Music Is the Universal Language

Bernhard Kerres opens with the music he wakes to, then makes a case that reaches well beyond the concert hall: making music, not only hearing it, rewires how we think and who we become. Drawing on neuroscience, El Sistema in Venezuela, and a program he co-founded in Vienna, he argues we are choosing between a robotic society and a humanistic one. Recorded at TEDxSalzburg, 2013.

Published 2013-09-28 by Bernhard Kerres

My mornings mostly start with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It gives me an inner quietness, a direction for the day, and a sense of energy beginning to flow.

It reminds me of a physics experiment from school. A box of metal filings looks like pure chaos. Pass a magnet over it, and out of that chaos comes order: the filings align and energy seems to move through them. That is what music does to me, and to many of us.

The experiment in the room

I often invite a room to try something. Everyone stands, closes their eyes, focuses only on their own breath, and begins to hum, quietly at first, then a little louder. A hundred people start on their own separate notes. Within moments, without anyone being told to listen, the room settles onto a shared note, sometimes even a harmony. Nobody instructed them to coordinate. Yet without consciously listening, they took in the sound around them and responded. We are always listening to the world around us, even when we do not know we are.

That small act of humming each morning gives your energy a kind of order. The science supports it. Researchers like Oliver Sacks and the neuroscientist Gerald Hueter have shown that making music, not only hearing it, builds connections in the brain that nothing else stimulates. Hueter calls music making a power bar for the brain, especially for children: it changes how they think, learn, and take in the world.

From Venezuela to Vienna

Some understood this long before the science caught up. Jose Antonio Abreu founded El Sistema in Venezuela decades ago, in a country burdened by crime and corruption, on the belief that music could change lives. At his first rehearsal, he had set out a hundred music stands. Ten children came. He was not discouraged. He saw a starting point.

I believe we stand at a crossroads between a robotic society, efficient but unfeeling, and a humanistic one. I know where I stand. After visiting El Sistema several times, three friends and I founded a similar program in Vienna, now reaching more than a thousand children and growing across Central and Eastern Europe. The formula is simple: every child makes music every day, in an orchestra, and performs regularly.

What music changes

I have watched it change lives in three dimensions. It builds personality: standing on a stage, again and again, gives a child self-esteem. It transforms group dynamics: in classrooms marked by migration and old conflicts, children whose families once stood on opposite sides of a war forget the hatred when they sing together. And it changes families: parents who had never entered a concert hall watch their child perform on a great stage, and see both their child and the future differently.

So my ask is simple. Take music making seriously, not only listening, but making sound yourself. You need nothing but your voice. Start tomorrow morning with a little humming. Every day you have a choice: the robotic society, or the humanistic one. Start humming.

Recorded at TEDx Salzburg 2013.