“I guess concert would be the last thing to be allowed after lockdown. You know, music is just entertainment.”
I felt like a knife accidentally cross by my heart, especially to hear this – “music is just entertainment” from a musician friend whose life is music and her concerts are all being cancelled. Although musician is not the only one who is suffering at this time, but it is still a serious matter, for the meaning of musician’s life being doubt when they are being forced out of work. Above all, it is so untrue that music is just entertainment, on contrary, music is essential for human to survive the “greatest hardship”. Daniel Levitin says in his book “The World in Six Songs”:
Our drive to create art is so powerful that we find ways to do it under the greatest hardships. In the concentration camps of Germany during World War II, many prisoners spontaneously wrote poetry, composed songs, and painted-activities that, according to Viktor Frankl – gave meaning to the lives of those miserably interred there. Frankl and others have noted that such creativity under exceptional circumstances is not typically the result of a conscious decision on the part of a person to improve his outlook or his life through art. To the contrary, it presents itself as an almost biological need, as essential a drive as that for eating and sleeping – indeed, many artist, absorbed in their work, temporarily forget all about eating and sleeping.
Even though I totally agree with him, I just want to be thorough and read the book he quoted.
There were songs, poems, jokes, some with underlying satire regarding the camp. All were meant to help us forget, and they did help. The gathering were so effective that a few ordinary prisoners went to see the cabaret in spite of their fatigue even though they missed their daily portion of food by going.
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s search for meaning.
Viktor E. Frankl is a survivor of four concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, Türkheim. He went through the greatest hardship and he was not a musician. Therefore, his argument is convincing and objective.
Since March, digital-concert become a trend. One of the advantages is classical music travel boundless far and able to reach unexpected audience, they might become the future concert goer. I am also glad that at least there is internet to help us stay connect to music and musician.
But it horrified me if this kind of digital-concert will be a long run. My heart sank as I read the article of what would concert look like in the near future “Next Steps: Picturing Possibilities for the Return to Work” by Musicians’ Union Deputy General Secretary Naomi Pohl. In a German weekly newspaper – Zeit Magazine (20.5.2020), Harald Martenstein was talking about something else but this sentence is my cry regarding live concert:
“Das alles ist sinvoll und fürchterlich. Man darf sich nicht daran gewöhnen auch wenn man es für sinnvoll hält.”
“All this is reasonable and terrible. One cannot get used to it even if one thinks it makes sense.”
Luckily, I have been to a good number of great live concerts, these memories will keep me survive. Like the mouse Frederick in Leo Lionni’s story, he remind his friends during the dark cold winter day about how warm was the sun and how beautiful were the flowers, and I remind myself with the memories of concert that I collected to keep my life going on.
I am also thankful for this barren season of live concert. Now I tasted how painful is the life without live concert, this makes me more certain about the value of live music.
Of course we all have to first survived and keep living, only then we can see the future that we are longing for. For that reason, I will not make a big fuss about little inconveniences that help protect life. I just have to be true about my pain, and this pain shows me how essential music is to me, so that in the future no matter how great the challenge is, I will not give up easily. (Hopefully, I know myself very well, I could easily be a coward too). Anyway, music is my survival kit now. I would like to end this writing with Frankl’s heartbreaking musical experience:
Suddenly there was a silence and into the night a violin sang a desperately sad tango, an unusual tune not spoiled by frequent playing. The violin wept and a part of me wept with it, for on that same day someone had a twenty-fourth birthday. That someone lay in another part of the Auschwitz camp, possibly only a few hundred or a thousand yards away, and yet completely out of reach. That someone was my wife.
Note:
Viktor E. Frankl is a survivor of four concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, Türkheim. His book Man’s search for meaning first published in Germany in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager. His wife is moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she dies at the age of twenty-four (1944).
Sadly human never learn from history, racist still could be found everywhere in the world nowadays.