Music and the War Effort

 

Photograph by David Young

For quite a few years I've been playing baritone saxophone in a quartet. Just playing together every week is satisfying and enjoyable, and it gives me a reason to keep practicing. At this time, during the war between Hamas and Israel, when many thousands of Israelis who live close to our borders have been evacuated and housed in hotels, we have performed twice to demonstrate our solidary with the evacuees and to raise their morale.

We're decent amateur musicians, and, if we weren't busy doing a million other things in our lives, and we managed to rehearse more than once a week, and sometimes not even that, we could get to a respectable level. As it is, our repertoire doesn't include challenging pieces that we might be capable of playing if we could rehearse more often and find time to master our parts on our own.

I often listen with admiration to performances of chamber music on my computer and in concert. It's magical to hear an ensemble playing together, in agreement about all the elements of the performance: pitch, tempo, dynamics, and articulation. Some string quartets, especially modern ones, are so demanding that it barely seems possible to play them. My own modest experience of playing in ensembles makes me appreciative.

I also listen to quite a bit of jazz, and when I hear performances of big bands like those of Duke Ellington and Count Basie I'm equally in awe of their tightness, which can only come from countless hours of playing together.