Why I’m a Musician

This may sound strange, but I don’t play music to express myself. That’s too shallow a reason to engage with some of the finest and elusive art ever created. Rather, I try to express what the music wants to be. This pushes me beyond my usual boundaries. When I grapple with something greater than I am, then I’m forced to better myself.

Art as self-expression? No thanks. The deliberate pursuit of self-expression often devolves into a black hole of mirror gazing. At worst, it spawns poseurs whose achievements are admired mostly by themselves and those who put hero worship above artistry. Further, pursuing self-expression is redundant. Everything we do is self-expressive. We couldn’t avoid it if we tried.

The best goal of an artist is to do something worthy. Self-expression is irrelevant. If art is done badly, then it’s not redeemed merely because it expresses the artist. If art is done well, then the question of who did it is ancillary. (The prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux are great art—that we don’t know who made them doesn’t diminish their value.) If I find someone who does art well, it’ll be the artistry that draws me in. Wanting to know more about the artist is the homage I pay to superior art.

To me, reading a musical score isn’t about divining a composer’s true intent. Yes, we have the notes and maybe a cursory guide to expressive nuance. But no matter how we try, we can’t recreate a composer’s intent to the smallest detail—especially when the composer is from a Zeitgeist alien to us. Rather, too often we read into the music our own biases. Studying the score becomes unconscious data mining. We find in the notation what we expect to find.

Instead, I look for something that challenges my expectations.

Here’s a small example. Some years ago I recorded Fernando Sor’s Op. 44 bis. All the pieces in this opus are waltzes in 3/8. When making the recordings, I at first played Sor’s phrase endings as a quarter note followed by an eighth rest. And that’s how they’re sometimes notated. But looking closer at the score, I found that Sor often wrote phrase endings as an eighth note followed by a quarter rest. I hadn’t been doing this, instead doing what was more familiar to me. Catching my oversight, I began trying what Sor wrote. It bothered me at first. It seemed the phrases cut off too abruptly. But sensing there was something in what Sor was doing, I stuck with it. Gradually, his aesthetic logic convinced me. What at first seemed too abrupt soon took on a rhetorical confidence. Ending phrases with a short note was a 19th century mic drop. “I’ve said what I mean to say,” Sor implies, “now let’s move on.”

So that’s how I played it. To my ear, it’s better than what my unexamined bias had me doing. Now I’ll be honest. This is still my interpretation, run through the mill of my own biases. Self-expression always wins in the end. But at the very least, I ended somewhere other than where I began. Art should do that. Art that can’t change us is inferior art.

“The mind cannot be purified without seeing things as they are.” The older I get, the more I appreciate the spare wisdom of this Buddhist axiom. That which lifts me out of myself is something to cherish.

And that’s why I’m a musician.