Julien Monette Beauty Blog No. 1

 Last Spring I got the opportunity to play the harpsichord in an orchestra concert of very old music like Bach and Handel.  


I sat at the bench with the instrument in the middle of the orchestra.  There was no conductor since it was more or less chamber music, so the responsibility to stop, start, and change the speed of the music was entirely on the students.  


Throughout the concert I felt as if I was in the middle of a great web of connectivity.  Each time a musical event such as a pause or a sudden slowing-down happened and all of us made eye contact and moved in sync, it felt as if we were part of one singular mechanism, producing the music as a unified force.  It made me think about how, for this briefest of moments, we could all agree in a precise and exact way on what was happening, what was being said, and what came next.  It was an entirely different experience from listening to that music, because we were summoning that music almost from some otherworldly dimension, or perhaps from the past itself.


The beauty was made obvious to me as I realized how closely in sync we all were.  Communication between the musicians had moved beyond the realm of words and into an almost spiritual form of communion.  I realized the beauty of the music flowing through us and out into the audience, as if we were a conduit for the sounds that we were realizing from the page.

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