Jonathan Biss & Adam Haslett on Anxiety, Depression, and Music (Healing with Music Series)

PUC-fan-favorite pianist Jonathan Biss came to our Healing with Music series alongside Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Adam Haslett for an intimate reflection on anxiety, depression, and music.

In 2021, shortly upon the culmination of a decade-long project recording all of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, Jonathan Biss took the rare step of publicly confronting a subject often considered taboo within the performing arts. He described his struggles with crippling anxiety and the severe effects that a solitary performing career had on his mental health in his instantly popular memoir Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven, produced for Audible’s Words + Music series. Having been celebrated as “one of today’s foremost Beethoven exponents” (The Chicago Tribune) ever since making his New York Philharmonic debut playing the composer under the baton of Kurt Masur when he was just 21-years-old, the pianist gave voice to the ways in which Beethoven—and music, in general—helped him heal from his anxiety as much as he had contributed to it.

Adam Haslett’s prolific career includes three critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling works of fiction, in addition to his journalism on culture and politics for The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. His second novel, Imagine Me Gone, was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was named one of the 20 best novels of the decade by Literary Hub. It was also finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, whose judges described it as “the quiet and compassionate saga of a family whose world is shaped by mental illness and the challenges and joys of caring for each other.” Drawing on his father’s suicide, Imagine Me Gone is the most personal book he has written—in his words, an attempt to “put the reader as far into the mind of someone with anxiety and depression as I can, and let them take from that what they will.”

ABOUT THE HEALING WITH MUSIC SERIES

Humans have been using sounds as a way to exist and endure since the start of time. As we return to the concert hall after the trauma of a pandemic, we are guided by artists whose stories of resilience in facing illness and personal upheaval shed light on music’s profound impact in events combining conversation and live performance. This video profile was streamed as part of the live Healing with Music event.
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