On Music

I'm sitting at a concert inMIT's Kresge Auditorium, on the side of the violins and French horns. Shadle's Symphony #2 plays; something about the music is striking, as if it has a hidden meaning, is a foreign language I cannot quite decipher.

As my mind wanders, I think back to the time when orchestra was a larger part of my life, when I played viola. What did the music mean to me then? Now I can hear the notes, but not understand them. Could I ever?

Many times playing music had seemed to me a way of relating to other people. Others it was just something I did, the exctracurricular I picked up so I wouldn't have to take fifth grade choir. The last year I played formally, it was a way of giving voice to fantasy.

Now the melody seems so far away, the rationality and spirit of it only in others' minds. Yet still I wonder, as this piece reaches a point of tension, what was Charles Shadle trying to say? What keeps the players' eyes and fingers moving so tirelessly onward?