Musicians, take heart even in a downturned economy. Music has always been about social connections, and all musicians who have ever performed know about that intimate connection between themselves, their music, and their audience. Music creates a human bond of listening and connecting in a wordless conversation of the soul.
We fret and worry that support for music in the schools may diminish. We know in our gut that short-term illusory fixes like “bailouts” are all about political theatrics in a dance between power-hungry politicians and Wall Street. The arts usually receive patronizing praise and the short stick at best, and are totally left out of the conversation at worst.
But music will never disappear from the scene. The ebb and flow of a Beethoven symphony has a spiritual meaning, a permanence and a reality that will always outperform the jagged lines of a Dow Jones stock chart that fluctuates daily with “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”