You may come to a concert in part to lift your mood. Get out of the house, enjoy some music alongside fellow arts lovers, hear a song you love. But if that music evokes a complicated memory, or takes you to a sad place, that’s OK, too.
According to Renate Rohlfing, an associate professor at Berklee College of Music and a clinical music therapist, music can be a helpful tool for working through grief, even if it’s uncomfortable at times.
“What’s meaningful about music and that intersection with grief is that it gives you a place to hold it, to contain it,” she says. “Grief can be such an overwhelming feeling, and so to feel it when you’re listening to a meaningful song, consider how it has a beginning, a middle and an end; there’s a way to kind of bookmark it. It can give you a sense of control and autonomy.”
In her own private practice, Rohlfing helps clients “go through that spectrum of emotion, and feel confident in how they experience it,” she says. “There aren’t a lot of places for us to necessarily be very emotive. But a concert can be one of those places: you can cry out of joy, or beauty, or grief, or from holding on to certain memories. The musicians hold onto those feelings, the audience holds them, and you’re able to actually have a catharsis and release. And then you know that you’re going to be able to keep going. The end goal doesn’t even have to be happiness; it can just be feeling the feeling you’re in, and having the confidence to know that you can feel it.”
Rohlfing believes this experience is nearly exclusive to live music. “There’s a synchronicity to it,” she says, referencing Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s concept, defined as a “coincidental occurrence of events.”
She adds that sometimes audience members’ heart rates align at concerts, depending on the music and how they are experiencing it. “It’s why if you don’t even talk to people at the concert, you feel connected to them,” Rohlfing says. “And with that, I do think there’s something unique about an orchestra – so many people on stage, with so much sound. You don’t get that same vibration, or that synchrony, by streaming it.”
The quest for that connection might also be why some fans choose to see their favorite artists time and time again.
“Sometimes feelings get stuck, or we don’t know how to put them somewhere, and that’s the great thing about therapy,” she says. “But if you don’t have somebody you trust and can talk to, I think that’s why people connect to artists so much, because they feel like they have a relationship with them, a resonance with them.”
Whatever someone feels when listening to music, Rohlfing hopes they find their own touchpoints with songs and realize music can be both a tool and a resource. “Figure out ways that you have control over your own emotions through music,” she says. And if that emotion is in fact grief, “remember the spectrum of emotion is what makes us human. And that’s why music is so important. Sometimes we distance ourselves from grief or sadness, but these are powerful emotions in life, and they can actually inspire us to do something new and be more deeply connected to other people.”
