Music works for us differently at different times of life. When we’re young, music makes our bodies move, sets us dancing, marching or just heats up our molecules. When we get older, music more often gives us a sense of composure and brings up memories.

Music holds memory. Music holds memory better than stories alone because music holds feelings, emotion and often movement too, stirring us to sway with the rhythm or with the muscle memory of playing the guitar or piano. Music evokes our stories too, and we say, “They’re playing our song,” or “This song brought me through the hardest year of my life.”

Can you think of a song or other musical composition that has followed you like a close friend through successive chapters of your life? Music that has carried on a changing conversation with you for a long time?

This will give me away as a nerd, but I want to tell you of a piece I always listen to at this time of year,  just before Advent and Christmas begin. I’ve never heard it live; I bought the LP record on the Nonesuch label when I was in grad school in 1965. The record was J.S. Bach’s cantata for the last Sunday in the liturgical year, “Wachet Auf,” known in English as “Sleepers Awake.” A congregation in Leipzig heard the majestic cantata for the first time on November 27, 1731 (292 years ago today). The music called to them and later to me: “Wake up! Don’t sleepwalk through your life!”

 That was an uneasy, transitional time for me, moving into adulthood, trying to find my own, authentic voice. “Wachet Auf” called me to wake up, stay alert, because transitioning from perpetual student to the world of work was going to take all I had and more. It said further: stand like a watchman on the wall, like the soprano soloist in the opening chorale, and wake the world up, be brave and be loud! (In my early 20’s, like many of us, I was fixated on saving the world.)

Strong music wakes us up, and here, in three steps, is how it can happen.

I learned to play the clarinet in elementary school. I was taught how to read music, the embouchure for clarinet, where the notes were, how to play them — the basic, necessary first step. No voice, not yet.

Then the next step: in my case was to be placed in an orchestra with kids from other schools. The director put individual parts together and made us learn to play as part of an ensemble. Or, if you’re on a solo instrument such as guitar or piano, you listen to the way other musicians handle the instrument or do the song, what works, what doesn’t, looking for your own style or voice. In high school, I played clarinet in a Dixieland band with five other guys. We did gigs for the lordly sum of $50 for the night. I tried to play like Artie Shaw, or Benny Goodman, a weak imitator for sure, but the point is I was struggling, the voice was still not mine.

If I had kept on, as real musicians do, on the foundation of hours of practice, the teaching of masters and familiarity with the musical interpretations of others, perhaps one day I would play, sing and create music that came from within myself. That’s the third step. Whether improvisation or playing the composition of another, my individual performance is one with the composition, one with the orchestra or choir, free to express what has become one with myself. That is voice. That is being awake, alive, not sleepwalking but creating, in the medium of music. Or even listening to music performed by others, in a bluegrass festival or symphony concert, it can happen. The voice becomes your voice, you feel fully expressed.

I speak here of music. The same three-step process happens in every other genuine practice, too. Teaching, nursing, cooking, arguing a case, playing tennis — learn the notes and technique, pay attention to how the masters are doing it, then let it flow out of yourself from a source deeper than ego. In fact, true voice, or flow, requires a certain absence of ego.

I no longer hear Bach’s cantata rousing me to save the world. Now it reminds me to be awake and tuned in, no sleepwalking through the years I have left. It says: Be ready for anything.

“Wachet Auf” is not like a jangling alarm clock that blasts you awake. Its wakefulness is more like waiting expectantly for someone you love to come home and you not only have everything ready for them but your heart is wide awake, eager and on tiptoe for the longed-for reunion. You want to be fully present when they arrive. That kind of awake.

Now I simply let the music wake me to beauty, gratitude and intimacy. As someone wrote in the comments after the Netherlands Bach Society’s performance of “Wachet Auf” on YouTube, “That such beauty even exists in the world is the greatest of wonders.” When the soprano sings the clear, haunting line “Alleluia” in the opening chorale, my heart is singing in her voice. There is more here than I can wrap mere thought around.

The call to “Wake Up!” is no longer an imperative to save the world. It’s more like an inspiration to be fully alive.