To my fellow musicians…

“I didn’t get it until I was fifty,” said a friend of mine after a church. Music is so difficult to understand. “I was constantly worried about how the piece sounded and I forgot about ‘it;’ and some people never get it.” This was something that frightened me. How could something that I feel so strongly about, the one element in my life I would do anything to hold on to, be the one thing that I might never understand? The one thing many musicians have defined as the “universal language” or the “language of the soul.”

I used to be one of those people that pitied those who played their instruments and/or sang in subway stations and sidewalks. This went on until about a week ago when some friends and I were in the underpass to the L-train in NYC. There, in this grimy, smelly, germ-infested corridor sat a young man with his cello playing Bach – the cello suites I would guess. That moment, pity was shed and replaced with appreciation. I have studied and have played and/or sung a lot of Bach’s music. What this cellist was doing was nothing short of beautiful.

My very gifted organ professor, Renée Anne Louprette, once said to me that organists are very strange creatures. We sit behind a huge machine and try to create music from this large monster that has an endless amount of air. I have found that what we as musicians do is very difficult. Making sounds is not what we do or strive for.

Years ago, I was in the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir and had a choirmaster, Christian Ashley-Botha, who we called Maestro. The wise man said “I think all us muzos are an odd lot. We all try to make something amazing, moving, touching compelling out of abstract sound. Music is so odd because it is so powerful and yet so intangible and transient … there for a moment and then gone for ever. No wonder we are a little crazy!” It’s at those few and far-between moments we share with listeners that we make a heartfelt or moving impact. That is what musicians do and strive for. You never who is listening and you never know the magnitude of what you are saying or doing to them. I wish people who told me that a career in music is grueling really knew what the grueling part of it was…

No matter how hard it is, we should keep going and doing what few truly understand and appreciate. Thomas H. Troger’s article in the American Guild of Organists says that “Every time you perform on the organ or conduct a choir or play on some other instrument, you are participating in the ongoing work of creation. We often joke about the resolutions we make on January 1, knowing how briefly they last. But I do not make fun of the impulse that lies behind them: I believe our wanting to start anew is related to the God-given desire to create a better life and a better world with the materials at hand. Every time you play or conduct or sing a composition, there is the possibility that you will strengthen the gracious creative impulse in some listener’s heart. That is one more good reason to keep playing all year long.”

Happy New Year and keep making music!