The potential for recorded music to be healing is so much greater with loudspeakers than with headphones, for with headphones the air does not dance.

Better still is music live, for then you can relate to the performer. But at a concert you are immobilized, imprisoned in your seat, constrained from dancing.

What if we listeners knew, and what if Bach and Beethoven knew – and all musicians – that the reason to listen to music is for us to be inspired to make it? Their Muses to actuate ours.

Some say the music lives in the lyre:
closed in its case it’s not dumb.
Some say the music lives in the fingers –
why then from yours is there none?

The lyre, my friend, knows no notes.

Adapted from Su Shih (Su Tung-p’o)

The True Musician is an emissary of the Spirit World.

What if there are no wrong notes in music? Often, on investigation, I find that (unconsciously) the musician wanted to play the allegedly wrong note because he felt in his mind that it would sound better that way. (I am reminded of the scholar at Oxford who was asked by his tutor why he had written something that he knew was wrong. His reply was that he knew it was logically wrong, but it sounded better that way.)

This morning as I woke up I found myself singing inside, as happens nearly every morning. It could be a classical piece or a popular tune – almost always different each day. Today it was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

Most mornings I wake up with music playing inside me. It could be any music – from the Brahms Violin Concerto, Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer,” “Ain’t She Sweet?,” “I Could Be Happy With You.” As best as I can recall, rarely repeated, different every morning.

A musician always sees himself as performer – not Musician.

God is Brahms,
Brahms is God,
and Schnabel,
and the piano...

Everyone needs to be healed – to be made whole. To be utterly one with the Soul within. And it is, I maintain, the primary role of the performer to find the Soul of the composer and reveal it to the audience, that they may be better able to find their own. For all that matters is to Know our Souls.