Art as Food for the Soul: What Music Teaches Us About Being Human
Jaap van Zweden has a phrase he returns to often. Art, he says, is “food for the soul.” Strip it away, and something essential in us goes hungry.
That idea carries weight coming from the Music Director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic—a conductor who spent four years leading his orchestra through Wagner’s Ring Cycle, one of the most demanding undertakings in the classical canon. But van Zweden’s conviction extends well beyond concert halls. It reaches into classrooms, communities, and the question of what we owe the next generation.
Why children deserve more than academic achievement
Education systems the world over measure what is easy to measure: test scores, literacy rates, mathematical proficiency. These things matter. But they do not capture everything a child needs to grow into a full human being.
The arts offer something different. Music, in particular, teaches children to listen—really listen—to something outside themselves. It builds patience, attention, and the willingness to be moved. Those are not soft skills. They are the foundation of emotional intelligence.
Van Zweden speaks of the orchestra as a treasury, a “big box” enriched by every ambitious work it takes on. The same is true of a child shaped by musical education. Every song learned, every harmony discovered, adds something that cannot easily be taken away.
How making music builds empathy
There is a reason singing together feels different from sitting in the same room. When voices blend—or when an orchestra breathes as one—something neurological and deeply human occurs. Boundaries soften. Differences recede. People become, briefly, part of something larger than themselves.
Research consistently links active music-making with increased empathy and social cohesion. It is not merely exposure to music that does this, but the act of creating it with others. The child who learns to follow a conductor’s cue, to adjust her pitch to her neighbor’s, to give and receive in real time—that child is learning how to be in a relationship.
Why classical music still speaks to modern life
Classical music is sometimes dismissed as the preserve of a rarefied few. The argument misunderstands what the repertoire actually contains.
Götterdämmerung is about betrayal and consequence. La traviata is about love and social cruelty. Parsifal is about compassion earned through suffering. These are not distant concerns. They are the same questions modern audiences carry with them to the concert hall—and carry home again.
Van Zweden’s approach to performance reflects this. Prepare exhaustively, he says, then forget the preparation entirely. “Just enjoy the music and let it flow from the heart.” That instruction could guide a lifetime.
The thread we must not break
Cultural continuity is not nostalgia. It is the act of passing something living—something that has consoled, challenged, and elevated human beings for centuries—into hands that will carry it forward.
When children are given music, they are given more than an art form. They are given a way of feeling, a way of connecting, and a way of understanding what it means to be alive alongside other people. That inheritance, tended carefully, does not diminish. It grows.
