I can sense it now, just like the first time. I was seated in a large auditorium, the ceiling soaring at least 20 feet above me. It was big enough to seat 500 people, though I doubted there would be very many tonight. Around me, people were milling in small clusters, making low-pitched small talk as they edged toward their seats. I didn’t know anybody there, and had already taken my seat, about six rows back, close to the center—chosen to be close enough to make out the faces on-stage.
The air was crackling with anticipation in a subdued sort of way—this was to be classical music, after all. We could hear the orchestra tuning up behind the heavy folds of the curtain. The lights were turned low, as cloaked as the sounds from backstage. There was barely enough light for me to read the print of my program. Several extra copies had been discreetly collected for family who couldn’t be there in person. The crisp coolness of the card stock seemed the more tangible given how muted were the lights and surroundings.
My son was about to play the violin for the first time in a public performance. I’d already perused the program and found his name—in small print since he was a beginner. But there it was! My mother’s heart swelled with pride. Deciding to play the violin at 15 had been his idea, and he had stuck with it with passionate determination.
Tonight was a triumph of his will and desire over some formidable obstacles, like the fact that we were homeless, staying with friends after a crash and burn of mine. Yet in the midst of that difficult time, the violin had become his lifeline. He once told me, “Mom, I’m always happy when I am playing the violin.”
He would sometimes practice four to six hours a day since he felt he was making up for lost time. So this concert was a big deal for him, and for me. I sat in a reflective mode in my plush stuffed auditorium seat, waiting for the lights to go down and the program to begin. I was thinking about the power of art to raise us above life’s difficulties. And then it hit me.
In a moment of clear certainty, I understood art as not so much a form of expression, a performance, or a work of art. It was as much about the ability to sense the beauty in any experience. The art resides as much in the reception as in the making of the object or performance… as much in the enjoyment as in the inventive act.
My being in the audience and feeling the music, and resonating to its emotional currents, was art too. My response was an integral part of the evening’s performance. I, too, was in a creative mode by my unfiltered openness to the richness of the whole experience. I was a connected part of an exquisite harmony.
I grabbed my purse and pulled out a pen and pad of paper. While in the heat of that intense insight, I wrote what follows. I knew the truth about art because it was welling up in me. I overflowed with the intensity of it, its absolute beauty.
I also knew, and still realize, I can see, hear, feel, and sense such fullness when I choose to open myself to it. The music listed on the program hadn’t yet started, but I was feeling it already. And then the curtain went up and it got even better.
Art, Music and Beauty
Art and music are about beauty. They have to do with the way we experience our world—not as something isolated and set down by the masters in the great classics. We turn our attention to the colors of the evening sky, the subtle shades and shadows of a loved one’s face, the silhouette of a bird perched on a light pole. We hear the music in the sounds and rhythms of the falling rain, the laughter and squeals from a playground, the chirping of a cricket.
Art is all around us, and yet it is not the things we experience. Art is in us—in our ability to notice. An eye or an ear tuned to lovely things will always be surrounded by them. The more we have the urge to notice, the more power beauty will have to touch our lives.