If you ever have an artistic and/or a spiritual longing but think you are too old, too untalented, too small, too (fill in your excuse of choice) to ever find the answer to that longing–a conviction that often overtakes me, too–this website is here to challenge it. Learning and practicing music as an adult have helped me see hidden assumptions that direct, or rather, block my spiritual search. My goal in bringing together the parallels between the two journeys is to expose these hidden assumptions..
First, a note on practicing music (as an adult): the idea of an inborn talent or that a musician is born, not made, plays no role here, if it stops us from doing the work. Though my goal is not to be a concert musician, all the same, it is to become a functioning musician who can accompany others, a goal no less daunting for someone with my starting point. I began taking regular music lessons at 35. Through my learning, practicing, studying so far, I’ve come to feel more strongly that anyone with interest and average intelligence–no exceptional inborn talent required–can learn and make real progress, which is both an ordinary and a magical course of event. [This website is an act that comes from that premise]. Effective pedagogy and a conducive environment play a bigger role than that of individual talent in determining how far someone develops musically. Here’s a quote from Robert Gjerdingen, a music professor:
“The old Italian methods seem to work wonders, especially for music students who are not prodigies.”1
Not prodigies. Hence the name of this website: “KWK” stands for keine Wunderkinder, which is German for “not wonder children,” not prodigies. I like the German term here because of its symmetry when abbreviated (and because it’s a language I’m currently learning).
Gjerdingen wrote about the success of institutions, meaning teachers, pedagogy, and environment, in training and producing not a rare few but many of the most influential musicians in 18th century Italy and beyond. This is not the story of one-of-a-kind Mozart and Beethoven who, as the popular imagination perhaps paints them, single-handedly achieved their levels of musicianship because they were simply born geniuses. The rest of us non-geniuses should just forget the whole business and move on with our mundane lives. Rather, Gjerdingen tells the story of ordinary people, yes, with musical inclination, but who nonetheless needed the guidance of capable teachers, effective pedagogy, many hours of training (in fact, they lived a life saturated in music), and daily opportunities to learn and perform with others, in order to become they musicians of their calibre.
“Simple lessons well learned can lead to miraculous results,” Gjerdingen continues.2
Similar preconception is operating in the world of spirituality. I wonder how useful are our images of saints and enlightened gurus who are supposed to be our role models. Our ideas of them often make us give up before we even begin to work. The majority of the spiritual friends who finally came to the end of their seeking and found answers knew and worked personally with an enigmatic teacher, Richard Rose. During their search many of them got hung up on the idea that they could never reach the goal because they were not enigmatic as Rose was.
A note about my version of spirituality: My main practice is one of excavating and examining (hidden) beliefs about myself and my life.3 [What is driving my life?] It is the practice of self honesty, alone in the face of the universe. Imagine: you’re on your death bed, lucky to be mentally clear, undistracted and keenly aware that you are about to die. Whatever your embraced religion has taught you, what do you know for sure about where you are going when you die? [[would the ideas of heaven, an afterlife, resurrection, any kind of personal salvation, comfort you at this hour?] You fill in the answer, but this kind of naked clarity is the goal of this practice of belief-examination and self-honesty. [[To facilitate this mental clarity, my spiritual friends recommended several more concrete practices: meditation, solitary retreats, celibacy, fasting. These practices are not done to deny the body so that one becomes “spiritual” in the sense of being “holier than thou.” In fact, in practicing self honesty I have become ordinary, or rather, I realized my ordinariness. What a disappointment, LOL! This version of spirituality based on inquiry is then closer to philosophy… socratic (“Know thyself;” “an unexamined life is not worth living.”) Unlike (academic) philosophy understood today where it is mostly armchair, however, this version of philosophy involves a certain lifestyle. What we tend to overlook today about the ancient Greek philosophers is that each school practiced a lifestyle along with their mental inquiry.4 …also psychology
This still leaves a room for muses and miracles to play a role.
But first, a contextual explanation of the quote. Gjerdingen’s book talks about the success of effective institutional training… music pedagogy in the “old conservatories,” which, in the 18th century Italy were church-sponsored orphanages that took in orphans and foundlings, housed and fed them, and taught them a variety of skilled trades, so that the children would grow up with marketable skills. Each conservatory focused on one trade; several of these orphanages focused on music. Yes, you read right. Music was considered a trade, not High Art. We were still in the period before the ideas of suffering genius artists and a frowny Composer with blow-dried hair composing in fire were much known. [[Music publishing industry was not active, and the idea of a Composer whose work is meant to be played obediently without any tinkering from a a humble and super talented musician, was not yet in existent.]] The first requirement for the children to be admitted to the conservatories was not a musical talent, let alone genius, but rather having no parents. The music coming out of this culture is generally called classical music and attached with with a certain cachet. In the eyes of the general public today this music belongs to the elite, and if the average people feel removed from it and can at best appreciate it from afar, it is to be taken as a matter of course. Classical musicians and composers tend to be surrounded with a certain aura made up of ideas such as inborn talent and individual genius, ideas especially unhelpful for adult beginners and learners of music.
I crossed out a few words in the quote above, because, as mentioned, this website speaks about more than just music practice. Sophie’s World: To be a good philosopher, one only needs to have a capacity for wonder. I think every adult (or even children) with average intelligence has asked in her lifetime profound philosophical/spiritual questions such as:
What is this life about?
Why is there life? Why am I alive?
Where am I going when I die?
Where did I come from?
What am I supposed to be doing in this life?
Many ask; few find answers. The finders are called enlightened, saints, spiritual guru, and put on pedestals way above the masses for having been chosen the Divine because they possess special capacities that others don’t have. (The word “guru” actually just means “teacher,” they may indeed be teachers. In Indonesian language, the word is used to denote any kind of teacher, be it in school or elsewhere, such as, guru matematika (math teacher), guru piano (piano teacher), etc.) This idea is also unhelpful for spiritual seekers. I myself have for long been trapped in this idea, which resulted in nearly 20 years of hopelessness and despair.
So this website is also my effort to examine my beliefs about what it means to be a spiritual seeker and to search. Ideas I encounter in the realms of creativity and high culture has counterpart in the world of spiritual seeking. My goal is to free myself from invalid and unproductive ideas in the two endeavors, so that I can salvage and direct energy to actually seek and learn, instead of being trapped in despair.
“Bad ideas die hard,” says Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. I would add, many of these are hidden, yet they drive our lives. At least we can start uncovering them one by one and examine them. If you want, you can come along.
High Art and High Spirituality.
music and music learning, high art and culture, spiritual knowledge, enlightenment, salvation. The goal is to free myself from invalid and unproductive ideas revolving these concepts, so that I can use my energy to actually seek and learn, instead of having these ideas block me. Hopelessness and despair are the forms my block take. “Bad ideas die hard,” says Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. If you want, come along.
my journey learning classical music as an adult while also living in that world, has illuminated and melted some of the blocks I am confronting not only in my music learning but also in my spiritual seeking. The block has made me lived nearly 20 years of my search and my life weighed down by hopelessness. It was not pretty.
Resources:
- Gjerdingen, Robert. Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians, p. 4 (original emphasis). For a short article by Gjerdingen on the old conservatories, see https://blog.oup.com/2020/02/how-old-music-conservatories-turned-orphans-into-composers/ ↩︎
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- I learned this practice through my involvement with the TAT Foundation [link] ↩︎
- Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy? ↩︎