I’ve just started reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and from about ten pages in I was totally in love. The language is twisty and baroque (as only German can be), almost brutally so, but once you have relaxed your mind enough the wealth of detail begins to fall in place like phrases in a Bach fugue, each one sustaining a central magnificence and sonority. I read it slowly and haltingly, returning to difficult or beautiful sentences as I would work through sections of a piece of music, for language too exists in time, and its beauty, indeed perhaps its meaning, exists not as a timeless abstraction, but in being there, in tempore with it.

It may be that in this age of mass-produced, digitally impeccable music on demand, it’s hard for us to even imagine what music was to the people who wrote it. Why spend hours in the practice room running through scales and exercises, playing the same twelve bars over and over again, when there’s no way you will ever have the same skill and technique as the professional musicians who make the brilliant, perfect recordings you can pipe right into your little white headphones? The sad fact, as my violinist friend Sasha and I were commiserating over recently, is that even musicians fall into the trap of focusing too much on technique. Most of us are drawn to music out of a desire for order (and often, it must be admitted, some degree of social awkwardness). Just being able to play a difficult piece is a profoundly moving emotion, and we challenge ourselves more and more to keep getting that sensation.

My college bassoon teacher once asked me about what emotional content I found in a certain piece we were working on, and I remember to this day how stymied I felt trying to answer him. I don’t know that I had ever considered the meaning of music until that point, or to be more precise, that I had ever felt anything beyond awe at someone else’s expertise and satisfaction at my own accomplishments. There were, to be sure, occasional glimpses of something transcendent, but I am not sure I felt anything beyond a vague, inarticulate longing. Eventually, inevitably, I reached the limits of my technical ability, and like so many musicians, face to face at last with the unattainable ideal of technical perfection, I dropped out. I had mastered my language as well as I could, but the joy I felt in it came from the mastery, and not from what I could say with it.

I do not think this experience is peculiar to musicians. As I suggested in my review of I (Heart) Huckabees, everyone has to choose whether to live in the world of people, or in the world of ideas. Ideas, it seems to me, are the natural terrain of the mind, and we spend our infancy and childhood learning to condense and explain the confusing voices of our senses. We replace, bit by bit, the sensations of light and sound with things. Rather, with concepts of things: we learn that the shape and color of a car go with the word “car”. Learning to drive a car is not substantively different from learning what it is. Our brains create models of how our actions will influence reality, and this is what I mean by the world of ideas.

It seems, alas, all too easy to become stuck in this world. In music, I had become trapped by the ideal of technical mastery. Like everyone I have lived at various times in frameworks of my own construction. We set up whole existences on the basis of representation and simulation, whether that involves wearing a mesh trucker hat and living in Williamsburg, or buying an SUV and living in Jersey. Even our good works have a fetishism to them: we would rather donate money to Oxfam than take the time to talk to a miserable stranger.

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