Music is Important⁠ ⁠

Every day I hear a song that gives me a pleasant memory. I might be in a store somewhere (back when we could be in stores), or walking through my neighborhood, or listening to my family activities in other rooms, and a song will always rise to give me some positive feeling daily. I will remember where I was when I first heard it, or who I was with, or that one special night with friends before or after the concert. It transports me to that place.⁠

Music is important.⁠

Not just important because it can transport me, but it can lift people from a dark place. It can express when we don’t know how, and it can soothe and smooth the hard spots in our heart or in this life. By now, everyone also knows it helps form the brain better, it opens up pathways with the “Mozart effect”, and schools with music programs tend to do better with student performance than those without arts. Music does a lot of complex and foundational work in human beings.⁠

I’ve written about this a number of times and keep saying it because people keep forgetting. Music is really, really important. This article is about how music forms our view of others and how we interact with each other based on music. When we go out into this “visible, created world” and meet a new person, there are a lot of surface and peripheral things we see about them and begin to interpret who they are by this. We take our experience of who we have met in the past that look like them, or talk like them, or do the same job they do. We can get a few facts about a new person and start categorizing them into those people we want to spend time with and those we don’t.⁠

Music is categorized like that too online, but music itself is above all that – it speaks to us, brings us new energy, and new friends. Listen to the score of your day and see if you can expand what you know, who you know, and how you listen today. Here is a photo of someone teaching music – one of our greatest gifts.⁠

Music is important.

#kensteorts

This Visible Created World:

It was the single most gorgeous photo I ever took. A quick, unplanned roadside stop just entering Grand Teton National Park in Northwestern Wyoming with my family. I pulled over, jumped out, ran to the other side of the car, lined up my old iPhone 6s, and shot a pic. Something in that moment was illuminated, or flashed, in my mind. As I checked the photo on the little screen, I saw it. Unmistakably, this was “the photo” for the trip. Ten crazy days in five states and multiple parks with our family of four – this was the photo. None of us in it.

Just this visible created world.

As a creative person, a musician, a speaker and an educational entrepreneur with the Visible Music College systems and partners and daily work of my life, I would be tempted to write about the “Visible-created world” and the miracle of music education in fundamentally changing artists into professionals or tentative songwriters into powerful voices in culture. But there is something far deeper than a college or song or record label. More than human made items and textbooks and merchandise.

This visible and created world.

I see a greater Artist who has imagined and designed and guided the creation of all things globally. I see the incredible series of captured moments in each life. Each one, created and meaningful. I see a global connectedness of these stories and persons that unfold into larger narratives of community and support through an often troubled and tenuous personal existence. And we are all creators. Yes, it is most obvious in the musician or the potter, but we also create food and finance and family. And gardens, and businesses, and healthful people. We, as little creators, visible to each other, outside our sacred spaces, reverberate in our daily connection to one another just as Bonhoeffer intoned the meaning of “the visible community” some 80 years ago in The Cost of Discipleship.

Visible Music College is a part of that visible community. We are in and of the visible, created world. We work globally to train artistic people to grow personally and professionally in a dozen places with hundreds of faces and all styles of music and art.

Look long into the visible created world – and embrace it for yourself.

#kensteorts