Junior High Music & Awe
The surprising power of awe
“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world,”
Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley
Last week was music week for my little family. I have one in Jr. High band and one in the elementary school orchestra. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, we found ourselves sitting in wildly uncomfortable junior high gym bleachers under harsh light, listening to the cacophony of band and orchestra warm-ups in anticipation of the actual event.
Something magical and wonder-inducing happens when elementary school musicians visit the next level. These concerts are (wisely) held the week elementary students register for junior high classes in our school district. The concerts are not even a subtle invitation to keep going. "Band is so great." "I've made so many new friends in Orchestra" and "Staying with music was the best decision I made when I came to junior high." (I love the energy and passion teachers and students display at these events trying to convince 12-year-olds to keep play music)
We listened to the high school chamber orchestra play Bach, the 8th and 9th-grade jazz band play challenging jazz solos, and 6th-9th graders play wonderful concert music!
All of this made me think of a recent interview I listened to about awe. Dacher Keltner, the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, shared his latest research on how to have a better life with Krista Tippet in an On Being Episode. His research led to the answer. The finds were surprising in that what makes life better is the experience of awe. And "what most commonly led people around the world to feel awe was an experience of other people's "courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming." (Krista Tippett in On Being-The Thrilling New Science of Awe) Awe can happen when we see a fantastic sunset. However, a more potent form of awe occurs when we see groups of ordinary humans acting in harmony together. Witnessing 6th graders who have only been playing their saxophones, basses, and violins for a year and a half creating music is an experience of awe.
There is another element of awe that awe researcher Dacher Keltner identified. Collective effervesces is awe that happens when a group of people moves together. In the interview, they spoke about dance clubs and cultural dance. I would argue that I witnessed "collective effervesces" watching twenty-five 12, 13 & 14-year-old violin bows move in unison and trombones playing jazz riffs. Even a collective effervescence of parents recording each movement and solo, smiles of pride that just can't be hidden.
The awe researchers identified that allowing goodness its own speech is another element of awe. They defined this element of awe as ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I mean, 12-year-olds playing orchestra music and concert band performances? That is utterly ordinary humans doing amazing things…and those teachers, the men, and women who have guided all these young musicians from noise to music, from interest (or forced interest) to budding passion. Elementary and junior high music teachers are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Awe.
What I loved about my surface learning of awe this week is that it isn't extraordinary; it's ordinary and happening all the time in every way. I could have focused on the uncomfortable seats, the inconvenience of two nights, where plans had to change, and the extra hour we had to get there for each performance because we had performers...but I would have missed awe. Collective effervescence was in that gym in abundance. Goodness was allowed to sing and speak with each performance piece, toe tap, and bow.
Some resources on awe:
On Being Podcast: The Thrilling New Science of Awe
Greater Good Magazine: What is Awe
The New York Times: How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health
A Blessing for Awe
Awe is everywhere. In ordinary thoughtful moments with strangers at the store, in the park, or on a walk. May your soul be open to awe when ordinary moments surprise you may you add a jot to your tally of awe, and may those jots and hidden heart notes of awe be uncontainable in their ordinary abundance.
Foster by Claire Keegan
Another book (novella) by Claire Keegan. This was the story of an unnamed young girl sent on a late spring Sunday afternoon to live with some distant relatives on a farm. She is left without much explanation other than that her mother is having another baby. We watch as she adjusts to creature comforts (warm baths, abundant food, and clean sheets.) We watch how ordinary human kindness widens her heart, and her experience of herself in the larger community. It’s a completely ordinary novel, and yet extraordinary. Claire Keegan’s writing is so sparse and yet so full. She leaves much unsaid or unexplained, and yet it works.
What most commonly led people to feel awe? Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming—actions of strangers, roommates, teachers, colleagues at work, people in the news, characters on podcasts, and our neighbors and family members. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty: exceptional virtue, character, and ability, marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action.
What’s the Most Common Source of Awe?
Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.
Wayne Dyer
It also has psychological benefits. Many of us have a critical voice in our head, telling us we’re not smart, beautiful or rich enough. Awe seems to quiet this negative self-talk, Dr. Keltner said, by deactivating the default mode network, the part of the cortex involved in how we perceive ourselves.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/well/live/awe-wonder-dacher-keltner.html
“Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Focus on the ‘moral beauty’ of others.
One of the most reliable ways to experience awe, Dr. Keltner found, was in the simple act of witnessing the goodness of others. When we see others doing small gestures, like walking an older person across the street, we start feeling better and are also more likely to perform good deeds.
However, goodness in others is often overlooked, Dr. Keltner noted. “Our public discourse and academic discourse sort of forgets about how much good people can and want to do,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/well/live/awe-wonder-dacher-keltner.html
