Join Steinway Artist Hsing-ay Hsu, creator of the Conscious Listening™ approach, for an interactive music appreciation experience that blends the worlds of arts, health, and education. Her engaging performances and "whole brain activities” around the music of Bach, Poulenc, and Chopin, creates magical moments while enhancing cognitive function and emotional awareness. This unique lens into rich multicultural masterpieces offers a powerful way to “connect to music, others, and ourselves.”

“Connections” at the Aspen Music Festival and School:
How Classical Music Helps Us Navigate Today's Complex World

As an Aspen Music Festival and School guest presenter this season, an alumna, and regular visitor, I have felt Aspen’s impact in providing a rich environment for renewing our spirit of learning and how our systems process our reality.

In today’s fragmented world of continuous disruptions, we need artists who awaken an exhausted and disillusioned public with better tools for how to respond to uncertainty, sometimes to focus in and other times to release control. 

Those of us who have experienced great performances know they are not luxuries but essentials to living a conscious, meaningful life. Listening to music improves cognition, emotional intelligence, mood and health - but more than that, it helps us explore spiritual meaning beyond the material world. Live concerts ground us to the present moment while connecting us to timeless ideas.

President John F. Kennedy, a passionate arts advocate, would be stunned by today’s political siege of the Kennedy Center, where I once performed as a U.S. Presidential Scholar of the Arts.

In his final address at Amherst College honoring Robert Frost, JFK warned:

“Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much… poetry reminds him of his limitations...[and] of the richness and diversity of his existence.” 

We are wired for spiritual engagement. The arts help us process emotions and thoughts, perceive sensations, and connect to a bigger picture. The resulting multidimensional awareness connects today’s volatility and complexity back to our sense of self and purpose. This is why music matters more than ever.

The current administration's proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts sends a chilling message: public access to “meaningful arts experiences" and the resulting connections are expendable. Cancelled funding has compromised projects in Aspen and across our nation. 

Sustaining the “land of the free and the brave” requires a strategy of creative research, long-term vision, and civic participation. It’s an amplification of how performers interpret the score – we filter through layers of information, stay connected with others amid distractions, and exercise the freedom to pursue a vision for a better world.

In 1952, Aspen Institute founder Walter Paepcke wrote that if visitors “come away with a broader horizon — perhaps even with greater wisdom — I shall think the [Aspen] experiment a success.” Concert music has the transformative power to expand our sense of what is possible.

Today, bravery also means to develop the emotional maturity, support others, and endure volatility. Just as a great symphony propels us forward through powerful moments of harmonic “tension and release,” we can rehearse this pattern between stress and letting go in life – it’s called resilience.

In one of my recent workshops, a participant called it “improvisational listening” – where the abstract nature of music allowed space for her imagination to blossom. If we want new solutions, we need creative thinking skills which need to be intentionally practiced and cultivated widely.

Dr. Joseph Polisi — President Emeritus of The Juilliard School and organizer of the Leadership Forum in China, which AMFS took part — told me a biting joke: “How do you exclude the U.S. from global affairs? Call a meeting for Ministers of Culture.” The sad truth is that we don’t have one. Yet in Aspen—a crossroads of ideas since the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial—the arts have long been a path to deeper understanding.

At a recent event, AMFS President Alan Fletcher talked to me about basing this summer’s theme on Kandinsky’s belief that art helps us transcend the ordinary to encounter something new and more profound. There is a remarkable lineage from Goethe to Kandinsky to Herbert Bayer to today’s musicians, all using art to expand human awareness. 

Integrating mindfulness, musical models, and emotional intelligence leads to what I call Conscious Listening™ - foundational skills for civic engagement and meaningful connection. Music can help us strengthen our connections through this age of transformation.