🎶 The Permission to Breathe: On Growing into My Own Music

by Logan Blackman

Author’s Note:

This reflection is just a pause to look back at where music has carried me, and where it’s still leading. I’m still learning, still refining, still listening for what comes next.

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I. The Prodigy Years

When I was younger, music came fast — faster than I could really understand it. My hands learned before my head did. I could sit at a keyboard or pick up a bassoon and make things happen that surprised even me. It wasn’t discipline yet; it was instinct, raw and wild.

I started organ when I was eleven — that was the true beginning. Around that time, I became obsessed with Davy Jones’ theme from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. That haunting melody on the pipe organ cracked something open in me. I decided right then that I wanted to become an organist — to create that same sense of mystery and power, to make people feel the way that music made me feel. It set the course before I even knew I was choosing one.

A couple of years later, I picked up the bassoon, and within a year was playing the Mozart Bassoon Concerto. By thirteen, I was conducting a collegiate ensemble. At seventeen, I formed my own wind symphony. By twenty or twenty-one, I had published my first composition. And by the time I turned twenty-two, I had earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees — completing the master’s entirely during my senior year.

I didn’t see any of that as extraordinary at the time; it just felt like breathing. Teachers called it talent, but to me, it was gravity. Music pulled me in, and I couldn’t resist.

Back then, I thought progress was speed — that the faster I mastered something, the closer I was to whatever greatness was supposed to feel like. I didn’t realize I was only learning the alphabet of what would one day become sentences, then paragraphs, then whole stories.

In those days, silence was a void. The goal was to fill it.

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II. The Pause

After college, life stopped.

Not just mine — everyone’s. The world went quiet, and in that silence, I lost more than I knew how to name.

My grandmother — on my father’s side — passed during the pandemic, and for the first time, there wasn’t a next rehearsal, or audience, or applause. Just stillness.

But in truth, loss had been a part of my life long before that. I lost my mom and dad when I was fifteen, and that loss shaped how I see the world — and my place in it. Music became the thing I could live through. It was the only language that made sense when nothing else did.

Still, before the pandemic, I never really took the time to stop, breathe, and most importantly, grieve. I just kept moving, composing, performing, filling every silence I could find. It wasn’t until the world stopped that I finally had to face my own quiet.

There were long months of hiding away, of numb days spent behind a controller instead of a keyboard. But one day, I pulled that keyboard out again. I told myself, I’ve got the time. I’m going to practice.

And I did. I rebuilt myself piece by piece. I learned Chopin’s Heroic Polonaise — a mountain of sound — and fought for every note until it became mine. That piece changed me. It demanded the discipline I once reserved for bassoon, and later, for organ. It gave me structure again.

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III. The Fire

Between heartbreak and recovery, I was stripped bare. Two relationships nearly ruined me — emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. It was brutal, but clarifying.

I realized no one was coming to save me.

So I did.

I took control — of my time, my work, my sound, my future. I started saying yes to what felt right and no to what drained me. That survival instinct hardened into strength, and that strength softened into confidence.

That’s where the permission came from.

Not arrogance — reclamation.

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IV. The Reconstruction

In the quiet that followed, I did what I’ve always known how to do: I learned.

When the world stripped everything else away, I leaned on the one thing it could never take — my talent, and the years I spent earning it.

I became my own professor.

Everything I’d studied — the breath of a bassoon line, the shape of a phrase, the architecture of tone — I began applying to piano and organ. I rebuilt my musicianship from the inside out, one note at a time.

I stopped seeing piano and organ as separate worlds and started hearing them through the same lens: awareness, tension, release, resonance. My education became more than a degree — it became a lifeline.

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V. The Return

Now, when I sit at an organ bench, I don’t feel like I’m racing anymore. I feel rooted. I don’t have to prove I can play; I can simply speak.

The silence means more now because I’ve lived through it.

I don’t fear it — I honor it.

Maybe this is what real artistry is: when your story finally catches up to your skill.

When you stop performing survival and start performing truth.

And through it all, I’ve learned that control isn’t about tightening your grip — it’s about joining the rhythm.

It’s knowing when to lead and when to be led.

Because some forms of control aren’t about power at all — they’re about becoming part of the dance.

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VI. The Continuation

That journey — the learning, the rebuilding, the listening — is what eventually led me to St. David’s.

Not by accident, but by alignment.

I came here relying on the same things that carried me through everything else: my talent, my training, and the values that shaped me long before I knew their worth. Every service, every rehearsal, every piece I prepare reminds me that I’m still becoming — still refining, still chasing the sound just beyond reach.

Music has given back what I once lost: love, patience, discipline, dedication, and integrity.

It keeps teaching me how to live — to trust timing, to breathe through dissonance, to let beauty unfold in its own tempo.

And somewhere along the way, I learned that beauty itself isn’t confined to pretty or ugly.

Beauty is wherever we find it — sometimes radiant, sometimes raw.

Because not everything painful is ugly, and not everything perfect is beautiful.

True beauty lives in the truth of experience — in the cracks, in the colors, in the courage to keep creating.

This isn’t an ending.

It’s the next phrase —

the moment before resolution,

where I finally understand that art, like faith,

isn’t something you finish.

It’s something you keep becoming.

Soli Deo Gloria