Pure coming and going

In a yoga class the other day, the instructor reminded us that there was no single correct way to execute the triangle pose (trikonasana). I was having a particularly hard time of it - it was one of those days where I was feeling distracted and very out of tune with myself, and the whole breathing-with-movement thing on which yoga is predicated was not coming easily. As I eased down into the extension, she spoke again: "There is no single trikonasana; there are an infinite number because each of us individually is different from each other, and none of us will ever do trikonasana the same way we do today."

This got me thinking about music (OK, I confess, just about anything gets me thinking about music, but that's what musicians do). I've alway wondered about performing a piece multiple times, and how different it feels each time, even if a recording of each iteration might have very little ostensible variance. I end up doing a lot of repetition with the Orchestra when I'm doing Young People's Concerts (which we'll be doing this coming week), and even with the pieces that the Orchestra has performed a billion times ("Ruslan and Ludmilla" Overture comes to mind) it is never the same over two (sometimes back-to-back) performances.

But what if those performances were identical, would two different audiences react to them in the same way? And would the musicians creating those identical performances actually experience them in identical ways, or can you duplicate a musical product while having a disparate personal experience internally?

This reminded me of a post over at "On An Overgrown Path" about the very nature of music. What is a piece of music? Is it the notes on the page? Is it what the composer heard in his head as he was writing down those notes on a page? Is it and aggregate of all the performance ever of that given piece? Or is it the last performance of it that you heard? The conclusion here is that: "The answer must be that the Matthew Passion, or any composition, is simply the music we hear in our head at any one moment in time - whether the source be a score, a live performance, a recording, a memory, or our imagination."

Which I rather like. The post goes on to talk about the impermance of music (with which I also agree) - the delight in music is that it's ephemeral, ungraspable and utterly unquantifiable. Every performance is a coming and going that only exists in that moment, and that's why we savor them.