Week 1 - Phil Kleven

The Möbius Strip. What an interesting word, but what is it? A Möbius Strip is a surface with only one side and only one boundary. An example of a Möbius Strip can be created by taking a paper strip and twisting it in half, and then connecting the two ends to form a loop. In a video by Parker J. Palmer, we learn that this Möbius Strip can be a representation of our lives. The two sides of the paper represent our “On Stage” life, where we are concerned with looks and ego, and our “Back Stage” life, which involves instinct, value, faith, and soul. The narrator of the video claims that we are born with no separation between our inner and outer lives, but by stage 2 of our development, we start seeing the effects of mixing our backstage selves with the onstage world. 

Lisa Fiore notes on page 10 of Lifesmart, “As is true for all periods of the lifespan, the physical maturation of human development initiates the process, but social and emotional adolescent experiences strongly shape the nature and direction of behavior”. Through her strong words, Fiore illustrates how events in our adolescence powerfully shape behavior throughout the rest of our lives. 

Sometimes we reveal too much of how we feel and the world seems to become a dangerous place for our inner feelings. As a violin teacher, I work with students of all ages, and see this all the time. Many students struggle with expressing their feelings, and seem worried about discussing their struggles. The disconnect between our inner and outer worlds can become painful, so we become centered - allowing our external life to revolve around our inner values. These feelings make it easy to exclude those who don’t share core beliefs. Just look at our last two Presidential election cycles. Our country has become so polarized by differing beliefs that cooperation between our two major political parties has all but ceased to exist. 

Further reading in Lifesmart illustrates that the direction of our lifespans can change, which is also discussed in the Möbius Strip video. Fiore notes on page 16, “Continuities and discontinuities appear in each of our lives because the term development implies change. Puberty, leaving home, marriage, and career all serve to shape psychological functioning” (Fiore 16). Although our lives are affected by life events, these very events add to the maturation of our individual human development.

To conclude and to connect this all to my own career as a musician, I’d like to leave you with a video of J.S. Bach’s canon on a Möbius Strip. The music represents our inner and outer lives, shown in the video as music written on two sides of a pice of paper. This is quite possibly one of the hardest types of music to write, as the composer must know how the notes played forwards at the beginning of the piece will interact when combined with notes played backwards from the end of the piece. Enjoy!

(skip to 1:43 to see the depiction of music as a Möbius Strip)