One of my friends was enrolled in a twentieth-century harmony class last semester under a professor who was known to be very passionate about his opinions, the most alarming of which being that there is no such thing as program music. What he meant was that music existed solely for music's own sake, that there was never a story to be told with it, never a picture to be painted, only the sheer beauty of the music itself was worthy of critique or analysis.

In C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, the narrator goes to Hell and then, by degrees, into Heaven, where he encounters all kinds of interesting people and the heavenly saints who try to guide them into Heaven. One character he manages to meet is a painter, who is unable to realize that the beauty of the scenes he's been painting all his life came from his desire to show people God. He could not understand why, for the time being, he had no reason to paint, because everyone he might show them had seen the beauty of Heaven, and a painting cannot match the real thing. The saint who comes to help him, a painter himself, tries to help him understand:

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him...(C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)

So I must ask myself, why am I a musician? Why am I a poet, an artist, a photographer, a philosopher? Because I have something to say. There is some kernal of truth buried deeply inside of me, and my art (if you can call it such) is a way of tapping into that truth, and for a brief moment, sharing it with the world. But sometimes I, like everyone else, turn my attention away from the message I am telling and focus solely on how I am telling it. I worry so much about how I sound, how my pictures look, how my ideas sound on paper, that I sometimes forget why I chose to do those things in the first place.

Someone once told me that a person's calling is where that person's greatest joy and the world's deepest darkness meet. We find fulfillment not by doing what we love, but by never losing focus of why we love it. I love music because, when I am performing or practicing, and I'm really enjoying what it is I'm doing, I can taste a bit of the divine. The music stops being the composer's and becomes mine, and then transcends being mine to being His. Music is just another language. I read somewhere that a friend is one who knows the song in your heart, but a true friend is one who can sing that song back to you. Music in itself is a beautiful thing, but if we forget the message we are telling when we perform it, then we have accomplished nothing. If another heart cannot reach out and touch and, for the briefest of moments, understand what we are trying to accomplish, then all our efforts, all our practicing, all of the love we pour into our music is meaningless...

~January 5, 2004