Month Two: Classical Music is Underway!

Well, it’s taken half a month to write this post about Month Two getting underway. I could beat myself up about this, but the truth is that I’ve been too busy enjoying myself to sit down and write about how much I’m enjoying myself. Seems like a good reason to procrastinate! Anywho – it’s April 15, so let’s talk Month Two: Listening to Classical Music.

As many readers know, I used to be a classical musician. In fact, I spent my entire life until my late 20s engrossed in classical music. From playing the piano as a five-year-old whose feet dangled under the piano bench to hanging up my ballgowns and heels when I “retired” from being an opera singer as I neared 30, classical music was one of the core pillars of my life. And even though I’m no longer a professional musician, my husband is (Ryan is a trumpet player in a symphony orchestra), so I still spend an enormous amount of my time listening to and thinking about classical music, and I’ve never really left that world. Many, many of our friends are musicians, and we talk music and music-world stuff all the time. In non-COVID times, I’m at concerts multiple times a week. I sit on the board of a classical music ensemble. I put classical music on when I work. It’s still all around me.

However.

When I quit singing, I really slammed the door on my own personal connection to music. When I decided to stop singing and go back to school to do my law degree and MBA, I had just gone through a really painful year of singing highs and lows, triumphs and rejections, enormous failures, opportunities missed, and a real disconnection from why I became a musician in the first place. Most of all, I had fallen out of love with being a musician. It became more painful than rewarding. In order to minimize my suffering, I thought, I needed to make a clean break from music. I stopped singing and would not dabble. I would not sing in an unpaid opera chorus. I would not sing in a community choir. I would not occasionally take a gig “just for fun” because I knew that if I wasn’t practicing every day, maintaining the level of physical ability needed to sing at the level I had become accustomed to, I would not do it. Surely that would be the least painful route.

Well, that might not have been a good idea. I realized recently that I never really took time to mourn the ending of my musical journey – I just moved on to the next thing and shoved all my feelings about being a “failed singer” who abandoned my dream wayyy way down where I wouldn’t have to look at them. I was a successful business woman now! I was a lawyer! I drove a nice car and didn’t have to take the bus across town with a garment bag and a water bottle and a pair of heels!

So imagine my delight this month when I began my commitment to listening to classical music every day and I discovered that this hidden grief did not break open and spill out, but instead blossomed up like a great, hidden joy. It’s really, truly spring here right now, and I can’t help but cling to this metaphor of a hidden bulb, rich with potential, laying dormant through the winter, then emerging as the soil warms and the sun coaxes the bloom upward and open. That’s how classical music is making me feel.

I really thought I would be sad. I still might be later this year when I spend a month devoted to watching opera (okay, I’m certain I will be at least a little sad then). Right now, I just feel enormous vibrance and joy every day as I put on a recording of a well-known piece, then another of a not-so-well-known work. I feel refreshed. I feel awake.

This is marvellous news to me, as I’ve just had a big freelance writing project come through, and I’m already up to my armpits every day chasing our not-really-a-baby-anymore-more-of-a-toddler around the house. When she goes down to nap, I put on a piece of classical music, and I am focused, soothed, and encouraged. I have enthusiasm and energy all day. I find myself somehow getting more done every day than I had hours for, yet my memories of the days are of laying in the sun playing with stuffed animals, or reading that book about the armadillo over and over, or gardening. I’m returning to the best physical and mental and emotional shape of my life rapidly and with what feels like little effort.

Is this all thanks to classical music? Well, obviously not. But, I am so fascinated by the feeling of finally reaching inside myself and opening the box that held something I loved so dearly – something so precious to me that I was afraid to look at it again. I’ve always been a person that walks the line between guarded and very emotional, and I think I feared that if I touched that thing in my heart, it would consume me. It was safer to leave it there, in the past, and view it cooly from a distance. Turns out the exact opposite is true. By grabbing it and holding it out in the sun, I have recaptured its power. It's amazing, to say the least.

Before I go – some logistical points about this month. Before I began, I made a list of 30 pieces of classical music that are very famous and very important and frequently performed, and I scheduled one of these pieces for each day of April. Then, because classical music has a major “big list of dead white guys” problem, I also chose 30 pieces by people not represented in that list, and scheduled them as well. I choose a recording of each piece each day based on what I’m doing and what my mood is – sometimes it’s just audio on Apple Music, sometimes it’s a YouTube video. Sometimes I listen very actively (not multi-tasking), and sometimes I put the piece on in the background as I do something else. Basically, I make it easy, and it’s working so beautifully. At the end of the month, I’ll publish the full listening lists and provide links where I can. In the meantime, if you’re interested, follow me on Instagram, where I’m posting each day’s listening as I do them.

Until the end of the month – I hope you look inside your heart and see if you tucked something away in there that could use a little sunlight.