Word 99 (Gap)

I’m thinking about Cormac Begley playing the concertina, about Jacqueline du Pré playing Dvorak, about John Coltrane playing Crescent, about Radu Lupu playing Brahms, about Jimi Hendrix playing “All Along the Watchtower.” I’m thinking about why it’s so arresting to hear a great instrumentalist take a physical object and make it sound almost, almost like a human voice. When the playing is average, you’d rather hear someone singing. When the playing is masterful, a drama arises. You notice how incredibly close they’re getting to the subtlety of phrasing we all take for granted in speech; but all the while you know, it is the nature of this game that they’ll never actually get there. They can’t. That gap is the ineffable beauty of instrumental music. And it points to what’s around us all the time, all the beauty and subtlety of speech that we’re always taking for granted.