Welcome to a new (Substack-only) series, “Art’s Open Door,” where we’ll explore the profound ways creativity and spirituality intersect and invite us into a deeper sense of well-being, connection, and joy. To hear an audio essay version of this post, click here.
“Andante Spianato” by Frédéric Chopin, performed by pianist Stefano Ligoratti
I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard that music.
Terrified, I sat cross-armed in Mrs. Cox’s ear-training class, waiting my turn. I stared down at the music I was about to recite, headachy and frozen. I had stopped drinking coffee on ear-training days (MWF) because of the shaking, but that only helped so much. When Mrs. Cox asked me to stand and sing or count something, which was basically every class, I hid my trembling hands behind my back.
The fact that I had never learned Juilliard’s specific ear-training method, “fixed do,” sent me spinning into an intense shame spiral. I was a doctoral student, after all. Sure, I had a Bachelor’s degree, an Artist Diploma, and a Master's of Music—seven years of higher education and conservatory-level training—under my belt. Still, those degrees might as well have been in Astrophysics as far as Mrs. Cox was concerned. Thus far in my education, we’d only used “moveable do,” so this was like singing in a new language. (Fixed or movable “do” are two different ways of teaching solfege or sight-singing where each note is given a different syllable a la The Sound of Music.)1 I walked into that course of study as a beginner, something I was (and still am) very much not good at being.
My experience in this class three times a week was proof that I didn't belong/didn't have what it took. My hair immaculate and my outfit carefully curated, my perfectionistic tendencies neatly secured in my impossibly heavy backpack, this girl from rural South Carolina walked the streets of New York City as an imposter.
This particular day was the apex of anxiety, the moment we were to combine all we had learned for the entire semester in an exam: reciting a solo piece from our instruments’ literature, singing it from memory in “fixed do” solfege in front of the entire class.
Next up, across the circle from me, was an Asian pianist whom I had never heard speak a word to anyone. He stood, his 5-foot frame rising with hesitance, one hand bracing his desk, and began to sing Chopin’s Andante Spianato. His 5-foot frame almost buckled at the weight of it. As a wind player, I immediately noticed how shallow and high his breathing was, the awkward pianistic melody so unnatural to sing with a human voice. His “si-re-mi-faaaaaa” was nasal but heartfelt, and his gentle eyes stared beyond the circle of classmates, never wavering. With clear pitch, he set down each note so tenderly, like shards of something precious and breakable.
Hearing that melody felt like meeting an old friend for the first time.
Instantly, tears welled in my eyes. Not stress or shame tears—I had hidden those kinds of tears in that fifth-floor classroom numerous times that semester—no, these were tears of joy. I let them fall down my face onto my Strauss Oboe Concerto as a flare of some childlike curiosity sprang up so suddenly it stole my breath.
Hans Christian Andersen once said, “Where words fail, music speaks.” I look back on that day at Juilliard and see that I was so deafened by my shame—my fear of not being good enough—that I stood mute and trembling, stuck and silent. The shame not only pushed me into myself and made me small, but, I realize now, it also made me unable to hear music speaking. Music, which had once led me beyond myself and into some big, wide world of hope and possibility, no longer sang to me because all I could hear was the roar of my own shame.
My classmate’s performance in that exam—the gift of that melody he gave me, even clumsily—opened a door I thought had been long ago locked. A door to beauty, curiosity, and faith. My shame evaporated as an overwhelming benevolence called me home.
At that moment, I fought a deep desire to run to the library and find the score and a piano, to experience what it felt like to make that tune come from a box of strings and hammers. Even though I was only slightly less inept at piano than I was at ear training, it wouldn’t matter. One line of that music, sung by a pianist in “fixed do” while breathing “wrong” in an ear-training exam, struck a deep chord within my soul. It wasn’t about the quality of the performance. It was something beyond, something transcendent.
Recently, I read about a group of religious and spiritual contemplatives from across eight different traditions (Buddist, Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, Native American, Russian Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic) who gathered in Snowmass, Colorado, in 1984 for what they called a “big experiment.” Led by Father Thomas Keating, they meditated together and then gathered to discuss. They quickly realized that while the words they used to explain or quantify their experiences differed, the experiences themselves were similar.
In the years following these meetings, Fr. Keating presented the group with Eight Points of Agreement, which were edited and revised down to this version. I won’t unpack all eight here,2 but two of those agreements provide words that help me understand what I experienced that day and many times since:
No. 1: “The world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names.”
No 6. “Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices but also through nature, art, human relationships, and service to others.”
Although I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, when I heard Chopin’s Andante Spianato in the timid voice of my ear-training classmate, it was Ultimate Reality that broke down the door and beckoned me enter.
Today, I might reach for words like God or Spirit to describe it, but back then, the faith of my childhood was barely breathing under the suffocating need to be perfect, drowning in my self-hatred and crippling insecurities.
On that day, Ultimate Reality sang to me—in solfege, believe it or not—and it was a miracle. I somehow recognized a melody I had never heard before. Like a song someone had sung to me as a child, it glowed with familiarity, mutuality, and Love, a tender memory of some long-lost joy.
Music, at that moment, was no longer a criterion but a communion. It required nothing of me but my attention, which was everything.
What strikes me about this experience now is how deaf I was to creativity’s deeply spiritual invitation to joy all those years at Juilliard, or even before that, if I am honest. And knowing what I know now as a coach for artists, I think that I was doing the thing that artists (or all of us) sometimes do when fear or shame shows up: we shut the door to spiritual experience out of self-protection. The competition and judgmentalism, not of the schools or studios I was in but of the work environment within my very own mind, was toxic. Subconsciously, I avoided Ultimate Reality because I expected God to judge me, too.
But I know now that when we shut ourselves off from each other and from something larger than us, we also shut out the possibility of joy. In the “tough skin, tender hearted3” life of an artist, many think it is the tough skin that artists need to cultivate most, that the tender heart is a given. But in my experience—in my reality—a tender heart can be so easily hardened by fear and shame, by life. And sometimes, the tenderest hearts construct the toughest armor.
Tenderness is a dangerous thing for an artist to lose.
For so long, my sensitivity seemed like a liability. If I just had more confidence, if I didn’t take everything so personally, if my heart was an impenetrable fortress of creative control, if I could stop caring so much about what people thought—then I’d be happy. Then this would all be easier. Then I’d “make it.”
But through the song that moved me that day, Ultimate Reality snuck in through a crack in the armor I’d built around my tender heart and opened it wide.
And so, artist or not, if you want to tame your tenderness, to cut off the vulnerable parts of yourself that could be hurt or disappointed or judged, if you want to avoid the presence or existence of a higher power, then best not listen to music at all.
Don’t hold a toddler in your arms.
Refuse to look west around dusk.
Decline that invitation to your friend’s art show.
Don’t ever find yourself in the same room as Michelangelo’s towering David or a real van Gogh, and don’t take a long meandering drive in October in northern Michigan.
Don’t read stories, either true or fictional.
Avoid the study of sea turtles, who somehow swim 5,000 miles back to the beach where they were born.
Run out if the theater gets dark.
Above all, keep so busy that you manage never to feel your feelings.
Hold others to the impossibly high standards to which you hold yourself, and never stop striving.
Lock your heart away from beauty and art so that it will never break.
Because there is a spiritual song that all created things sing, and your heart knows the refrain. When we experience beauty, human-made or natural, it is the Creator who’s left the door cracked between Ultimate Reality and this one.
Maybe you’re wondering what I did with this spiritual encounter under the fluorescent lights of a Juilliard classroom. I wish I could say that it gave me the strength to forgive myself for the ways I had “failed,” or to be more gentle with myself as I was learning, or to love music again after years of wondering if I should quit—but in that reality (painfully lower case and very much not ultimate), I didn’t have the courage yet to loosen my grip. After another week of hand-wringing and panic, I somehow managed to pass ear training with a B minus (another miracle). I wandered the streets of New York with that Chopin on my iPod, longing to find the thin place again.
Within weeks, my shame sealed up the crack in my heart’s armor, and I passed the whole thing off as a strange but ultimately insignificant occurrence. I wasn’t ready to walk through art’s open door yet.
The memory of that day in class reminds me that perfectionism always slams shut my heart and locks the deadbolt. It reminds me that Ultimate Reality sings, not only under the spotlights of the recital hall with superb acoustics on a 10-foot Steinway with a professional pianist at the keyboard, but through the rattly voices of recitation exams and shallow breathing and leaky oboe reeds and (in the stories of my faith tradition) smelly shepherds and bleeding women.
It reminds me that we busy ourselves with the work of being “good enough” so we feel like we are the kind of people who deserve to experience beauty or feel joy, when all along, it was Beauty and Joy that were seeking us. They sing a song that, on some atomic level, we already know. It is just a matter of listening long enough to recognize it, to sit down and try to join in, however imperfectly it may come out.
At the intersection of art and faith, of creativity and spirituality, is an outstretched hand. It is calling on you to go next, not to perform but to simply attend, to listen, to join in when you feel ready. There’s no need to be nervous because, while it includes you, it isn’t a test of your readiness or worthiness.
It is an invitation, an imploration: Please stop ignoring or pushing away these moments of beauty and connection in the busyness and noise of this reality. You were made for more.
It whisper-shouts, Look. Listen. Stay tender.
It isn’t a pointing teacher scrutinizing your recitation or a hard-hearted God who is disappointed in your lack of talent or skill, but rather, it is Love bidding you enter into the music that’s been ringing since creation began.
It calls you even now. Can you hear it?
It’s your turn. Walk through the door. Sing along.
“Fixed do” means the note C is always “do,” whereas movable means the “do” changes based on whatever key you are in.
Many thanks to my friend, Heather Lanier, who shared this concept with me. I’m reading this book about the Eight Agreements and will report back!
Rachel Held Evans coined this phrase, “Tough Skin, Tender Heart.”
Your podcast and this post are maybe the most incredibly moving words I’ve heard in a long time. As a woman who devoted many hours of my youth playing the piano and listening to my parents playing classical music this brought back some sweet memories. More importantly to me, your writing is exquisite and inspiring. So glad I’ve found you on both platforms.
Imperfection in performance is so, so important! The most moved I've ever felt was in a concert of a superstar artist who'd been performing and selling records for 3 decades at this point... he started singing the first song, and it sounded... wrong. Off. I couldn't believe my ears, surely he knew how to sing?? But he HAD been singing off-key... About one third into the song, something shifted, and he sang strong, beautiful, clear and most certainly, in key again, for the rest of the concert.
That moment stayed with me until I got it. He was nervous. Scared.
And that moment, that insight, gave me permission "show up" in life, even if I was scared all the time. Because if this man, who could plaster his walls with golden records, was STILL scared going on stage after 30 years of doing that, to a room full of people who WANTED to see him play and had paid good money to do so,... I figured that it was probably okay to be scared, and not a sign of moral failure on my behalf.
I remember only one of his own songs from that concert, but all the other ones have faded. The other one that stayed in my memory was another one where he showed himself to be vulnerable. Before he played the Beatles' "Hey Jude", he said, "Here's a song I didn't write, but I wish I had."