Cold, muddy toads.

Posted by Ahmed Anzaldúa on March 31, 2011. one comment

In his novel Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel refers to words as “…cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field.” I believe that this metaphor, while unflattering, describes my experience with music quite accurately. There are plenty of quotes out there about how music is the soul of the universe — Plato — or how the Big Bang was really a “Big Chord” — Terry Pratchett. For people from every time, place, and culture music has always served as a link to the cosmos, to the eternal both inside and outside of ourselves. Faced with this, musical notes really do feel as an inadequate way of expressing something so astonishing — they are like cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field.

We deal with it constantly and for many musicians, including myself, it is a constant source of frustration that the notes we play are nowhere close to the music we feel and imagine. I suppose that for some composers this must have been torture. This isn’t frustrating only for performers; the hardest thing for me as a teacher is to give that enthusiasm to a student, that sense of awe about the works we play.

We should be grateful for our notes though, those sounds we coax out of our instruments are really all we have. They’re our connection to the universe and, while the sound that results may seem ridiculously small compared to that, music isn’t really in the sounds that we make by blowing, hammering, scratching and making stuff vibrate. It resides in our imaginations, in our intentions when we play and in our reactions when we listen. Let’s try then to perform our musical notes with joy but to always go beyond them, lest we find that our notes are as cold, muddy toads croaking along with nothing to say.