can’t sing and have a shallow breath, singing forces you, trains you, to use deep breathes as a developed habit.
You will also need to release muscle tension in order to accomplish this. As it is foundational to managing the stress and anxiety that life can bring our way. So when I have gone through break-ups other anxious times in my life, for example, singing always calmed me down. It made me deep-breathe. This got more oxygen to my brain and allowed me to check in with body tension. Ultimately, I could take those proper breaths! This is an example of part of the practical self-development aspects of music study.
The Third Example
The third point I want to make is: how the study of music develops the release of mental and emotional tensions through healthy self-expression.
Expression is the communication of making known one’s thoughts or feelings. I will write a second blog on just this topic of self-expression. As it is too extensive to include in this blog. But generally speaking, as you collect musical knowledge, you develop the tools and music language for expressing your “self”. That is, creating from what is within you. Sometimes we find that what is within us, our deep thoughts and deep feelings, cannot be captured in words. Especially people who have had traumatic experiences and don’t have an easy time talking about certain life experiences. Playing an instrument and creating the music is a way to translate those feelings and thoughts into sounds, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. These are used to create or express the same feelings or thoughts.
If you learn the craft of songwriting, you are wrestling to express yourself at a whole different level than instrumental. Songwriting is a place where words, feelings, and thoughts, are processed like poetry. Sounds are matched to those words in a way that conveys more than what instrumental music or poetry alone can express. In both instrumental and songwriting, the human story is expressed and humanity is drawn closer together through it. Any mode of expression that brings peace and community, comes through someone’s healthy self-expression.
This has been my personal journey from self-awareness, to self- development, to self-expression. This is why we at Martucci Music have such a passion for sharing these revelations with our community
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