Zorba: it’s my santouri. Makes the best music. It goes with me, always.
Basil: It will be wonderful to get down and do some real work! Also, it will be very good for the village, which I understand is rather poor.
Zorba: we make everybody happy!
Basil: and’ll we have fun too! We’ll swim… and we’ll drink wine. And you’ll play the santouri!Zorba: [silence]
Basil: What’s the matter?
Zorba: it’s about the santouri. We make a bargain, or I cannot come:
in word, I am your man
But in things like playing and singing
I am my ownBasil: How do you mean?
Zorba: I mean free. You sign?
Basil: I sign
From the film Zorba the Greek, 1964.
Communing with the immaterial entity “Music”
When the musician practices her instrument, she becomes emotionally engaged with the music of which the instrument is a conduit. The instrument serves as a medium to communicate (and commune) with that abstract geometry of sound we call music. A musician can practice her instrument, drawn forward by a desire to make the entity of music proud of them.
How does she make it proud ? By playing a piece well, by mastering a particular passage so it becomes instinctive and fluid like second nature, by orchestrating the elements that constitute music in a way that evokes something genuine on someone, even if the sole audience is the musician herself.
Intrinsic satisfaction is fuelled by the craft’s pride in us
Intrinsic satisfaction from an activity can be conceived as a desire to make whatever invisible thing that activity is meant to channel proud of you. You seek to delight it with your intervention, your contribution, your partnership with it. If you think about it, you are indeed providing music with a medium to materialise in the world and have an effect on it.
And that intimate relation that one gradually nurtures —by earning it— with that invisible thing can be an endless source of self-worth. We might never become one with it, fully merge with it, but together with it we can cultivate something that will dwell within us as second nature.
This musicality then courses through us both deliberately in our performance and peripherally in our daily life: serving as a tone-setter, a force of equilibrium for everything else we do in life. If we develop sufficient intimacy with a craft, it becomes a microcosm of our disposition toward living in the world.
The principles of a craft are the principles of harmony
Every principle governing the interplay between the components of this craft, and the possibilities latent within the injection of creativity between these boundaries, works toward achieving a harmony that is both rule-bound and limitless in its variability.
And the inner workings of this harmony function as metaphors for harmony in the visible world, because harmony itself is constituted of laws that transcend any categorisation of human endeavours. Thus, these principles can be extrapolated from a source of personal inner stability.
The musician makes music proud by communicating with it through her instrument. Perhaps music stands as the only entity that is proud of her at this moment, perhaps she has fallen short of the standards held by many the people around them. She might miss out on the rewards that these people’s pride would confer upon her, but she is undoubtedly receiving an immensely precious reward from a music that is proud of her.
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