Having been fortunate enough to receive a robust, extensive and varied music education coming up through the Waldorf School system, I can attest to how it permeates every other aspect of learning: its power to shape and grow the brain and its ability to bridge every gap imaginable, be it culture, language or developmental differences. This isn’t a controversial idea whatsoever, as there’s plenty of data on the benefits of music and art in education that show how the advantages one receives from it extend to everything from math skills to interpersonal communication. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived in a labor camp for eight years, devoted his Nobel Prize lecture to this very subject. He proclaimed that “not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience.”
I cannot imagine how different the world would’ve looked to me had I not learned to play instruments, and I owe much of my precarious sense of sanity and daily balance to the fact that I played music nearly every day of my childhood and young adulthood. With that said, I had the pleasure of getting to see the next generation of Waldorf kids in the throes of this process when I attended the school’s annual talent show with one of my very best friends from High School, whose daughter, Klava Alicea, is now in the 3rd grade. I hadn’t seen Klava for a few years when I went over to their house on a blustery winter day back in December. Her mother told me she had started learning the guitar about a week earlier. I asked her to play something for me and she bounced over to the couch without batting an eye, and performed the first verse of Katy Perry’s “Firework” with better execution than most adults I know who play. Maybe even Perry herself. What struck me the most was Klava’s self-possession with the instrument which matches what is clearly a natural gift. Knowing what I know about live musical performance, this kind of fearlessness is a requisite piece of the puzzle when you’re attempting to captivate your audience, almost more so than talent. Fast-forward to about a month ago, when I got to see these skills on display for the school’s talent show. Earlier in the week she had told me that she would be performing Adele’s, “Someone Like You”, as a duet with her mom on guitar. My first thought was how terrified I would have been if I were her. Just all of it. Mapping Adele’s vocal range; playing in front of a room full of my musical peers and entire extended family; Remembering the words…It’s the stuff of nightmares, really. Klava couldn’t have been more poised up there on stage, and sang the song perfectly, her beautiful little voice floating through the air like a butterfly. I’m confident that she will be able to have a career in music if she so chooses, but more importantly that she will become the kind of adult that this planet desperately needs: caring and open and confident. Unafraid of who she is and the world she inhabits.
All of the kids who performed that night were tiny little exemplars of Solzhenitsyn’s words, when he said that “falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art”. I rest much easier at night knowing that there are adults like these in the making.
