On Emotional and Imaginative Skills

We spend a lot of time talking about our singing skills in barbershop, and quite a lot about musical and performance skills. But for all our talk about the emotions in the songs we sing, we don’t often pay much attention to our own emotional skills.

This is partly because we tend in our culture to think of emotions as somehow entirely spontaneous and natural, as things over which we have no control, or as given parts of ourselves, like our faces or body shapes. But if you think about it, we have some choice over even the most physical aspects of our beings – we can gain or lose weight, dress smartly or casually, change our hairstyles or glasses. It’s still undoubtedly ‘us’, but we exercise some control over who ‘we’ are and how we exist in the world. Likewise, we do actually exercise quite a degree of control over our emotional lives in day-to-day interactions: we endeavour to keep our tempers when provoked, we try not to laugh too hard when it might be unkind, we are very careful about when and in whose company we might shed tears.

So, emotions are aspects of ourselves that we can control to an extent, and that we can develop – they are competencies as well as experiences. And arguably, this is one of the functions of arts such as music – they provide a context in which to practice a broad range of emotional states so that we can respond fluently when we meet new experiences in real life.

Now, some music speaks immediately to emotions that we are already familiar with – this is music that we perceive as accessible and moving, and will differ for each of us, depending on our previous musical and emotional experience. Other pieces of music seem less clear on first acquaintance: they speak to emotional states we had not thought to imagine before, or responses beyond our current experience.

At these times, we have a choice. We can either take a leap out into the unknown, or we can retreat. We can risk a period of uncertainty as we try on these new emotions for size, and stretch our imaginations into new shapes, or we can reject the experiences encoded in this music as unfit for our consumption. And as we take that choice, I’d suggest we remember that every musician who has achieved greatness has chosen to open themselves to new musical and emotional experiences: Bach lightened his native North German counterpoint with Italianate harmony and French dance rhythms, Gershwin brought traditional Jewish music and new jazz sounds to Tin Pan Alley, the Beatles explored both the music and the philosophies of India.

So, when a new piece of music jangles in your ears and you are not sure that you like it, remember that the people who created it must have found some human value there, and are offering you the opportunity to share the experience. If we don’t immediately like the sound of something it is at least as possible that we are limited in our ability to respond as it is that the music is limited in its ability to move. If we set ourselves the target of always aiming to find the value in music, in exercising our emotional imaginations to discover the responses it invites, we will enhance our capacities both as musical performers and as emotionally competent human beings.

Liz Garnett,  20th August 2002