Playing in Concert

"Some music needs to be seen as well as heard."  Meredith after attending the Moscow Symphony

While viewing a YouTube video of Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, I was struck with an analogy.

If you've ever played in a band or an orchestra you know that the conductor is the only person on stage who is following the entire score.  All of the instrumentalists-- strings, brass, percussion and woodwinds, are following only their respective parts.  Another consideration of playing on stage with an orchestra is that the conductor and the audience are the only persons who can hear the entire orchestra. Well, for that matter the audience hears it somewhat better than the conductor as the sound is reverberating off the walls.  Regardless of the superiority of the acoustics in the hall, each individual player is mostly hearing the performers around him or her and not the entire piece. Furthermore, since they are hearing the other players' music on the rebound from the hall, there are various delays of milliseconds as the sound from other instruments arrives at their ears. The player needs only to follow the conductor for this potential distraction to be a non-issue.

I was noticing how each player was playing close attention to the music on the stand in front of him, but always remained aware of the conductor.  The conductor had a much larger score on his stand. He was paying close attention to the orchestra, but his gaze never strayed far from his score. Musically speaking, those page turns are life and death. Then I noticed several other things that were significant to the performance. The players were not just playing together, they were swaying together. The strings were moving their bows in concert.  The woodwinds were not only moving their bodies, but their instruments were dancing to the rhythm of the music. The orchestra was moving together like a flock of birds or a school of fish. So although they were each playing his or her individual part, there seemed to be an invisible cord connecting all of them.

So here's the analogy: The stage is everyone and everything around us. The individual players represents our lives.  We play only our part. We really have little idea the specific notes being played by the person beside us or anywhere else on stage.  For that matter, if we get focused on what s/he is playing, we are not doing a very good job playing our own part.  It's only when we're playing our part correctly and artistically that the music being heard by the conductor and the audience is what the composer intended. If you believe in God and that S/He is more or less behind things and in control of things, for the sake of this analogy, is God the composer or the conductor? Or both?  I'll leave that for you to decide. One very important consideration regarding playing only your part, sometimes your part is an elongated rest.  During your rest--rest! It is not your turn to play. The music will go right along just fine without you.  If you play during your rest, you'll just embarrass yourself and mess it up for everybody. Count the beats in your rest and play when it's your turn to play.

The fact that the individual performer can only hear those players well who are immediately around him can be compared to your family and persons in your sphere of influence.  You may read about or see on the news that things are going on in the world, but you  have little to no influence over it. Your world is that world you live in day by day. If you want to affect the world at large, then affect your world, the world immediately around you.  And don't concern yourself with the rest of the world. You need to keep in mind that you do affect your world every day whether you want to or not. But you decide how you're going to affect it.

To take the analogy a little further, the concert hall becomes our solar system, our galaxy and the entire universe. The universe is a very big place.  Distances, as you know, are measured in light years---the distance covered by a ray of light in one year traveling at 186,000 miles per second. And then those distances between stars and galaxies go into the billions of light years apart.  But in spite of its unfathomable vastness, this universe is still our home. Planet Earth resides there and so do we. We live and breathe in  that enormous hall.

My father told me something many years ago that is apropos to this discourse, As we were returning from a concert, he said, "Because of  your education and experience, I expect that you enjoyed that music on entirely different level than I did. There were intricacies and aspects of that music that you understood that I will never understand. But just because I didn't enjoy it the way you did, doesn't mean that I enjoyed it any less. Your musical aptitude didn't affect my musical inferiority at all. Your experience wasn't better. It was just different." So then, just because some people live in nicer homes, drive nicer cars, have children who attend better schools doesn't mean that they are enjoying life any more than you are.  Just because they have more of some things doesn't mean they have more of the things that give meaning to your life. Who knows? They may sense something in you that they wished they had.


A symphony is defined as a composition of different elements.  No matter how beautifully written the composition, it will never be heard if you don't play your part. Just play your part and the symphony takes care of itself.