Today we celebrate love. Most often, we celebrate romantic love. I am a girl who loves chocolate and flowers and sweet cards just as much as the next girl, but I also like to think of Valentine’s Day as a day for celebrating passion, the fire inside us that makes our tickers tick.
Though musicians are often seen as quite passionate people (something I do not dispute), musicians must, out of necessity, spend a good deal of time thinking about technique. There are certain periods of time when technique may even be the main focus. You can have an abundance of music itching to pour out of your soul, but if you don’t have the means to communicate it, then the music will remain locked inside.
Even after the the music school years, technique remains an important focus, though perhaps at some point it’s more like oiling the moving parts and doing a minor repair here and there than it is the building of the engine that happened earlier in life.
I was recently having it out with a technical problem in the practice room. Frustration abounded, and I wallowed in it for awhile. Then I put down my horn and – I don’t know why – pulled up an old recording I had of the piece I was working on. The hornist playing absolutely sang through the horn. “Oh, wait,” I said. “This is music.” It was inspiring. It was a story. It did NOT sound like the torture device I had been experiencing. It was beautiful. My next time through was much better. The focus had finally shifted to the place it most often should be.
In the midst of all the general fretting over the music industry, or feeling stuck in whatever is annoying me about the horn at the moment, Valentine’s Day, in addition to being a wonderful day to have some chocolate with my sweetheart, is a good day to begin a quest to recapture music itself, to find some sparks I have possibly been forgetting about. It’s a good day to remember how to tell a story – a heartbreaking story, a silly story, a terrifying story. It’s a good day to remember that the best stories are always love stories, and that the best stories are always told with love.
