Of course I’m kidding… but music and good musical performers really do have an amazing and profound physiological and psychological impact on the audience. It turns out humans empathetically synchronize with a performer emotionally and physically, allowing them to experience something bigger than life in this controlled artistic environment. The ancient Greeks knew it and from the Greek kathairein (cleansing), catharsis emerged: “A purification or purgation of the emotions… primarily through art.” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
But that’s ancient history and for those more interested in modern science we turn to an article on the National Institutes of Health website written by Andrei C. Miu and Felicia Rodica Balteş in 2012, ( www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3265492/ ) “In the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in music and emotions. Psychophysiological studies have uniquely contributed to the idea that music listeners not only perceive feelings in music, but also experience genuine emotions, which are associated with congruent physiological, behavioral, and subjective changes. Theories from cognitive science have argued that empathy plays an important role in music-induced emotions, emphasizing either emotional contagion or cognitive empathy.”
The authors elaborate, “Scherer and Zentner explained how cognitive empathy may be one of the central routes (i.e., involving the central nervous system) by which music induces emotion. Based on the performer's emotional expressions (e.g., colors of voice, facial expressions, gestures), listeners may presume that the performer experiences emotions and, by understanding that they are related to imaginary events, they may feel safe to deliberately respond with similar (even negative) emotions. The impact of musical performance may thus be related to empathic accuracy, which depends both on the target's emotional expressivity, and the observer's empathy. In addition, musical experience may be like an “affective sandbox”, by allowing listeners to pursue emotion exploration and hypothesis testing in safe environments.”
All this to say, “…we can use empathy to enhance aesthetic emotions in our everyday life, while we are watching live or recorded musical performance. Musical performance offers a context in which listeners seek to resonate with the feelings of the performer in relation to the music…”
I talk about this phenomenon frequently with students and as a teacher of any musical instrument it’s so much fun to kindle this fire of artistic expression in the students we teach. In more ways than one, music goes way beyond the notes and is perhaps the purest expression of the human spirit in a language that transcends, connects and makes us feel as one. Whether on violin, viola, cello, bass, guitar, ukulele, voice, piano or drums, once we find our voice, we can share what’s in our heart: the gift of music, of being human -together.