Vijay Iyer is an award-winning pianist and composer. Among many notable albums, his oeuvre also includes Holding It Down, a performance work based on the dreams of military veterans of color. In this excerpt, Iyer reflects on the relationship between the arts and community, as well as why we need the arts.

"The arts are not something separate from us. I think that when we deal with these hierarchical notions of culture, we tend to think of the arts as something we go to, rather than something that is a part of us. And I guess my life experience with music has always been the opposite. It's always been that we are the arts. And I say that with the utmost humility, because when I say "we" I don't mean "we artists," I mean we, as humanity. It's something that has to be continuous with our daily lives, and I'm not interested in creating some kind of distance, or some sort of divide, between the arts and life as we live it every day.

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"I would say that art does the work that nothing else can do. If anything else could do it, we wouldn't need art, we wouldn't have art. A sculptor, I can't remember who, said that if we understood each other we wouldn't need art. I thought that was such a plain-spoken encapsulation of something so profound and obvious–so obvious that we don't see it sometimes. People always talk about understanding art, "Oh, I didn't understand that music," but it's not about understanding.... It's how we harmonize with each other. It's what we're able to participate in collectively that isn't about understanding; it's about something else. It's about sensation, it's about feeling, it's about expression, it's about community. It's the conversation we can have without actually having a conversation. For me, that's what art, which is a loaded term, has to do. It has to do those things that nothing else can do. It has to take us to places where nothing else can take us. It has to connect us in ways that nothing else can." 

This excerpt is from an interview with Vijay Iyer originally published on the Art Works blog in May 2012.