Who's Doing the Playing?

My flute teacher tends to work more with my imagination than with the mechanics of playing, and sometimes his instructions mystify me.
From the start, more than two years ago, he has been telling me to put myself into the notes that I play, and I have been struggling with that metaphor.
In a way, it's no different from the general message of Buddhist meditation. One should always put oneself into where one is and what one does.
My teacher also speaks of being aware of reality while one is playing, being attentive to what comes out of the flute and also to what one is putting into the instrument, and how (the quality of the breathing, the vibrato, the shape of one's lips, the tension in one's fingers, how one is standing and holding the instrument, and so on). This is clearly another way of saying that one should put oneself into the notes one plays.
His main criticism of my playing is what I might call timidity. I want to avoid making mistakes, so I don't take chances. I hold back and don't play with confidence. (Naturally, at the beginning, when I was never sure whether a note would come out of the instrument at all, I lacked self-confidence, but by now I am closer to being able to produce a reasonable sound every time I play a note, so I should get past that timidity.)
At my last lesson he told me that my alter-ego should be playing, because playing a musical instrument is one of those rare opportunities that life gives one to express what one ordinarily keeps under wraps.
This not an easy instruction for me. I am in fact not big on alter-egos. I'm not an actor by nature, though I could think of a few situations where I do let my alter-ego do the acting: mainly when I participate in religious services.
So, this morning, I decided to imagine an alter-ego who could play for me. I was very surprised by the figure that appeared in my imagination, not Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, but large, rather corpulent man in a tuxedo, light on his feet and very assertive. This morning he didn't play much better than I do, but he has potential.

Piano

I had to have some oral surgery, and the doctor said I wasn't allowed to play a wind instrument for a week or ten days, so I've been playing a little piano, very badly, instead.
The piano makes me think of a lecture-demonstration we just heard. Gil Shohat was ostensibly talking about madness in modern Western classical music, but it was mainly Shohat being his charming self (I am a big fan of his).
He started by playing a CD of the first Prokofiev violin concerto, with a mainly sweet and melodic first movement and a manic second movement, leaving me puzzled. How could Prokofiev have thought up that music? How did he plan it out?
Later Shohat was joined by a fabulous pianist, Dorel Golan, whom I had heard before and remembered. Her performances of extremely difficult etudes, entirely from memory, were extraordinary.
So, from piano to piano, there was a clip on the NY Times web site about an eleven yeard old jazz prodigy from Bali (!) named Joey Alexander (check him out), who plays better now than most pianists can ever hope to play.
One can only marvel at such a gift, be grateful for the rejuvenation of jazz, and hope that he develops into a mature artist (or, for that matter, that he takes up theoretical physics or whatever he wants to do).
No matter how wonderful these musicians are, both the prodigies and the products of long, disciplined practice, they don't make one's own meager efforts to produce music any less valuable to ourselves. One can't have a world where only one in ten thousand does what he or she does on the highest level, and all the rest of us sit in awe.
True, a lot of modern music (actually since the beginning of the nineteenth century) can only be played by virtuosi, and this might be a flaw in it - hard to play and hard to listen to. Last month I heard a performance of a string quartet by the Israeli composer, Tzvi Avni, much farther away from the conventions of classical music than Prokofiev's work, and I wondered how the musicians learned their impossible parts separately and then put them together, a truly astonishing feat - to say nothing of the composer's work. How did he hear the music in his mind and notate it?
We humans are capable of such wonderful things, and just a few hundred kilometers north of where I am, in Syria, we are treating our fellow humans with ferocious cruelty, and "the world" (whatever that is) can't or won't put a stop to it.

Interesting and Important

After my mother died, more than twenty years ago, we faced the problem of dealing with the contents of her home, since my father had died a year earlier. We live in Israel, and her home was in New Jersey, making it difficult and expensive to bring her belongings to us, even assuming there would be room in our apartment for all of her things.
She had told us about certain items that she wanted to give to some of her nieces and nephews, and we took care of that. But we couldn't deal easily with all the rest, trying to sell everything for what it was worth. So we called in a man who specialized in emptying out people's apartments, paying some amount for some of the things, and guaranteeing that the place would be empty and ready to sell. Obviously we could take what we wanted from the apartment before letting him have his way.
He was a heavyset, blunt Italian-American, super smart, friendly, and persuasive.
After surveying the entire place and making notes to himself about the furniture, decorative objects, paintings, and appliances, he sat and went through my mother's costume jewelry rapidly, saying "this is interesting" whenever he came upon a piece he liked, before offering us a global price for the whole batch.

I was interested in the way he used the word "interesting."
He meant, "I can sell this for a profit," but it wasn't only that. He took my wife and me to his warehouse, and it was clear that he liked his business, loved the objects he had for sale, and enjoyed having them pass through his hands.

"Interesting," after all, is a relative term. Every item of my mother's costume jewelry must have interested her when she bought it, or my father, when he gave it to her, but there was a lot of it she never wore - she had lost interest in it. My wife did not share her taste in jewelry at all, so absolutely nothing in the batch interested her. Some of the pieces were of great interest to me, regardless of their monetary value, because they reminded me of my mother in her prime, and I didn't let the man have them.

"Important" is another relative term. Is anything objectively important? No. Events, people, animals, and objects are only important to the people who find them important. A historian could tell you that the Opium Wars in nineteenth century China were very important, but if someone said, "The history of European colonialism in China is not important to me," the historian can only respond, "Okay, don't take my course or read my book."
Of course, one might also tell the historian, "I acknowledge that your topic is important, but it doesn't interest me right now. I'd rather focus on professional golf, in which I take a great personal interest."
We aren't always interested in what is important.

The Touches of Sweet Harmony

"Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" (Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Scene iii)

The question Shakespeare puts in Benedick's mouth is one of the deepest questions we still ask about music: Why does it affect us the way it does?

Shakespeare's characters have more to say about music toward the end of The Merchant of Venice, a denouement which, for Shakespeare and his Christian audience, was entirely satisfactory. Not only is Shylock defeated, he is forced to convert, and his daughter has also converted and married a Venetian nobleman.

Lorenzo's praise of music in conversation with Jessica, his bride, in Act V, Scene I, is symbolic of this harmonious ending. He begins:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

These lines are of such exquisite beauty that no comment is necessary, beyond noting that it shows us Lorenzo's refinement and his true love for Jessica. He goes on to speak of the metaphorical music of the heavens:

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

This heavenly music, the motion of the stars, is mystical:

Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

Jessica's response is puzzled:

            I am never merry when I hear sweet music.

Lorenzo's first explanation is psychological, empirical:

The reason is, your spirits are attentive:
For do but note a wild and wanton herd,
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music:

He then goes on to confirm this observation with a reference to classical literature:

therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.

Finally, in a kind of non sequitur, he claims that failure to appreciate music is a sign of villainy, probably a veiled reference to her Jewish father's ethical and spiritual inadequacy (prior to his conversion):

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

Lorenzo's line of thought is as follows: the music we hear on earth is a reflection of the divine voices of the angels in heaven, by implication, what is revealed in Christianity; therefore sensitivity to music, although natural (even wild animals are subject to it), is a sign of communion with mystical truth, and those insensitive to it are not to be trusted. The people in The Merchant of Venice who are not to be trusted are the Jews.

Obviously a Jew reading these lines rejects the Lorenzo's theory, but is there a less tendentious ethical dimension to the love of music?

We are left with Benedick's mystery: “Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?”

A Musical Gem

Tellingly, although musical talent is almost universally regarded as a sign of general intelligence, if not genius, African-American musicians have, in the past, been thought of as having "a natural sense of rhythm." As an amateur musician who has tried for years to learn to play jazz, I have nothing but respect for the intelligence and craftsmanship, and, yes, genius, of the African-Americans who invented and developed the idiom.
Among the most brilliant Afro-American musicians who have enriched the culture of the world, was the eccentric Thelonious Monk, who wrote the gem I've been thinking about, "Straight no Chaser." It's a twelve-bar blues, with no substitute chords or advanced harmonization: it's straight, as the title announces. But it's all chaser.
The melody is also deceptively simple, a riff that's repeated ten times, with some variations, including a chromatic version of it near the end. Hardly changing the riff at all, Monk made it fit perfectly over the traditional harmonic structure of the blues. It's a bit like a puzzle that's been solved, but the solution is so clever that the challenge of the puzzle remains in the air. What makes it so elusive and unpredictable is the way Monk starts the riff on different beats, managing to surprise the listener again and again in the restricted, twelve-bar framework. 
I can hardly think of a piece more satisfying to play, as hard as it is to play it well.