February 22 2009
I want to take a moment to acknowledge the manual labourers we call 'musicians'.
Making music is bodily, physical,, corporeal, muscular, tendon-ular, bone-wrecking, knuckle-cracking, twisty, wristy, arthritic, paralytic, anatomically anomalistic job. You pound, you pull, you push, you lift, you stretch, you open, you close, soft, hard, heavy, light.
Making music, to repeat, is manual labour.
I was playing with the wonderful Windsor Symphony Orchestra a few weeks back. One young (as in early 30's) brass player could barely stretch her arm straight out to her side. Her muscles were tightened, knotted and twisted from playing. A different brass player had to press ice packs to his lips, they were so busted from blowing. Another 40-something player could barely lift his arm up, his shoulder was so crumpled.
Every musician deals with physical stress. We need to pay careful attention to our mechanism. We work industriously to develop our technique in non-injurious ways. We stretch, exercise, warm up, cool down, and are always careful. We need to do all of this. We need to produce like artists, but work like athletes.
Every business has its ugly backrooms, and you-don't-want-to-know-how-they-make-sausage aspects. This physical reality underlying the ethereal beauty is the musician's. The sad truth is that some musicians are ruined physically long before they have lived full musical lives.
I was interacting with some audience members who really enjoyed a show recently. My arms and hands were fine, thank goodness. But I couldn't help thinking of the clashing facts that their visceral pleasure was achieved through my, and my fellow musicians', muscular exertion. As though we had been digging ditches for them to ballroom dance happily.
I guess art, like marriage, is a prosaic structure with a poetic essence. We work to maintain the essence, and to ensure audiences experience only the essence.
So next time you reach out to shake hands with a musician, have a thought to what his or her carcass has been up to, its delicate nature as a work tool, the source of infinite colours and sounds- have a thought to all this, and shake that hand ever so gently. Ever so gently.
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