IT'S BEA TIME!

Tchaikovsky Understands: A Reflection on Music, Shadow Work and Creative Living

Written by

Bea Bhardwaj

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I am confident that by existing, I preserve my right to use clichés and touchés. So, here’s today’s cliché that I’m digging into:

Music is life!
Music is therapy!
Music makes me feel the feels!

There. I said it.

How I understand is that music is a creative force that flows through an artist’s mind and leaves an impression—first on them, then on the listener. And just like poetry, paintings or other art forms, it means many things to many people. The ripple effect? The same song can make me smile, make you cry, make someone else dance around the kitchen like it’s nobody’s business.

It soothes. It calms. It moves. It lives.

As one of the most versatile art forms, music is a medium of connection between the artist and the audience, emotion and movement, though and memory. It adds multiple layers of meaning when combined with other forms of expression—lyrics, dance, musicals or film score.

Nerd Alert! Science shows music measurably impacts the brain, body, and emotions. It is known to boost healing, memory, regulation, even cognition. [Studies below.]

For me personally, music is somatic grounding. Each note speaks to a neuron at a time, and just unfolds whatever demands attention. I’m at a point in my life where I depend on music because it,

  1. blocks out the world when it gets loud
  2. helps address emotions I didn’t even know existed
  3. makes me more productive
  4. calms my nervous system

Music is therapy, we know that (I hope), but it only recently hit me during shadow work, peeling back one layer at a time. Throughout my hermit phase, music was my only companion; it made me feel understood. Sure, I’ve stuck with multiple genres over the years that helped me focus on coding, compiling policies, documenting strategies, driving, cleaning, and so on. But this time, it unlocked something I didn’t know existed.

And just like that, one day, I was reading Dr. Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and he talks about Gödel’s String G and Bach’s fugues, and somehow mapping it all to chess, levels of descriptions, operating systems and so on. That caught my attention. Books, like songs, change every time you return to them. But Dr. Hofstadter’s work has a hold on me—I’m both smart and underexposed at the same time. I understood the logic, math and systems but nothing about fugues and canons, which hurt because that’s literally how the book starts. Until this section, I dismissed it as an error only to realize that Pulitzer Prize winning PhD’s don’t make spelling mistakes.

In my defense, that book was for technical side of things so I may have skimmed over the musical details. Anyway, I queued up Bach playlists on Spotify and listened to them for an entire week. And one night, just like that, after Bach’s playlist ended, a new tune began. Even without any real knowledge of classical music, I knew it wasn’t Bach. It was familiar, but it was different. Definitely. Not. Bach.

I tried to name all the classical artists I knew to win this single-player guessing game in my head. After a total of seven guesses, because that’s all I knew (I’m working on it!), I was curious and annoyed; no one wants a song they can’t name stuck in their heads. But I still didn’t check. Instead, I began painting.

That familiar tune was Violin Concerto in D Major Op.35 Allegro moderato.

Most of my shadow work included writing—journaling, poetry, blogs, short stories, multiple half-written books. Somehow, painting became the portal to the other side. And I walked through that portal with none other than, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. That familiar tune was Violin Concerto in D Major Op.35 Allegro moderato.

What’s still funny to me is that I fell in love with his work before I knew who Tchaikovsky was. I’m embarrassed to admit seeing the ballets and paying limited attention to the orchestra. Somehow, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Manfred Symphony, along with some symphonies and violin concertos, and operas like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, became critical to my routine.

Tchaikovsky’s music was my permission slip to feel and let victory and defeat coexist.

Something about the orchestra—the swelling violins, the aching cellos, bass percussion, long breath pauses—is intruiguing. It’s not just inspiring, it opens me. It orchestrates whatever I am trying to feel, bypass, or fail to articulate.

Tchaikovsky’s music was my permission slip to feel and let victory and defeat coexist. He didn’t shy away from longing, grief or intensity. That’s my kind of people. And yes, I listened to multiple composers and discovered that with Tchaikovsky’s music, I allowed myself grace and created a safe space to feel without having to understand why or justify anything to anyone.

I’m scoring my inner world.

For me, and I’m sure for many creatives, music is not just for ambience, it’s more like a collaborator. It meets me where I am, no matter how vulnerable, unsure, or reaching—it pulls me forward just far enough to find structure in my creative flow. And no, it’s not an oxymoron.

Now, when I write, especially with Swan Lake, Symphonies 4-6 and Serenade Mélancolique in my ears, I’m transported to an abstract realm or just a different era where I’m not just translating ideas into words: I’m scoring my inner world. The strings, tempo and unresolved tension help me explore the tone of what I can’t quite say, but somehow, the words follow. Not perfectly. Not quickly. But they come.

I wonder if the compositions know what I’m trying to say before I do. And that, too, is an act of creation. Which artist or sound inspires you creative flow?

If music can hold such power for me, what might it unlock in you? Maybe it’s time to listen a little closer

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