I have always loved Philip Glass’ music.

My favourite is Satyagraha, the opera about the life of Gandhi and his philosophy of non-violent resistance to injustice.

Satyagraha’s libretto is based on the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture, and is sung in Sanskrit.

The music is hypnotic. You are slowly drawn into a series of typical Philip Glass loops able to lure your mind to a place of total surrender.

I listen to Satyagraha when I meditate or walk on the treadmill. It gives me a great sense of peace.

I went to see a performance of this opera last week at ENO. I liked it much more than their previous one in 2007. The scenes are more interesting and the singers have more personality. It was mesmerising…

 
Here is my favourite passage from the last act:

In what for others is night, therein is the man of self-restraint wide awake, separate from passion and hate, self-possessed and drawing near to calm serenity. This is the athlete of the spirit, whose ground remains unmoved, whole soul stand firmly on it. This is the fixed, still state which sustains even at the time of death the athletes of the spirit, who event then set forth, some to return, some never to return. Outstanding is he whose soul views in the selfsame way comrades and enemies, loving all alike.

Working on it…. It is all but easy. That’s why such a powerful reminder is important.

“Music is meant to exist in the moment and not to be recorded.”

I was listening to an interview with the Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider on BBC Radio on Saturday. His words made me stop and think.

I met Znaider in 1997 when, as a young graduate of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, he performed at an event I was organising in Brussels.

I remember he made me feel very homesick…and not just because he spoke German with an Austrian  accent…actually because of his strong personality.

I have longed for the land of strong personalities all my life.

If you listen to Znaider playing the violin, you’ll know right away what I mean.

It’s the certainty you get by hearing his music. You feel a structure surrounding you and lifting you up.

Isn’t this the feeling we get from strong personalities in general? A feeling that they know the way through life and, if we follow them, we won’t get lost…

How do you structure silence…?

I came across a quote by Daniel Barenboim, the renowned pianist: “…it is so disruptive when an enthusiastic audience applauds before the final sound has died away, because there is one last moment of expressivity, which is precisely the relationship between the end of the sound and the beginning of the silence that follows. In this respect music is a mirror of life, because both start and end in nothing”.

As a communicator, you feel under constant pressure to fill silence with words and messages.

Silence often terrifies us….We dread silence during presentations because we think it can only mean two things: either we have forgotten what to say or that the audience is not interested and is therefore not asking questions.

We all live under the tyranny of words until something happens…

It was my coaching training that made me realise the power of silence.

Silence is an essential component of any successful coaching session… Only by building in silence can issues be explored in depth…. Real break-throughs only happen after powerful moments of silence…

So how do we apply this to communications?

The answer might be that we just need to be brave and resist the urge to structure every minute of our presentations, sessions, pitches, etc.

Another quote by Barenboim got me thinking: “I will … attempt the impossible and try to draw some connections between the inexpressible content of music and the inexpressible content of life”.

Communicators do the same. We are brokers of passions. We help people express ideas and we get audiences excited about them.

Is silence the secret ingredient we need to use to turn ideas into reality?

I’ve always believed that passions make people bond beyond cultural and ideological barriers.

The story I tell in our book about my encounter with a Kazakh immigration officer only a few years after the end of the Cold War is an example.

Last weekend, I found another one.

I was reading an article in The New York Times about the anniversary of Isaac Stern’s trip to China.

The famous violinist toured the country in 1979 giving concerts. People travelled miles by train to see him perform. This happened at a crucial time. China was emerging from a long period of isolation from the rest of the world.

Stern is credited not only with spreading the love for classical music but also with enabling cultural exchanges between the West and a country everybody had learned to fear.

You have to watch the video about Stern teaching young Ho Hongying to play the violin. It contains one of the best lessons in cross-cultural communications I have ever come across.

Without knowing a word of Mandarin, Stern manages to tap into Hongying’s passion for music and, instantly, her performance improves.

What would be the equivalent of this in corporate communication?

This video of the concert given by the first-ever online collaborative orchestra got me thinking… about the implications that projects like this could have for world peace.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra was assembled by encouraging musicians from all over the world to audition by posting a video on YouTube.

Ninety winners from 30 countries were invited to play at Carnegie Hall.

It is worth listening to the speech Michael Tilson Thomas, the Orchestra director, gave before the concert. I love this part: “thanks to the internet and the amount of music that can be found online, we don’t need to define classical music any more, we can experience it”.

Does the same apply to cross-cultural relations?

These days, thanks to social networking, we can establish friendships on the opposite side of the world, in countries we knew nothing about. Through these contacts, we begin to learn about different realities and ways of thinking. A person from another culture is no longer a bit of statistics in a newspaper. Experiencing is so much better than sticking labels!

There are lessons for cross-cultural communicationsto be learned from the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project. I hope someone will come up with a study on this.

I love Sarah Rayani’s voice…

I know, I know …I know her mum and I might be biased …

But no, I am not. Her voice is intriguing and she’s got great looks.

I love the combination of Indian music and hip hop. She’ll make it big.

And guess what? She went to a strict all-girl school…. like me and my friend Gina. But I promise…. we won’t be singing any time soon.