Music to overcome loneliness and humiliation
Music fosters our emotions, allowing both musicians and listeners to express how they feel. Music is the medium people can dance to and listen to. It is the sum of the familiar forms everyone knows: a guitar riff, an opera, or a piano solo. Music is at the core of human nature, as vulture-bone flutes show. At the same time, music is the sum of sounds that can be created and heard, however it is more, as sheet music demonstrates.
What do a homeless teenager and a pampered child have in common? Sometimes it is music. In each cultural environment, relationships can be difficult. It is not because a teenager is homeless that he will easily make friends with other homeless people. It is not because some children are the center of their parents’ world that they will be recognized by their peers or they teachers. Feeling alone, the homeless teenager will find in sounds and verses a privileged form of expression and will create hip hop music. Downgraded by an ironic music teacher, a cherished child may make efforts to play a piece of music much better than the teacher could have imagined.
Music to spark the heart and feel less empty
Stories of musicians urged and driven by their parents, successful performers, to dedicate themselves to music, are numerous. Such children, when they are growing up, sometimes realize that their self-esteem was shaped by a very competitive environment and they can feel unloved and, every so often, for some of them, inadequate. At times, they understand that their musical talent, which was to be a gift, can be almost like a curse: they become insecure at the idea of not being perfect.
How do they change their negative feelings? Life may help. An encounter can make all the difference. Pianist Michelle Kim explained that for her, the meeting was organized by her mother-in-law, who was involved in Christian charities. She asked her stepdaughter to play a concert for underprivileged children in a church where there had no piano, only a synthesizer, and virtually no adults, but mainly children, children that were poor, but were, however, happy when they were singing. Then she realized that music was there to be shared, to bring happiness, and she started teaching children who had no musical background and who felt insecure most of the time because of their precarious living conditions. And now, more underpriviledged children can understand that music is a gift. And since music, like any gift, can be received with gratitude and shared, like any other gift, these children play for audiences that can benefit from a bit of serenity and well-being when they hear it. Such persons are still hungry for music. It is not always about being in poverty, it is about admitting than one cannot always be completely self-sufficient.