On Black Wednesday last, a happy coincidence saved spirits, morale, and outlook. (If you have to ask what was so black last Wednesday, we are not on the same page and you are reading the wrong guy.) I had no time to brood, sulk and indulge my anger and frustration; I had to get to a morning recital at which I was merely a guest, not a reviewer. There, music did the trick. I became so involved with Beethoven and the other composers on the program, there was no room in my head for any of the negative emotions. The state of the world, as far as my concerns were concerned, was centered on the personality of that genius, the personality of the performers and what they were discovering. How bad could things be when I had such places to go?

It reminded me of a favorite philosophical theme, how the principle of hope is embedded in the musical experience, activity, gesture. Persons practicing music and performing it are activating that vision as they strive to make their music better, as they aim for a rendition closer to the mark in their imaginations, just a little closer to the way they think it ought to go, the way great so-and-so played it, or should have played it. In making music, we are looking with optimism to the future.

Hard to think of the irascible Beethoven as an optimist, even harder to consider Mahler a positive visionary, but in essence they had to be, whatever the buffets and frustrations they believed they were suffering. How else could Beethoven compose masterpieces that lift us to the empyrean, whatever our mood of the moment ? How else could Mahler have composed his shattering symphonies — with all their tragic drama — without having, nurturing, growing the hope that there was a humanity out there that would understand and feel with him and his music. That hope had to be far greater than the despair so acutely and irresistibly projected in the music. There will be people out there who will understand.

Losing yourself and your problems in music is just escape, some might say. But is escape bad? Wasn’t it essential for the Nazi victims in Terezin to “escape” in music, and through it cling to their only connection to life itself? By whatever strengths they found to create and perform, they were, through their music, projecting a sense of other lives, of former lives, of future lives they could hardly bring themselves to speak aloud about. And what about those Germans who were appalled by what was happening, impotent to affect the course of events, and condemned ultimately to suffer the avenging sword and the terrifying destruction wreaked upon them indiscriminately? We know that music was a critical life resource for them.

So it has been for every musician, whether those known to have suffered — Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky — or those romantically thought to have led serene lives. As T.S. Eliot said, art is not an expression of emotion but an escape from it, words that Stravinsky might have uttered and probably did. And while other forms of art, the visual arts, poetry, literature and so on, also afford avenues of “escape,” of losing oneself in the extension of another person’s thought and spirit, the process with those arts is not the same, which is not to depreciate them. Music alone is an animation in sound and in time, of thought process, spirit, the rhythm of living, of the energies of life, of life itself. Music lives in time, as we do.

Of course, there are the associations we have been conditioned to make in music, the associations between certain kinds of minor key music and sorrow, between agitated textures and storm, struggle and strife, between highly energetic, rhythmic movement in bright harmonies and joy, happiness, elation. Such are responses to the immediate face of music however, not to the inner workings of the music. It is those inner workings that reflect nothing less than the activity of the composer’s mind, the thinking and imagining in process. Getting in touch with that is nothing less than communing with that composer, dead or alive.

In the process, there is the connecting with the person of the performer, the re-creator, but the real person, not the “interview” or pretend or wannabe person, not the painfully shy or the aggressive extrovert or diva boasting on the outside. The actual article, genuine or not, nice or manipulative, cannot hide or pretend while performing. That’s another thing about music. Its performance tells the truth, one way or another, if only you will, or can, listen deeply enough.

Besides the communing, there’s something else. I don’t know a more complete way of reaching into myself than through listening into a work of music. That constitutes the attending to as much as possible of what is happening in the music as it unfolds in time. Each of us can do that, to varying degrees depending on training, practice, musical acuity. Of course, it’s not so bad after all just to listen to music half-earedly, diverting the mind, as a pleasant distraction. That too helps, if it is only a palliative kind of escape. However the grasp, at whatever level the engagement, the listener is changed, if only for the moment. For that moment, the listener is transported, in one sense, out of self. In another sense, that listener is also conveyed more deeply into the self in the recognizing of one’s own life force as it joins or at least shares with the other, the greater other.

Such considerations form for me, the most compelling reasons for the teaching of music at every grade level in the schools. Music has a moral force, and the learning and practicing of music cultivates that in the personality. In spite of what we can think of musicians whose external persons were difficult, troubled, even malevolent — think Wagner — their music reveals a very different and human person, the better self that cannot be hidden.

So, whenever I am fearful, as our government has been both teaching me to be and inducing as agent or source of fear, I turn to music, suddenly practicing and listening more than I have in a long time. It’s the best out, and the best in.

(Robert P. Commanday, the senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

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