Nurture Your Music and Watch Your Audience

Nurturing brings to mind images of mothers and gardeners – people who feed and care for living things, helping them grow and develop with attention and compassion. And while it’s obvious that a nurturing attitude is attractive in these people, it can be hard to imagine how one would nurture music. Nonetheless, nurturing your music is one of the most important things you can do to ensure that you and your performances make an impact on the world around you.

To nurture means simply to encourage, protect, and cherish something (or someone) as it grows. We’re big proponents of cherishing your audience – without them, you have no career. But how exactly can you nurture that audience or the music they come to hear?

Caring for music

Fundamentally, music is a language – a communication tool. In fact, music is the only universal language. Every culture in the world incorporates music in some way, and every human being can experience it. If you can speak, you can sing. If you have a pulse, you have rhythm. Music speaks of emotion, and it steps in when words no longer suffice. It’s extremely valuable, even indispensable, and as such, it deserves care and respect.

However, unlike a plant or a child, which exist regardless of whether anyone notices, music only exists when it is experienced. Yes, music is represented by notes on a page – but that isn’t actually music – that’s merely the instructions for creating music. Music is an experience and to nurture it you must cultivate the experience – give it value, allow it to have reach, impact, and touch lives. This is what we mean by nurturing music.

It’s about attitude

When we nurture something, we care for it beyond and before ourselves. We do what we can to help it thrive for its own sake – not just to serve our needs. Nurturing music is no different.

If you are using music as a way to gain fame or accolades, if every performance you give is really just a way of saying, “Look at me! Aren’t I amazing?” you are not nurturing music. You are nurturing your ego. Most of us have egos that need no nurturing – they are doing just fine on their own.

To nurture music, you must respect it for what it is and what it does. Music is a way of communicating something that cannot be expressed any other way. It’s a conversation with an audience. To nurture your music, you must nurture your audience – create an environment that allows them to experience the conversation and grow from it.

As performing musicians, we diligently practice pieces so that there are no breaks in our audience’s experience of the music – so that the piece can communicate without us getting in the way. We carefully craft performances designed to offer a particular experience. But it’s important to remember that what we are really nurturing is a moment in time. A very special moment, but a finite moment. Once we’ve delivered that moment to the best of our ability we have to let it go and do what it will like a pebble in a pond. It’s time to move on to the next pebble – to creating the next moment.

If you view music as all about you, it’s impossible to craft these moments or let them go. However, if you recognize that music is a language that has been around since the first heartbeat, and will be around long after you are gone, it becomes possible to see that you are but a piece of the puzzle, a little expression of this language of emotions.

And though all people are capable of making music, professional performers are the experts. You’ve been given special stewardship over this gift of language. If you take care of this gift – if you nurture it – you are nurturing the lives of the people listening, and they will grow in both heart and number.

This is part of our series on the characteristics of attractive people. If you would like to hear the live discussion about this characteristic, head on over to ClassicJabber.com now.

If you are ready to learn more about how to build a profitable, fulfilling career as a performing classical musician, check out Concert University, and the free webinar that outlines 5 strategies for success.