Unlocking Health and Wellness with Art and Music

Most of the world has faced since March 2020 recurring lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the ever present specter of illness or death. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has cast a shadow over our lives, livelihoods, and health, the scope of which has not been seen since the days of world wars.

Staff at ADB can feel blessed that they are working for an organization that not only looked after our economic welfare through steady employment but personal welfare through new flexible working practices and benefits. However, our mental health and overall wellness remains to a great degree individual responsibility. For someone like myself locked up at home alone for extended periods, the period has required its own mental survival strategy. Away from work, at weekends, the answer was to throw myself into art and music.

Since childhood, drawing and painting has been a way to pass the time and contemplate the things in life that make me happy, whether people, places, or even pets. These skills were more valuable than ever as the lockdowns struck and my thoughts turned to painting in oils spring scenes I could not witness myself, nostalgia of my college days, or natural scenes in far-off vistas, as far afield as London, Japan, the South of France, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as closer to home in the Philippines.

During frequent bouts of quarantine when I managed to return to UK, I took my watercolour paints, and sketched out miniatures to while away the time.

Back home in the Philippines, my building in Makati became a self-contained community with people congregating with their pets in the outdoor parking when we were not allowed out any further to exercise. I started a series of dog portraits to spread happiness among the residents, resulting in a series of more than two dozen drawings and four paintings.

As lockdown weeks turned to months, I also began recording a musical series on the harpsichord, a baroque keyboard instrument I have enjoyed playing since my youth. Some modest early recordings I made of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti turned into a series of 50, to provide a representative sample of his 555 works in this genre embracing all the keys he wrote in. These were featured in Health and Wellness month in 2020.

For 2021, I took another tack and decided to learn and record Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a mammoth undertaking. Bach published these 30 variations based on an aria around 1741 and were reputed to be commissioned for a count who had trouble sleeping. The variations adhere to an ingenious plan and show off his full technical and stylistic mastery. They also make great technical demands and contain many virtuoso passages.

The work became somewhat iconic when recorded in the 1950s on the piano by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. But the variations are in fact written for a harpsichord with two keyboards, which makes more sense of the music given the frequent hand crossings.

The process of learning, recording, and then video editing all these musical masterworks has proven therapeutic during quiet weekends of the long lockdown.

Hopefully I can look back on this art and music output when the pandemic is over and feel satisfaction that I achieved something tangible and worthwhile amid distressing circumstances, while striving to maintain my personal wellness and mental health.