Various things, mostly music

(Note: I wrote this during the summer after a week in New Orleans for Suzuki training. I never posted it, and I'm not sure why. I came across it and decided that it was not to time-sensitive to post now. So I did)

Well, I have spent a week learning how to teach the piano. I think I learned as much about how to play the piano as how to teach it. I have been inspired to practice 3 hours a day. Let's see how long it lasts.

Awhile back I was listening to some really good music. I guess we have gotten rather out of the habit of listening to music as much as we used to. As I was swept away by the beauty of what I was hearing, I remembered "oh yes, this is why I am a musician. Because I love it." funny, isn't it, how sometimes we lose sight of the forest for the trees? I have spent so much time recently practicing because it's what I have to do that I had lost sight of why I was doing it in the first place. Music is a gift, and I'm in the business of sharing it. You know, I think that perhaps that could be said of many of the things I do. Sometimes I get so caught up in 'doing the right thing' that I forget the big picture. I'm a child of the King, chosen and blood bought. God's love and his grace are gifts, and I'm in the business of sharing them. What would my life look like if that where always first and foremost on my mind? By God's grace, we'll see.

You know, music is many thing to many people. To some it is a waste of time and energy. To some it is a nice venue of entertainment that they could live with or without. To some, however, it is a positive obsession. Robin's horn teacher went off on a tangent at one of her lessons about people who are so "into" music that it is almost a religion. "It's like music is the god and we are all priests of something. I think that some of them would like us to shave our heads and bow worship it" I didn't quite know how to take that statement when it was made, but then, I had never met someone who fit that category. Well, I have now. My instructor this past week is passionately and obsessively devoted to music.

Beethoven is universally acknowledged as one of the great masters of Classical music, yet he was an altogether disagreeable person, not to mention being quite miserable. Music did not even make him happy. It is all rather disturbing, if you ask me. Schumann went positively insane, Wagner was a vehement anti-Semitist and form all accounts insufferably arrogant, and they and many like them lived and died very unhappy. Music, which was given as a gift from the giver of all good things, when in becomes the gift, and from there proceeds to be venerated as the great good and the highest that man can attain, becomes a terrible master. Beethoven, when he lost his hearing lost the only thing that made the world worth living in to him. What a tragedy! What will it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his soul?

What is music? not a end in and of itself. Bach said that all music should be none other that to the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul. Bach's life was not wound up with his music. He was a full time church organist and a father of 20 (several of whom chose music as their profession). And he seems to have died happy and contented.

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent"

I don't know who said it, but I like it.