music

Just the other day, I was thinking about, among other things, pianists and what makes a good or bad one. Having played the piano for more than a decade now (wow that makes me old doesn't it), one eventually arrives at the conclusion that manic technical ability really accounts to nothing much as far as music is concerned.

Lang Lang can play his crazy Horowitz-Liszt pieces to perfection, Maksim can trill his 14 notes per second, sure. But if their heart isn't in it, it merely makes them technical virtuosos -- there wouldn't be much of a difference if a robot was programmed to play the same piece. Heck, a robot probably wouldn't even make any mistakes. By all accounts, it should be perfect.

But it isn't. What really does make good music? Certainly, a degree of technical skill is required. More importantly, the pianist must play from his heart. A good pianist can play pieces that are technically difficult. But it takes a really gifted pianist to tell a tale with his music, so much so that the music becomes alive.

Sometimes in our pursuit of God, we tend to overlook our heart and drown in a sea of technicality. We are so focused on trying to play the music that we forget its meaning and beauty. Being a person of routine, I have to admit to being very guilty of this. I go through the motions of prayer and worship while forgetting just who is it exactly that I'm praying to. I'm so caught up with a crescendo in my prayer music exactly where the score dictates, or an accelerando right there in that specific bar. I stop feeling the music. I become a robot.

Sometimes, our very virtuosity is in itself the greatest obstacle to listening to the music of God. One of my gripes with many of the younger generation of pianists is that they are far too obsessed with speed. How many times have we rushed through the rites of Mass without slowing down to contemplate their meaning? I'm so proficient in saying fixed prayers like the Our Father and Hail Mary that sometimes my mind switches to an 'auto-pilot' mode. Have I been truly doing justice to the prayers (and oh, what beautiful prayers they are)?

You see what makes the music of life just so perfect is that it is imperfect. We stumble, we fall, we make mistakes. We mess up our staccatos and legatos, our ornaments and our dynamics, maybe even our piano itself is out of tune. But still we press on in our playing, we pick ourselves up and continue the chase for God. See if God wanted a perfect race He'd have been better off making robots, machines that wouldn't fail. But then love wouldn't be called love, beauty wouldn't be called beauty, and faith wouldn't be called faith. These are qualities which are by nature exceptional, yet if they were to become innate in all of us, they would cease to be.

Because it is when us ugly, imperfect creatures of little faith truly comprehend to live our lives in perfect love, when the technically incompetent pianist pours his heart and soul out into a piece that may well be beyond his capacity, that the music of life becomes truly beautiful.