Performance as Journey: Response to an encounter with Lorin Hollander described in WyzardWays' posting of 2/22

As a music therapist, I was drawn to the Wyzard's account of a community brought together by Barbara Hesser--long-standing director of the NYU Music Therapy program and pioneer in the field--in a summer retreat which featured the concert pianist Lorin Hollander. Having trained in her program, I was struck by the apt description of Barbara as a "spiritual force" energizing others and catalyzing relationships through musical improvisation, meditation, and soul-searching discussion. I recognized with a thrill the potency of her uniting an interdisciplinary group of seekers through vocal and instrumental musical exchange which grew organically out of silent communion.

In my first year of music therapy training, 1997-98, I was fortunate enough to experience directly a performance by Lorin Hollander. In addition to the performance itself, I was impressed by the vibrant variety of the gathering which seemed to expand the bounds of our humble classroom space (Room 985 in the Education Building). I knew nothing of Hollander's biography at the time, but found that his music affected me uniquely--quite differently from that of many other performers whom I had heard in concert--in ways that I could not verbalize. It comes as both relief and revelation, all these years later, to read the Wyzard's impressions of Hollander which so resonate with my experience: of his performance as a journey, a channeling; not only a channeling of the composer's imagination nor of his own sensibilities as performer, but a "presencing of the human spirit," an evocation of multidimensional experience and response in his listeners. Rather than being unilaterally presented by performer to audience, Hollander's music served as a vehicle for our moving together from moment to moment along unpredictable channels.

Given the powerful impact of his music, I am not surprised to learn that Hollander had personally made the journey from child prodigy to visionary and searcher. Educators may draw much inspiration from this development, especially educators in a performance-oriented field. How seductive--but ultimately devastating--it can be to spotlight the technical skills and virtuosic achievements of the "prodigy." No wonder performance is ubiquitously associated with anxiety and inhuman competition toward narrowly defined, standardized goals. If we can instead envision performance as interactive--as a process of engagement with a medium, a community, and one's own multifaceted potential--then it can truly serve both educational and therapeutic purposes of advancing growth and development. Rather than imposing external, quantitative criteria, performance education can be a cultivating of students' inspiration; and a memorable performance event such as the sharings of Lorin Hollander may thus yield the "ecstasy of a fulfilled inspiration."