Matters Musical and Emotional

I heard a most interesting discussion on NPR the other day while driving to my weekly blood draw (treatment is going very well) about a crisis in mattering. Hearing this discussion at this particular point in my life (mid 60s, with a disease that has certainly caused me to think about life differently), was exactly what I needed.

Before the internet became the highway, street, road, window, and path to just about everything we do, both as musicians, and in extra-musical activities, my feelings of not mattering were personal family issues (a lot of typical middle child stuff in a wildly atypical family). Despite my issues growing up,  I had friends, and I knew that I mattered to a lot of people.

Mattering and connection were, thank goodness, hard-wired into me through public school, my neighborhood, my musical life, writing letters, talking on the telephone, and even my various workplaces. Occasionally colleagues became friends, but even if we remained only cordial in our interactions, those relationships still mattered.

We didn't think so at the time, but raising children in a small town ended up being a real advantage in the mattering department. Even though they came of age with the internet (though it was primative and wired with annoying dial-up connections), they grew up with activities they enjoyed and a local paper. They also had to live and grow among people who had very different priorities from the priorities we had at home.

But they knew everyone, and everyone knew them. And they grew up knowing that they mattered. In their adult lives and in their lives as parents of young children they both seek out relationships that are meaningful. 

Our son lives in the Boston area, which is where I grew up. I told him that I used to know all the cracks in the pavement in the Back Bay area of Boston, but then they changed the pavement. Aside from his young family and a few friends, I have very little connection with Boston. But I occasionally learn that musicians there play music that I have written and arranged. I need to remind myself that what I do and what I have done matters, even if I hear about it in indirect ways. It is so easy for me to forget that what I have done (and what I do) musically does matter.

I think the music I write as a medium through which musicians who play together can feel that they matter to one another. I try to make my music as comfortable as possible to play or sing, so that people are free to express themselves. 

After a period of withdrawal from active professional musical life because of the unpredictability of the array of chemo drugs I am taking (since the beginning of 2026), I am doing my best to start stepping out a bit and am making connections with more local musicians. It feels like a healthy way to move forward.

I am also using this time to take a break from composing. I am spending all my musical energy practicing violin and playing piano.  After playing at the piano for the past decade or two, I can finally play the instrument more freely, and without tension. I have no desire to develop the kind of technique that would make me sound like a real pianist, and do not care at all about playing at any tempo faster than molto moderato, so I do not practice scales or etudes. I just play music. 

Violin is a different story. My goal with the violin is to be able to play everything at tempo, in tune, with clean articuation, and with the greatest possible sense of phrasing and nuance. It makes for a nice life balance. Good cop, bad cop, I guess.

I am learning a great deal about writing music from Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms these days. They are my best teachers. I am excited to see what comes out on paper when it is time for me to write something new (or when someone asks me to write something new, whichever comes first).