Fear

It is interesting to think about the influence of fear in the creative (and even personal) life of a composer. I don't mean to say that it does not affect the lives of other people, actually, I think it is an essential part of human behavior, but today I want to focus on the musician, on the creator of music, or the organizer of sounds, however you want to see it. 

To begin with, I don't think there would be any composers, of musicians, if human beings didn't have in them a great fear of the void, of the nothingness that surrounds our existence. The act of producing music, was in the beginning, closely related to the spiritual realm. It is still used, in many contexts, to induce us into superior states of mind, where we are not able to distinguish the physical from the non-physical. Think of a shaman in a state of trance, dancing to some fast and vertiginous rhythm of drums, think of a techno party, all the people half drunk dancing to the repetitive and loud music that surrounds them and fills the space. All this gives us a sense of immortality, it makes us, in a way, forget our immanence. Music my or may not be the language of the soul, but it certainly gives us the illusion that we have one. Through music, we feel that we can reach deeper and more subtle levels of meaning. Whether this actually happens or not is almost irrelevant, I think the illusion is enough. 

Nevertheless, I do think this actually happens, I think that music helps us reach deeper within ourselves and see who we really are. Primarily, music is about feelings, about sensations, whether it is the delight of perfect consonance (as in a pythagorean sense, thinking of the parallel fifths sounding in some forgotten cathedral in the midst of the 9th century) or the despair of an unresolved triton during a 4-hour Wagner opera, and feelings are the most honest product of our minds. You can deny a feeling, you can hide it, but you cannot not feel it. This is also our most vulnerable side, which leads to the second idea.

I think another important aspect of the musician's mind is the fear of being vulnerable in front of the world, that is, the fear of revealing our deepest emotions in front of an audience. As someone that grew up in a more Western-styled society (I wouldn't call South American culture "Western" without wincing a bit), I was always taught, albeit implicitly, not to show my feelings all the time, not to speak of them, especially if they were negative, because this means revealing your weaknesses to the world. If someone knows that you have some sort of soft spot, they might use it against you. 

As a musician, the aim is exactly the opposite: to be as expressive as possible, but also to be able to understand and manage your emotions. But here is where the two worlds collapse, because when you compose a piece of music, some of this inner world is revealed in it, whether you want it or not, whether this was your intention or not. The fear then comes from this conditioning to hide our feelings from other people, which leads to a fear of going "too far" with intuition, since that would be revealing too much of oneself. The aim, then, I think, is to  gain confidence in oneself, so that the expression of the inner world will not be blocked or determined by how the audience will perceive it, but more by what do I really want to say here. Self knowledge in the deepest way is clue here, because it helps to realize what do I really feel, and what comes from this social conditioning.

I will continue this when I have more ideas, for now I leave you with the Deutches Requiem, by  Johannes Brahms.