Music, Health, and Activism... Oh My!
Well, I’m a day late because of my procrastination habits, but I’m still succeeding in posting this week!
When I first thought to add health and wellness to my mission, I was nervous. Am I trying to tackle too big of a target audience? Am I straying from my niche? Is this wise for marketing? What do I actually know about any of these topics? Am I still a tuba player? My mind raced everywhere, tapping into the well of imposter syndrome it’s been digging up lately. When I was able to calm down and remember everything that has brought me to this point, I realized that I am doing exactly what needs to be done.
Here I am, Jazzie Pigott: a professional tubist and wannabe fitness influencer with passions for music, social justice, and health/wellness—an identity that features the most stable career fields during the COVID-19 pandemic! Slight self-deprecation aside, I’ve realized that to truly pull this off, it is important to define for all of you wonderful readers why I’m combining these things and how this fusion will be done. Without further waiting: the content you’ve had to wait an extra 24 hours for!
Why?
Put simply, representation—my reasoning for being a musician in the first place.
Black women are underrepresented in both the music world and the health and wellness space. As I have always believed, seeing yourself in a space is important. I did not have a Black woman role model throughout my fitness journey, and I can imagine my confidence in going to the gym may have been significantly better if I actually did. As a musician, I have been lucky enough to have Velvet Brown to look up to, but just one woman is not enough to make up an entire field.
I did a mini-experiment on representation during my sophomore year of college. When giving a presentation to my tuba studio, I asked everyone who their primary role model was. Not to my surprise, every student mentioned someone who matched their identities—the white women chose white women, and the white men chose white men. A role model is someone who can give you energy, drive, and purpose. They are someone who shows you that it is possible for you to do this too.
There is an entirely different level of representation between music and fitness. In looking at the fitness space, how many fitness influencers are musicians—how many musicians are fitness enthusiasts? The answer is, not very many. And with that, how can we expect musicians to see the value of health and wellness if they do not see it as applicable to themselves? I’ve found that musicians tend to see themselves as different from the general population (in many ways we are), which makes it even more difficult for the existing health and wellness community to reach them. Through actively promoting health and fitness, I hope to bridge this gap and encourage the music world to take health more seriously.
How?
I’m already a few weeks into this blog already (technically months if you count my unplanned-preview post from June), and have written about my experience with physical and mental health and some tips to start health and fitness journeys with busy lives. None of these posts so far, however, have fully intersected between the three core areas and instead have each had a relatively singular focus. Here are some of the ways I have brainstormed bringing these areas together. In the future, I will go much more into depth on each topic.
1. Health and wellness’s impact on music and activism
In order to perform your best in whatever role you choose, you need to have a healthy body and mind. Exercise has been shown to have a number of benefits. Simply moving more throughout the day has been shown to increase people’s productivity. Aside from exercise, we must also get adequate rest. When someone isn’t well-rested, they will be fighting their body’s exhaustion to get through the day which takes away from their ability to perform the task at hand—whether that’s playing in an orchestra or organizing a protest.
2. The importance of resistance training to musicians
Music is a very physical activity and having a strong and healthy body is important to facilitate the long hours of work we do. Yeah, cardio’s great and all, but the real change comes with the weights. Resistance training can be used to correct muscle imbalances and help prevent some of the injuries that can occur due to playing an instrument. Resistance training is also much more fun in my opinion, so it’s easier to fit it into your day!
3. Activism in the health and wellness world
Whenever I think of “health and wellness,” I have the image of a thin white woman preaching the benefits of yoga and clean eating, and I know I’m not the only one. The health and wellness space is predominately white similar to the music world. As I said earlier, it is important to provide and promote representation of people of all sizes and colors
4. Health and wellness as activism
Racism is a public health issue. The access to resources that promote health and wellness has been limited for people of color, and this has resulted in poor healthcare and higher rates of chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. COVID-19 highlighted these disparities as people of color have had a higher rate of death from the disease. Promoting health and wellness to these communities is necessary for change to occur.
5. Music as activism
At the heart of every revolution, there is music. It brings people together and is a powerful force to ignite change.
6. Health and wellness activism in music
Despite the physical nature of being a musician, little time or care is given to taking care of physical, mental, and emotional health within music programs. In today’s society, the technology that has made things convenient for everyone has also created an “always-working” society. Rather than going home at the end of the day and not worrying about work, we come home to respond to emails or social media. We are chronically stressed and do not get a break, so it is more important now than ever to learn self-care. Health and wellness practices should be added to the curriculum in every music program in order to allow musicians to relieve stress and continue to perform well.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s post! I'm looking forward to getting more into these topics in the future. I have a bonus activism piece in the works for this weekend and will continue the health and wellness series next week with reasons to start finding time for fitness in your busy lives.