As the audience applauds, she walks out on stage to greet family, friends, teachers, and strangers who sit eagerly awaiting her first notes. This girl, who had just turned fifteen, had won the summer music festival’s concerto competition this year, and as a result, was about to perform her concerto with the faculty orchestra. She smiles, genuinely thrilled to be on stage about to perform. With heart racing a bit, knees somewhat shaky, and fingers a little cold, she signals to the conductor that she is ready to begin. The orchestra opens with a luscious introduction as she puts the violin under her chin, grins once more out of the sheer pleasure, and pulls the bow across the strings. From that moment until the very last chord of the piece, she becomes aware of nothing but the next note, the next phrase, and the music that is being produced as the orchestra joins in her musical endeavor. Later, people will congratulate her on a wonderful performance, full of energy and emotion. But, was this performance merely emotion and bodily energy? Did her mind, body, emotions, and reasoning act separately or were they working together?

I only can explain this type of unique experience because I was that fifteen-year- old girl the summer after my freshman year in high school. After all the hours of practicing that concerto, was this performance merely emotions and excited physical responses? Or was there more to it? Was my mind involved? My body? Any reasoning, decision-making, impulses, etc? And how might I know how my body and brain were interacting, if they were at all? As a musician studying how the brain and body are related and how they work together in everyday functions, it is of utmost importance to understand how this interrelation affects me as a performer.

Early in my musical training, I was taught to first intellectually analyze the concerto, sonata, or symphony that I was approaching in order to understand how the piece was composed and meant to be performed/heard. After methodical and technical practicing, then I was allowed to add the emotions, feelings, and extra musical ideas. Using this process, my musicality did not achieve its full potential. As I have matured as a person and musician, my instruction has been somewhat altered. There was a time when I was told merely to trust my musical judgment, allowing my technique to become the follower of the musicality. In this instance, the feelings came before the reasoning. Here, too, I encountered trouble. The technique suffered. Within the past year, my teacher and I have discovered the ideal way of performing, dealing with technique (reasoning) and musicality (emotions) simultaneously.

My development as a violinist correlates with the evolution that has occurred in brain/body research and philosophies. As psychologists, biologists, and other specialists began to discover how the body and brain interacted, they believed that the body and the brain were separate entities. They said the brain and body operated on their own, not needing one another to facilitate any processes. With this viewpoint, there are two ways in which things could be accomplished: 1) the body first reacts to a situation with an emotion, and the brain follows with reasoning or 2) the brain generates a explanation, and then the body reacts to the rationalization, causing an emotion. Both of these methods eliminate cooperation between the brain and body. Just as developing technique or musicality before the other mired my playing as a musician, this manner of thinking hindered our knowledge and understanding of how the brain and body work everyday.

However, in 1994, Antonio Damasio wrote a book called Descartes’ Error Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain that has helped change how we view the brain, body, emotions, and reasoning. Basing much of his argument on an incident that happened in the 1840’s to Phineas Gage, Damasio argues that the brain and body work together rather than independently. One of Damasio’s main ideas focuses on expressions and biology, more specifically primary (innate) and secondary (learned) emotions. By concentrating on these two categories of emotions that include both the brain and body, Damasio proves how these two entities operate in order to produce and complete complex emotions, functions, and utilities only done by the human.

Using Damasio’s terminology, primary and secondary emotions can be applied to our lives as well. They need not remain on the research field, in the investigative reports, or within Damasio’s book. My musicality is an innate ability (true of many musicians), one that comes naturally to me. Therefore, this trait is a primary emotion. However, technique used in playing the violin is most definitely a learned facility, making it a secondary emotion. Looking back at my concerto performance with orchestra, now armed with this knowledge of how the brain and body work together, I understand better my reactions emotionally and physically to the situation. While performing, primary and secondary emotions were being used. Mind and body, emotions and feelings, reasoning and interpretation: they all were at work, together. Each one helps the other, producing a very positive effect—a wonderful performance that I thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks to Antonio Damasio, we can begin to understand how the body and brain work in a joint effort to create an astonishingly ideal way of living—with emotion and reason working equally.