Recently I watched a very instructive video clip on Youtube featuring a saxophone virtuoso named Ben Wendel, who described an exercise that is very simple in appearance but very deep in its reach. It got me thinking about the connection between virtuosity and musical cognition.
Recently I've been working on Mozart duets for two flutes (originally for flute and violin), which are beyond my ability but still almost within my reach, and the pleasure of playing Mozart outweighs the frustration of not playing his music as well as I ought to.
Not only was Mozart a brilliant composer, he was also a virtuoso keyboard player and violinist. The connection between his ears, his mind, his fingers, and the rest of his body was apparently perfect. Not everyone who can play fast and expressively is also a great composer, and not every great composer was a great performer, but there's something powerful about the extraordinary connection between body and mind in music. In discussion of musical cognition, that's something that has to be addressed.
From the other direction, playing music certainly must strengthen the body-mind connection in the performer.
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