Song and Survival

Prague is a city carved out of survival.

It stands with the quiet authority of something that has endured. Gothic spires stabbing into grey skies, bridges heavy with centuries of footsteps, and walls that seem to listen more than they speak. I spent a week there recently, not just as a tourist or musician, but as someone looking for answers: to how art survives hardship, how identity weathers silence, and what it means to keep making music when it sometimes feels like no one is listening. Prague, like music itself, does not offer easy answers. But it offers something better: continuity through difficulty. And that, perhaps, is more powerful.

Walking through Old Town Square, I felt what I often feel when practicing certain pieces: Smetana, Janáček, Dvořák. That sense of restrained power beneath the surface. Czech architecture is layered, like the music: Romanesque roots, Gothic ambition, Baroque flourish, and the brooding undertone of 20th-century trauma. Everything in Prague seems built not just for beauty, but through difficulty. It’s the kind of beauty that’s earned through war, suppression, occupation, and revolution. And it shows.

The Charles Bridge is lined with statues of saints, each one weathered like a life lived under too many rulers. The Astronomical Clock doesn’t just keep time, it remembers it. And the city itself is a kind of sonata form: presenting themes, developing them through turmoil, and returning to them transformed. You feel it in your bones. And you carry it, as I think many musicians carry their own quiet history. There is a heaviness in Slavic history that’s hard to romanticize: centuries of foreign rule, cultural erasure, forced assimilation, and war. And yet, out of that came music of astonishing warmth and emotional intelligence.

The Czech composers wrote not as court composers or bourgeois entertainers, but as witnesses to a cultural identity constantly under pressure. Their music isn’t just beautiful...it’s resilient. It carries the DNA of a people who were told, time and time again, to disappear. And it says, instead, “We are still here.” That quiet defiance lives in every cello line of Dvořák’s Dumky Trio. In the irregular rhythms of Janáček’s string quartets, full of speech-like phrasing and interrupted thoughts. In Smetana’s Má vlast, where even the rivers carry national memory.

As a classical musician, especially today, in a world that so often asks us to commodify or dilute what we do, it resonates deeply. The career is not always glamorous. It’s not always fair. We work in a field that reveres tradition but often underpays those who uphold it. We are told, subtly or overtly, to make ourselves more “marketable,” less “serious,” more "content-friendly." But like the Slavic composers, we persist. Not out of stubbornness, but because we know what lives inside the music: the weight of history, the possibility of transcendence.

I spent one afternoon at the Kafka Museum, and although Kafka wasn’t a musician, his presence felt relevant. His world was one of absurdity, alienation, systems too vast and cruel to understand. There was a quote on the wall that stopped me: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.” It sounds like surrender. But I think Kafka was pointing out something deeper: that survival, even silent survival, is its own form of resistance. Musicians understand that. Slavic artists have always understood that. Sometimes, just continuing to play, to compose, to rehearse, to perform for a half-empty room, is a radical act.

As I stood in Prague Castle looking out over the Vltava River, I thought about how so much of what we do as musicians is about memory. Not nostalgia, but remembering. Remembering beauty. Remembering grief. Remembering what it means to be human in a world that forgets too easily. Prague does not forget. It carries everything, its triumphs and tragedies, in plain sight. And maybe that’s why I felt so at home there. Because musicians do the same. Every note we play carries someone’s story. Sometimes our own.

A week in Prague didn’t lift the weight of music’s difficulties. It didn’t fix the fragility of the arts economy, or the burnout that too many of us feel. But it reminded me of why I began this journey in the first place: not for applause, but for the privilege of making beauty in the face of history. Like Prague, classical music is not easy. It demands much, gives slowly, and rarely protects its own. But it endures. It leans into hardship like a trombone line leaning into dissonance—aching, unresolved, but somehow… still singing.

So to my fellow musicians: keep playing. Through difficulty. Through doubt. Through silence. Because someone is listening. Even if it’s just the City.