Leadership Music: From the Immanent to the Transcendent
Dizzy Gillespie: "The trumpet is lying in the case every day, waiting for me."
As millions tune in to the Democratic National Convention starting tonight, the question of who will lead the executive branch of the United States as President will be a foremost concern. This predicament is a leadership challenge at the highest reaches of the American government. For a brief respite, I invite you to read a (slightly revised) post from three years ago that relates leadership, metaphor, and music, all perpetual themes of ours at the Jazz Leadership Project.
Opening Riffs
One metaphor leads to another. As the legendary music ensemble Earth, Wind & Fire said: that’s the way of the world. Or, in this case, the way of language.
This very blog is based on the metaphor of “tuning” into leadership. When we tune into a radio or television channel or a favorite podcast, we take a moment to focus our attention for the sake of entertainment, for information, and, if we’re fortunate, for insight.
But tuning, as a metaphor, goes much further.
According to physicists, our universe is “fine-tuned,” and the manifestation of life itself seems to be a miracle: if one or another of the physical constants that holds everything together were slightly off, the universe would have proceeded differently.
Yet, here we are, riffin’ metaphors.
Tuning forks are used to tune musical instruments, in modern quartz clocks and watches to help keep time, and in medicine, to assess a patient’s hearing.
As leaders, what can help us stay in tune—not sharp or flat, stay on time, and better listen?
If we dare and care to ask, such inquiry points to fundamental issues of self-development and deepened intrapersonal to interpersonal communication.
First Quote for Thought
The opening riffs above are appetizers for thought. The statements below, which you’ll find featured on our website home and blog pages, are quotes for thought in concert with our tuning motive.
I believe every leader needs to tune him- or herself up like a musical instrument … to make music that connects people with a noble purpose.
—Fred Kofman, The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership
When I read Kofman’s book and came across the quote above several years ago, it resonated strongly. Having played in music groups in high school and college, the practice of “tuning up” before a performance was a given. But for those who have never played a musical instrument, ask yourself: why do musicians tune up their instruments before playing?
The second part of Kofman’s quote, “to make music that connects people with a noble purpose,” points to an answer: a desire to play well and work together with others toward substantive ends—or at least to move in a purposeful direction. For musicians, that end and direction, that matter of ultimate concern, is MUSIC qua music.
Music, very likely a human practice even before the play of communication we call language, is obviously a powerful metaphor. But why?
Music as Transcendent and Immanent
In performing arts such as theater, dance, and music, we practice deliberately; we woodshed and hone skills for the sake of an ensemble mindset groove among the performers who connect with audiences, modeling the possibility of collective action toward the greater good. Mature musicians, for example, understand that MUSIC is a higher transcendent of human culture, as music allows us to, at least momentarily, transcend the finite. But if this last statement is true, then music must also be immanent, where the divine manifests in the material world.
Music is more than individual self-expression, though it allows for that, too. Music resolves the Western philosophical tension between transcendence and immanence because it intermediates the human spirit, soul, and body, touching mystic chords of memory in the seen and unseen.
Music, indeed, is the art of the invisible.
The Hero and Heroine’s Journey
As with music, the hero and heroine’s journey aren’t solo flights. There are archetypes of support and challenge along the adventure. The arc of these narratives is more than Abraham Maslow’s “self-actualization”; they rather point to the higher octaves of Maslow’s lesser-known “self-transformation,” where heroes and heroines return home from the adventure with an elixir of realization and the gold of wisdom to be shared with others for the sake of the larger community, culture, society.
We tune ourselves up, undergo inner transformation for outer connection, and play well and resonate with others who are on their own journeys of belonging and possibility.
Final Quotes for Thought
Barry Posner and James M. Kouzes, co-authors of the classic The Leadership Challenge, once quoted Dizzy Gillespie. They recalled Dizzy saying:
“That trumpet is lying in the case every day, waiting for me.”
In the same sense, leadership is waiting for you every day. It’s waiting for you to take action. It’s waiting for you to show others that you mean what you say. It’s waiting for you to demonstrate that you know how to get people moving.
In the final analysis, leadership is about playing that instrument called “you.” But when you perform, you have to make sure that you play in tune.
—Barry Posner and James M. Kouzes, The Truth About Leadership
Posner and Kouzes flip the script on the expression “don’t play yourself.”
No. We should play ourselves as instruments of tension and release, call and response, growth and development. The concept of “life-long learning” points to a never-ending story of progressive refinement, a tale of tuning up by tuning in.