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It is an ancient, hopeful metaphor, an instrument in tune, speaking of pleasure on earth and order in the cosmos, the fragility of beauty, and the quiver in our longing for love.
I remember now that music is vibration, a disturbance in the air. I remember that music is a kind of breathing, an exchange of energy and excitement.
Every artist must sometimes believe that art is the doorway to the divine.
Practicing is striving; practicing is a romance. But practicing is also a risk, a test of character, a threat of deeply personal failure.
Practicing is training; practicing is meditation and therapy. But before any of these, practicing is a story you tell yourself, a bildungsroman, a tale of education and self-realization.
But to become a better musician, I realized I had to practice my story, learn to remake my hands and my history as characters in this narrative, instead of obstacles.
No one is interested in my fingers except me.
Graham celebrates a “divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Each day you sit down full of fantasy and flaws, a chaos of discordant voices. To others, your playing might sound sweet and lovely. But alone in the practice room, you must contend with friction and disharmony too.
Repertoire is destiny. An instrument aspires to the world that composers create for it.
“Mistakes are never serious,” he responded. “The danger lies in repeating mistakes, practicing them.”
In the right moment, notes reveal powerful emotions, depths of feeling, whole worlds of meaning that seem expressible in no other way.
sympathetic vibration—the ability of a vibrating string to cause related strings to vibrate
Andreas Werckmeister assured his readers in 1686 that “melancholic or passionate people very much appreciate the correct use of dissonance.”
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was equally convinced that “music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.”
myth of the inner life.”
Music enacts the highs and lows of our temperament; it demonstrates that lonely distances may be crossed, as if by magic; it proves that two things—two strings, two hearts—might vibrate as one. Music embodies the hope that the innumerable scattered facts of our existence conform beneath the surface to some meaningful plan. It expresses the grandeur, the sweet pleasure, of order.
We can't prove our theories of what music means. But each theory reveals what we long for; it proves the truth of our longing.
The essence of music is revelation, I thought. The essence of life, however, seems to be disappointment.
Harmony is not eternal, though our need for it may be.
the guitar appears first in ghostly form, in a carving on the Sphinx Gate at Alaca Höyük, in central Turkey. Dating from about 1300 B.C.,
The Maidu tribe of California preferred the musical bow as the best instrument for contacting spirits.
the image of Orpheus holding a lyre signified immortality
