Why Music?

I was recently asked to write a brief message to the young musicians who are competing in a music competition in Malaysia, at which I will be co-chair of the jury. This is what I said:

Why is there music? What purpose does music serve? In a world where everyone is trying to get ahead, to stuff themselves with as much “practical knowledge” as they can so that they can get ahead … why should we bother with music at all?

As musicians, we are often faced with this question. Sometimes it begins with our parents, who are worried that we won’t be able to make it in the big, bad world and are hoping that we’ll move towards something “safe”, like brain surgery or corporate law. When they first have an inkling that we might want to go into music, our elders frequently panic. And well they should, because music is not “safe.” Indeed, music is “dangerous”. It brings us face to face with who we really are.

We come to life in music. A single breath, a single heartbeat — these take place inside nothingness. But when the second heartbeat comes, the space between them is no longer nothingness. It has become time, and because the two heartbeats take place in the dimension of time, they are already music. It is a beat, a pulse, a series of events in time that have a structure, a story, a meaning.

Therefore the awareness of being alive is born at the same time as the awareness of music. And the cessation of music, the stilling of the heart, is also the cessation of life. Music and life are one.

All creatures exist in the context of the rhythm of time, but human beings are the only creatures who are aware of it, who have transformed the dimension of time into art. In the end, therefore, it is music that makes us human.
So, to everyone who makes music — whether you are singing in the shower or participating in a huge symphonic production — I want to say this. There is no higher calling than music. A work of music isn’t something hanging on a museum wall. A work of music isn’t scratches on paper or interminable raga sequences. A work of music is what happens when musicians take those fuzzy little scratches, those memorized patterns of shrutis, and make of them a creation that will never be repeated again.

The act of performing music is a sacred ritual that goes back to the very birth of humanity. It is a reenactment of the drama of birth, life, and death. And unlike that great painting in the museum, that statue in the city square, the collaboration between composer and interpreter will never happen again in the same way. Every single performance will be profoundly different — perhaps only in a few nuances, perhaps in saying something completely new. Between the scratches on paper and the cloud of glorious sound that enthrals your audience, there is only you.

What, then, is the thing you have created? It is only particles banging against each other in the empty air. Yet, for the duration of the performance, you have snatched moments of structure and meaning out of the random motion of molecules.

A composition may last for a thousand years or more — indeed, in our vanity, we often think of great art as lasting for ever. But your performance lasts only as long as your performance. Even a recording is not the same thing. Even if one day there could be a perfect holographic recreation of every element of your performance — it would still not be the same thing.

As a musician, you stand at the intersection of our dream of immortality, and our sure knowledge of the transience of all things. You are the gateway between the eternal and the ephemeral. In the moment that you are creating this performance, you are all of humanity.

There isn’t any other “job” like this. It’s in order to live in this moment that you have worked so hard, that you have played scales until your fingers were bloody, that you have thought and rethought every nuance of your interpretation.

That you have dared to take this road — which in the end is the loneliest of all roads — that you have searched for a voice with which to say that which has never been said — makes all of you — you young musicians — unique. No matter how far you have come, no matter how far you have left to go, the world listens. The world thanks you. The world loves you.