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Three recent reads on music with similar themes. Well, one similar theme and that is:

The difference between playing music and performing it.

I’ll take them in the order they came to me.

First, there was a piece in First Things a couple of months ago about the harpsichord:

The grand piano was built for the stage, and owes its reverberation to the concert hall in which it is placed (or, in modern classical music recordings, to digital plug-ins through which its sound is processed). The harpsichord’s reverberation, on the other hand, comes from within its own wooden walls. As a result, a real harpsichord simply isn’t very loud. …

….

By almost any modern reckoning, this would make the harpsichord inferior to the piano, at least on a practical level—perhaps even on an aesthetic level, too. After all, doesn’t this mean the harpsichord runs the risk of being an individualistic instrument, purely for the delectation of the player? The audience is left out of the musical experience. 

I would argue the opposite: The piano is the instrument of expressive individualism; the harpsichord is the instrument of a vibrant, discursive life of the mind. It is the glorious vestige of an era when music was free from the impossible burdens that Romantics placed upon it, deprived as they were of any other reliable source of the noumenal. The harpsichord belongs to a time when music was an activity to be done, not heard. When Bach described his Goldberg Variations as being “for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits,” one might assume he meant that just listening to the Variations would refresh our spirits. Not at all: These connoisseurs were presented with “keyboard exercise,” as he put it. The refreshment came via playing the Variations, not by passively hearing them. People were not, after all, buying a recording of the score, but purchasing the sheet music. 

This makes the harpsichord not solipsistic, but “discursive.” In the Middle Ages, the word used for “rhetoric” was often the Latin word dictamen, which means “letter-writing.” For centuries, this was the primary metaphor for understanding communication. Bach addresses his works quite frequently to readers as if he were writing them a musical letter. When I sight-read the Goldberg Variations at my harpsichord, I am receiving a communication from Bach and joining a conversation.

So although the harpsichord is meant to be enjoyed in one’s living room, it is not a radically individualistic activity at all. When we understand the musical work as a form of communication between the composer and the reader—just as we understand reading a book as a form of communication between the author and the reader—it becomes alive to interpretive possibility. I engage with the composer’s music as a peer, even while I acknowledge its surpassing excellence.

Then, a Facebook post, inspired by the Rogan business, but going much further, reflecting on Spotify and other streaming services in general:

For the majority of human civilization, making a living from being a musician was obtainable by a very small number of people. Music used to be just passed on through friends, families, communities, churches, etc. Music as a commodity is fairly new. Before the idea to sell music on a large scale came about, once you heard a song, it was yours forever, because the only way to hear it again would be to sing it yourself. We as humans have over-glamorized and overvalued music. It’s a natural, abundant resource that the majority of humans can create. Just about anyone can learn to play an instrument. It’s no harder than any other skilled profession, the only thing you really need is time. Human brains love patterns and patterns create dopamine, we are biologically wired to love and make music…

…

Musicians get upset because they JUST want to play music and not have to do the business part. But business owners are the ones who make the money. Making music and making money are two very distinct talents. You can be a musician and not sell your music. There’s no shame in that. But if you want to make money from your music, you’re going to have to have an entrepreneurial outlook. This means you’re going to have to learn and perform tasks that make your business profitable. Sure, I’d love to just do the fun parts of my job, but I own a business, so I have to do tons of stuff above and beyond just publicity.

The reason why you’ll never hear me complain about these conditions is because I know that working in the music business is a privilege. I work in an industry that’s only goal is pleasure. New music is not needed. “Paid Musician” is not a job that society needs. As mentioned before, we have plenty of music to last any individual a lifetime. Plus, people will always make and play music, even if they outlawed anyone ever making a dime from it again.

(There’s much more – she digs deep into the economics and business of it all)

And finally, from Ted Gioia: How to Abandon a Music Career:

I’ve encountered successful musicians who are burnt out in their careers, begrudgingly playing the same songs night after night with no genuine emotional commitment. On the other hand, I know musicians who play simply for their own joy and happiness—or perhaps merely think about the music, playing their instrument in their imagination long after they have lost the ability to do it physically, yet still hearing the sounds as they flow through their hearts and minds.

They are truer musicians, by my definition, than many of the superstars on the stage.

I see this everywhere in my own family. My son Thomas is developing into a fine pianist, specializing in Bach. He doesn’t express the slightest desire to perform, but he loves the music. My wife Tara was working as a dancer and choreographer in New York when I met her, but as she got older she had to face the realities of what aging does to a dancer. But she still dances every day, and with joy and total commitment. Often only her family members, or occasionally her students, see her do this. She hasn’t danced on stage in front of an audience in years. But Tara is still a dancer.

She will always be a dancer. Because that resides in her soul and spirit, not some performance venue.

I chose the headline of this article carefully. It’s called “How to Abandon a Music Career.” That’s very different from abandoning music. In fact, focusing less on the career sometimes allows you to have a better relationship with the music.

That’s a message that isn’t told often enough—especially in the music schools, where professional development and career advancement is at the top of every agenda, and at the forefront of everyone’s mindset.

And here’s the strangest part of the whole story. Even those individuals who will continue in professional music careers for their entire lives need to nurture that intrinsic love of making music for its own sake. That will make them better professionals, but—even more important—also bring them more joy along the way. And the joy is why each of us started down this path in the first place.

I know musicians, and have some in my family. My youngest is rather talented and spends a lot of time on his music, but professes zero interest in a musical career, although some of us still hold out hope (not for a performing career, but perhaps in composing and arranging).

But it’s his life.

Because he is talented, I’ve spent some time on the edges of that music student world. I’ve watched the competitions and recitals, I’ve listened to stories from green rooms and auditions.

So I’ve seen how in music, just as with every other blasted activity kids are involved in these days, all else falls before the deities of competition, rankings, achievement and institution-framed “excellence.”

And of course, performance. Flawless, spectacular performance of the Waldenstein when you’re ten.

In other words, as I’ve observed before, once you get into middle school, if you don’t want to or can’t be on the travel team, why are you doing this anyway?

Or, to make the point in terms of another part of life, one which is my frequent subject here: despite what a social-media driven pop spirituality culture tells us, to live as a disciple of Jesus doesn’t demand big, performative works of piety on the travel team of inspir-influencers, or for any of us to inspire the whole world – but first of all, always, to simply love the people in front of us, at this moment.

Keep going, and consider the whole notion of performativity in general. Why do what you do? Why say what you say? Why interact or engage or spend time in an activity?

It’s that fine line – always such a fine line – between not keeping our light under a bushel, enriching the world and other’s lives with what we have to share – but doing whatever it is we do for love. Because if I have not love…

Back to music. We’ve never been on the High Performance Road. But we’ve also been blessed because from the beginning, his excellent teacher has understood this kid, accepted his goals, made sure that if he changed his mind he had the tools to take those steps, but if he doesn’t – well, even if you don’t want to practice three hours a day and try for Julliard, you can still go deep into the music, play it beautifully, grow from the experience, and bring some of that beauty with whoever happens to be listening at the moment, whether it’s the fifty parents and grandparents at the recital, or if it’s the elderly woman and her daughter, walking quiet, steady laps around the church after their rosary while you practice in there.

I think I made her cry again.

And hopefully, all of this will bear fruit in that no matter where he goes, he’ll always find a keyboard when his fingers start itching, and maybe even find others to jam with, not because there’s a big audience to please or a scholarship on the line, and to certainly use his gifts for God’s glory and the service of others when called to, but in the end, to sit at the piano, most of all, for the pure, absolute joy, in communion with that mystery in your own soul, expressed in musical language gifted to you by a riot of brilliant, quirky friends across time.

2014, NYC