"The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils."
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Music and leadership are rarely considered side-by-side, much less as integral aspects of a more comprehensive way of understanding human thought and human action. But that is exactly what we will pursue in this chapter, the possibility that both music and transformational leadership shape and are shaped by similar patterns of human experience and human energy, that the best leaders display a certain “musicality” that distinguishes them from others, and that actual musical expressions, skillfully facilitated, can be employed to tap and evoke significant aspects of the leadership experience and help to unveil its mysteries. In other words, our leadership can be enhanced by recognizing and drawing upon our aesthetic make-up. To turn our opening quotation from Shakespeare around, the best leader shave “music in themselves” that moves them to think and to act, engaging emotion, imagination, and will. If this is the case, then locating and bringing forth the aesthetic element of leadership can be extremely helpful in the practice of leadership.
What is it that transformational leaders do that causes others to follow? Our answer to this question is simple: we think that the best leaders connect with us emotionally in a way that energizes us and moves us to act. Transformational leadership engages others in a very special way, touching elements of desire, commitment, and possibility that are deeply seated in the inner lives of potential followers. In addition, these leaders provide the assurance that we often need to pursue important values. Transformational leadership is about change, and change involves bringing new energy to bear on important, and often shifting human values. Leaders facilitate a reshaping of human energy, restructuring the narratives of human experience and bringing alive a new progression of possibilities, even in spite of ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty (Denhardt and Denhardt 2005).
Interestingly, this is similar to the role of music in our lives. Music connects with us emotionally, communicating a certain energy that resonates with one or another emotional state. It touches us physically, emotionally, even spiritually and primes us for what might be called a feeling-based exploration of our personal condition. In this way, music relaxes us, assures us, consoles us, inspires us, excites us or calms us as its rhythms and harmonies interact with our own. In a very real way, we are moved from wherever we might have been to a new condition, noticeably more in tune with something we value, and definitely a couple of notches removed from any of our default states. The music’s progressions and transitions – its changes in harmony, melody and rhythm -- become progressions and transitions in our own feeling states and, indeed, over time we are primed for analogous progressions in other aspects of our lives, more or less at ease with complexity, dissonance, ambiguity, dramatic emotion and more.
It’s easy to think of music as a metaphor for leadership. For example, many have illustrated leadership by reference to the role of an orchestra conductor or the leader of a jazz ensemble. To this point, Denhardt argues that leaders are rarely able to write and conduct a “symphony” that others play. More often they are called on to be fully integrated into the performance themselves, to play along with others, like the leader of a jazz ensemble improvising a tune. “By establishing the theme, the leader of the ensemble . . . can chart the basic pattern and direction in which the performance will move. By setting the tone and the tempo, the leader gives focus to the spirit and energy of the group. By modeling effective and responsible performance in their own solos, leaders can energize and articulate the performance of others. But it is the performance of others that is critical” (Denhardt 1993, 180-181).
For this reason, we think the relationship between music and leadership is not just metaphorical but far more intimate. Both music and leadership are concerned with shaping human energy, with energizing people and encouraging them to new horizons. Both are concerned with summoning things into existence, with enlivening and deepening the human endeavor. In this way, both music and leadership participate in the same philosophical tradition, not the tradition of physical or empirical thought, not even in the tradition of social or political thought. (Indeed, we have often been misled by efforts to categorize both music and leadership in these ways.) Rather, music and leadership are both better situated in the tradition of aesthetic thought, that field of study concerned with the exploration of mind, body, and spirit in relation to art, beauty, and imagination – the world of possibility and potential.
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