Learning to Play Yourself: Music as Metaphor for Soul
In our very constitution we are musical, as is the world itself. If anything, the music we listen to is a metaphor for human nature.
—Thomas Moore
David Hubbard, Deputy General Counsel, Verizon, beaming @ Jazz Leadership Project workshop early in 2020
In early 2020, before the pandemic, Jewel and I led consecutive Jazz Leadership Project workshops for Verizon’s Consumer Legal Team, the first in New Jersey, followed by a team-gathering in D.C. We presented our JLP principles and practices, with a live jazz trio conveying them in sound. The sixty-person team considered their everyday work and communication via the leadership excellence and ensemble mindset of jazz music.
With open arms, we welcomed the opportunity to continue our engagement with them last week, a live webcast from a broadcast studio.
After the workshop, Vice-President and Deputy General Counsel David Hubbard shared this thought:
Jewel and Greg have reminded us that we're all musicians every day. And as we've studied the principles and practices that the Jazz Leadership Project teaches, we've become better leaders throughout our organization.
Playing Yourself as an Instrument
In Black American vernacular, the expression “don’t play yourself,” means to not fool or lie to yourself. But if we flip the vernacular script, learning to play yourself as a musical instrument can be most beneficial.
In jazz, a musical instrument can be a voice as well as a percussion, woodwind, brass, or string instrument. What’s the purpose of a musical instrument? The answers become a metaphor for a term we’ve referenced before at Tune In To Leadership: self-as-instrument. Here are a few instrumental purposes:
To express your unique self and to play well with others
To make music
To engage in tension and release, challenge and cooperation
To be dynamic, loud to soft, together
To follow scripts, improvise on those scripts, yet also transgress those scripts, together
To be flexible and adapt and blend our egos and identities
To have conversations, to engage in intersubjective dialogue
The latter is crucial, because, as the poet David Whyte says, the universe is conversational.
When we converse, we ask questions and make statements. Self-as-instrument, then, involves playing well with others and engaging in inquiry. As in jazz, self-as-instrument also involves very deep listening.
Listening with and to the Music of our Souls
Thomas Moore
The author of the epigraph above, Thomas Moore, a former professor of psychology and religion, is famous for his enriching book, Care of the Soul. However, the quote is found in another of his works, which I discovered in Jewel’s collection, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. The work features a section devoted to Art containing a short, melodious essay, “Musica Humana.”
He begins the essay by riffing on the Roman statesman and philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, known in history as author of The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison before his execution. In a different essay, which Boethius wrote in a somewhat less precarious circumstance, he formulated a conception of musical types that became influential in the Middle Ages. The three kinds of music, he proposed, are: cosmic music of the spheres (musica mundana); music that we hear with our ears (musica instrumentalis); and the music of the soul (musica humana), “the harmony that unites the spiritual with the physical in the human person, the parts of the soul, such as the rational and irrational, and the parts of the body.”
While in college, Moore was utterly enchanted by Boethius’s formulation. Later, when he worked as a psychologist, it helped him with patients. For instance, when a patient attempted to reconcile two themes or desires, such as being a serious student while maintaining a playful attitude, Moore would think in terms of music:
Often we approach life as a logical problem and try to decide which alternative is correct and makes sense. A musical approach looks for ways to combine many different themes, without logical solutions and without allowing any one theme to dominate.
Moore also realized that life “often takes the sonata form,” with an initial “presentation of material—themes and counterthemes, harmonies, and figures,” followed by “the intricate dissolving and free ‘development’ of that material,” and finally the recapitulation, “when the material is again presented in its clear and cohesive shape.”
The musical view of the soul accepts rhythms, harmonies, dissonances, and developments, and so it is tolerant of the many different kinds of figurations that makes up a life. Thinking musically, we can ask not what is the right way to go, but rather what is the form here?
The ear training that we recently spoke of allows jazz musicians and avid fans to recognize whether the situation at hand is a 12-bar blues or a 32-bar AABA “I Got Rhythm” variation, or some unique form as composed by, say, Thelonious Monk or Ornette Coleman. Such a capacity to recognize and play with form is akin to what I call “conscious culture,” a favorite term of Ralph Ellison’s. Far too many these days ping pong from social media posts to the outrages of the political news cycle, not consciously recognizing the forms of manipulation at play. That’s living in “unconscious culture.”
Problematic, most certainly. According to Moore: “. . . when we are attached to familiar understandings and unconsciously involved in the culture around us, we may not hear the music of our souls. Rather than being musicians of the psyche, we are truckdrivers, putting our muscle into getting the job done and getting there somewhere on time. As musicians of the soul, we could be unusually sensitive to the heart’s music and care for it with all the attentiveness of a jazz piano player working out a new riff.”
Are you a musician of the soul?