Feeling The Music

I can't sing Bach's B minor mass and hurt at the same time.


I am not sure exactly what it is - I think Bach's music (or at least this particular work) requires, demands, accesses all my emotional brain space, so if I'm physically hurting (arthritis and the like) or emotionally hurting (life changes looming big on the horizon) I'm a wreck.


Like have to stop singing. On the very verge of weepiness, in fact.


Our conductor made mention of the emotional qualities of this work, and how he tells his church choir at funerals that sometimes they have to just keep singing and hold it together - and this is the same. I agree. I'm hoping to be able to follow that directive.


This has never happened to me like this. In college, even when in the last throws of those awful days where I was fighting extreme pain to try to keep playing the clarinet, I was still able to just keep plowing along. The experience was never musical, and most likely harmful, but yet I perservered...


There'll be none of that now. I have recently developed this habit of telling people I "see the world differently" in regards to my new home with the Quakers and their (our) practices. I'm wondering how this musical experience plays into my daily way of seeing the world. I seem to have difficulty bottling up emotion and forcing it away. Only to resurface on another day anyways. So perhaps all this strum and drang is a little more efficient, albeit hard to wrap my head around right now.