The Tortured Musician | The Millennial Edit
In this week’s Millennial Edit, Rosie Bennet discusses the nature of suffering in the musical world and how this image and expectation affects the way we work.
When I was little and had just begun playing guitar, I was blessed with a complete lack of contextual knowledge. Nothing of what I learnt about music and the musical world was from pretense. I had no expectations and no dreams that had anything to do with musical life at all.
Neither of my parents were musicians, none of my family or friends were involved or interested in anything artistic at all, and aside from Bugs Bunny’s occasional foray into ‘Hill Billy Fiddle’ I didn’t even really have an idea of where music came from; in the same sense that as a child one might not make the connection between meat on their plate and where it comes from.
I was the eternal novice, I knew very little for an unusually extended period of time.
Music school brought with it my first impressions of the life as a musician, I could now visualise what playing music was, I could imagine what a career would be like, I saw musicians working, eating, laughing, living. Most of the interactions I had with music and musical people at that time were intuitive, a way of presenting myself that I had seen bounce off others and elicit respect. At that age (10) I couldn’t yet include myself; in fact I found it very difficult to call myself a musician until I was about 21.
I struggled with the concepts of pain and emotion in music. I felt fraudulent when people would say that they felt like I was musical or that I had ‘something to say’, I was, in my eyes, simply trying to make the cut. Despite the pain I did feel, mainly through a large capacity for empathy, I never felt like it was the right pain.
Artists appeared to live on their art. Stories would circulate of a pianist who could look at a score just once and play the whole piece through from memory, a painter who spent all their money on oils and could barely eat for three weeks, a conductor who learned of their father’s death in the green room before a performance and went on to conduct the most passionate performance of their life.
Meanwhile in my adolescence I would suffer a minor academic set back, or say something particularly humiliating in front of somebody cool and guitar would be in the back of my mind for the rest of the day. I was at odds with this, I simply did not understand why the antidote to what little pain I could muster never seemed to be guitar, it always seemed to be ice cream or crying.
Throughout my teenage years, the quality of my performances did not fluctuate nearly as much as I believed. I improved in a relatively steady manner, despite managing to harness my suffering in my last years of school. The performances were no more ground breaking in times of suffering than they were when I had simply worked hard.
The relationship between music and suffering is fascinating, especially because it is a sentiment that pervades the whole culture of classical music. In many cases it is because as listeners, we bear the weight of the human cost of creating something that feels so painful, so much so that we often cannot separate the creator from the creation. For instance, we cannot listen to The Death And The Maiden, or Die Winterreise without being stunned at the sad yearning that we know coloured Schubert’s life.
Despite the fact that we understand that music is a career, a job, a way of putting food on the table, the creations of artists that we feel we know about but are historically removed from still read like a diary. We attribute disproportionate suffering from the events of a creators life into the source and effect of their work.
Our own personal suffering and our preconceived judgments of a person, including how much we can relate to them often stands at the foreground when we are listening to a performance. Those we can relate to, those we feel we can see ourselves in are those that we subconsciously attach the most capacity for empathy to. Often while experiencing music as a listener we skim through the motions of pain and joy, but it is the players that we trust the most to ‘give’ that are the ones we permit to engage with those emotions that are already stirring within us.
As a classical musician it helps to be aware that those who ingest fine art in the role of Audience are often well versed in the ceremony of sacrifice and suffering. It is however also worth noting that art that portrays sadness very rarely stirs sadness within us, it very rarely elicits tears. It is almost as if the audience understands intuitively that adding more weight to the balance will tip it over completely. The heart that feels at ease is the heart that achieves catharsis, we can only let go when we feel safe.
As performing musicians we should remember this at all times. If an audience is to feel, we must allow them the conditions in which to do so. Stability, wholesomeness, empathy, joy, these are the building blocks on which we can build art that serves something higher than just the day to day pain of our own lives.
If we are to truly remove the parts of ourselves and our egos that impede our performances of the music that we aim to serve, we must accept that a life in music is a lot more than a long process of feeling as much as possible.
Suffering on its own will not bring us any closer to the reason why people listen, the reason people really listen, goes much further than suffering, the listeners put their trust, their belief in you, in this moment and no matter what happens they stand to gain from it. All you have to do is play.
About Rosie Bennet
Born in London in 1996, Rosie started playing guitar at age seven. She received her early musical education at The Yehudi Menuhin School of Music and went on to study with Zoran Dukic (The Hague, NL), Johan Fostier (Tilburg, NL), Rene Izquierdo (Milwaukee, USA) and Raphaella Smits (Leuven, BE). She has performed in festivals all over Europe, including Open Guitar Festival in Křivoklát, Czech Republic, Glasgow’s Big Guitar Weekend, Scotland, Porziano Music Festival, Italy and the West Dean guitar Festival, UK. Highlights of her concert career include performances at Wigmore Hall, London, The North Wall, Oxford and concerts given on El Camino De Santiago.
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