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I wrote this story after a long year spent doing music.
I walked into the arts center past the windows near the entrance, which in some way or another, even being cold, reminded me of what it was like in the spring. I try not to duty myself beyond the call of society but this was just too much, even for me, to feel spring during such a dull and dreary state of nature. It was just too good, although shortly after, realizing that I should just accept the gift of nature to me, and how I can see its beauty.
As I walked further into what seemed like a dark dungeon of endless subjectivity I noticed a trumpeter playing a fluegelhorn to my right. He wasn't playing music, but instead something else; a set of notes that he simply attempted to play very well consistently, but was nothing close and lost in the monotony of playing something over and over again. As he played such notes to his liking, he held the top pitch, for one reason or another, but as I walked, I realized that his flat tone (which by any means was not his fault, but the make of the horn itself) was becoming lower and lower in pitch. I cannot imagine, being a child of beauty, of music that moves the soul, teaches you wisdom, shows you the conquest of every nation with each single chord, and shows each single feeling put into it, that that could sound, in any way, good to a man who strives for nothing but a dollar in the wallet, a wife in bed, and the ability to create music so precisely, so finely tuned that the beauty becomes, once again, lost in the endless monotonty of reaching such an unnecessary level. And he was proud of his accomplishment of a few notes played to his liking, which I'm sure given a replication of what he did, would sound like something only his dog would eat for dinner!
I picked up my own instrument and walked slowly further into the building, further away from the nature and beauty that created us. I sat with four other individuals, similar to the trumpeter in philosophy (the only differences being of opinions about what sounded the most precise, which can lead to contention so rough it can break good friendships in the beat of a hummingbird's wings). A man stood in front of us and told us that "The beauty of chamber music is that you can play off of each other's techniques, each other's abilities." Now any ignoramus can stand back and say "I don't at all like this music, it sounds horrible." If asked why, he would answer: "It's not good music." But someone who is trained so finely, tweaked so greatly, notices the same piece being played with incredible accuracy, he will tell you: "That is beautiful playing." Nobody in this world would guess, not in a million years, that by the second man telling us that he hears beauty in the technique, he tell us that he is even more ignorant to something he lost along the way: The words of the first ignoramus, the one who finds beauty in the music itself, in the very essence of what nature had to show me when I first walked into the building.
As I left rehearsal that day, I shrugged off all that I picked up while in the building, and started singing my own tune. And instead of it teaching me what I was supposed to know to sing accurately, it showed me something else, something irreplacable by technique and the endless pursuit of a shadow beauty which lingers over the lust of being some kind of technical genius. It showed me a little part of my heart; a little bit of inner peace within myself that only the beauty of a true piece of music could help me find.