What Makes the Music...the Instrument or Musician?

What makes music, the instrument or the person playing it? That is my question today and it crosses over into everyday life. What a man or woman does with the essence of their breath and motion from their hands creates the music. The instrument, while very valuable in delivering the sound is in fact, secondary to the musician.

Let’s examine the instrument by itself. In fact let’s use the Steinway piano as the example. The world’s most respected name in pianos, each one hand crafted to perfection. In fact, here’s a link to the Steinway website showing how each piano is built with the hands of actual people using their talent and expertise to build each piece. It is a work of art. In Steinway’s own words, “Handcrafting each Steinway requires up to one full year – creating an instrument of rare quality and global renown.” Take your own factory tour. http://www.steinway.com/factory/

Now, if a person decides he wants this extraordinary musical instrument, he can purchase it, put it in a place of his or her choosing and yet, it sits there silent, beautiful as it may be. The piano itself cannot produce the amazing sounds it was created to make without a living, breathing person to bring it to life. Sure sounds elementary but let’s examine this just a little further.

The person that sits at the these 88 black and white ivory keys has to have more than just a desire to play, they must in most cases, practice countless hours, making hundreds of thousands of repetitions of scales, arpeggios and chord progressions to master the skills needed to bring real music out of the wood, metal and ivory sitting in front of them. Irregardless of the worth of the instrument, the musician that plays it has worked thousands of hours more than the people that crafted the instrument.

My point in illustrating this is so relative to the everyday life we live. What we expect to get out the magnificent body, mind and soul the Creator has designed with HIS own hands is indeed music. However, too many times we want the sounds of a concert pianist to flow forth in our life experience without paying forward the price required to actually realize it. There’s music inside all of us, yet we must put our hands to work to make it play. My grandpa, with a fourth grade education told my mother when she was a girl, “I don’t understand why a man says he can’t make it. There’s so much a person can do to make a living, he just has to make an effort”. He worked for himself most of his life and he was content in knowing he had done the best he could with his hands and the breath God given him. I could see, hear and feel the music that played thru his life and it was indeed magnificent.