Soul Music
Copyright 2017 Don Ray
While watching an amazing
piano concerto performance by John Nakamatsu.
As I watch the extreme facial
and body language and contortions, and marvel at the physical training and
skills of these artists, it strikes me how ridiculous the whole thing is. To train the human body to this extreme
level, to concoct such bizarre contraptions of wood and string and metal, all
in the effort to communicate from one soul to another…….this scene and
countless others like it through the ages give powerful testimony to a profound
and fundamental truth.
Musical instruments, and the
musicians that master them, demonstrate the desperate drive that takes the
human spirit to any lengths to establish, even if only for the duration of a
performance, some connection with another human soul.
This depth and breadth of
expression does not come easily. The
musicians’ faces reflect the life of focused discipline required to convey a
tiny fragment of one human soul to another.
The very existence of music of
the complexity of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 Opus 11, or Beethoven’s Symphony
No. 7 in A Major Opus 92, and the way some of us crave hearing such
masterpieces, should not be lightly dismissed as a quirk of societal artistic
development.
There is a reason for this, and
it provides a most important insight into our deepest spiritual needs: our clumsy words do not suffice to connect us
at the depth for which our souls hunger; so we carve and glue and bend wood,
forge and sculpt and polish metal, and then train and discipline and condition
our bodies and minds to extraordinary degrees, in order to communicate that
part of the soul for which we have no words or explanation or description.
Let the music of our souls ring
forth, and let us give thanks to the composers and musicians that provide the
channel for that connection.
Pass it on.
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