How many of you play musical instruments? What do you play and where?
I'm last chair third clarinet in the county community band. We have lots of retired musicians from THE U.S. Army Band plus many music teachers and many other skilled instrumentalists, some of whom have returned to instruments they haven't played since high school.
Miraculously, we're a walk-on group. Anyone can walk in and sit down and join us. It's impressive self-regulation. Unless you're pretty good, you feel out of place soon and leave on your own accord. We're the most self-regulating, democratic band I've ever seen.
The least skilled survivors, like me, know enough to mime when the parts get too tough. The main thing is DON'T play wrong notes! I've played tenor sax too but prefer clarinet with its more interesting parts.
Music is such a miracle. An empty room. People wander in one by one toting cases of various sizes. They open the cases and take out mechanical devices. Some need little strips of precise cane to generate music. Some just blow through many feet of tubing all coiled up.
Some pound on membranes. One just waves his arms. All are looking at perplexing black symbols on white paper, often created hundreds of years ago.
Suddenly the room is filled with not just noise, but the most glorious coordinated sound, a feeling created by a composer dead for many generations, but still alive through his composition as we are transported into a place not otherwise attainable.
Well, when we play it right, anyway.
Er, I do get a lot out of it, huh? Seriously, as you know, the main test of music is this: great music gives you chills, sublime music brings you tears.
I love it on the rare occasions when great music gives me chills. And I'm not ashamed of the tears that come from beyond my control when sublime music touches me as nothing else can. Maybe that is the universal commonality of humans and beyond.
Some of the most sublime music I recall was when in-laws treated us to a night at the Chicago Symphony. It was a rare concert when a great choir complemented the orchestra. They performed highlights of Italian opera. My God. Literally.
I tear up thinking about that. It makes all kind of crap worth enduring.
Hundreds of artists joining to communicate the most exalted music of geniuses from centuries ago, preserved and embellished for future generations. Such an incredible gift. Maybe as close to immortality as we get, at least before death.
As is the ability to sit here up too late and spew such thoughts to a keyboard that makes them available to kindred souls around the planet.
As Tiny Tim said, Bless us All!
