Nectar Amist the Percussive Weeds

Nectar Amid the Percussive Weeds


After two weeks away on vacation, I was struck and somewhat horrified to see just how overgrown my garden had become with weeds. Weeds in all shapes and sizes. Weeds that just seemed to spring out of nowhere and usurp their territory without any consult or apologies.

After spending the previous months tending to the garden and trying with painstaking effort to grow a few roses, shrubs and even applying my paltry skills in the current sentiment of ecological self-sufficiency to planting a modest 'Victory' vegetable Garden (...which ended up being more of a defeat, but that's another story)--I was more than a little aghast to see just how the weeds had taken up residence in so aggressive a manner.

It led me to think of the nature of things...For instance, a beautiful garden left unchecked, will quickly evaporate and be taken over by weeds. It is the natural state.

Although, is it the most beautiful?

I will take flowers over weeds any day of the week--but it seems that despite nature, producing a flower takes much more effort, attention and nurturing. One has to override the stronger tendency for weeds to invade and to suppress them at all costs.

I am going to try to make an analogy now between weeds and the nature of a musical instrument which I love and have spent my life with--the piano. It may be a stretch, but here it goes:

The piano is an anomaly as far as instruments go, because it is tricky to classify. The basic classifications, or families of instruments are: string, woodwind, brass, and percussion. With this system it makes it straightforward to classify a violin under the string category; the trombone under the brass family and the clarinet under the woodwind family, just to name a few obvious examples.

But with the piano, we run into a hermaphroditic problem: Due to its more complex nature it is considered both a String instrument AND a Percussion instrument.

Because of the strings which vibrate and hence produce the piano sound, it is classified in the string category--However, because of the hammers inside the piano
(part of the component known as the 'action') which are thrown into flight when a key is pressed down, this act of the hammer hitting the string gives the piano also the classification as a percussion instrument.(A percussion instrument is defined as one where the act of striking produces tone, such as a drum or timpani).

As any pianist will attest, the quest to draw a beautiful tone from the piano is among the most challenging of aspects in mastering the pianistic art. It requires apt listening, a perfect harmony between the player and the instrument and a true choreography in physically applying the correct 'touch' in order for this aesthetic magic of tone to happen. In pursuit of this, the player must dodge the easy to attain, overwhelmingly percussive aspect of the piano, for when one strikes the keys with an undue amount of force, it will easily destroy the tone so that it becomes shrill, glassy and harsh. Under these conditions, it aborts the ability for the instrument to sing and for the hidden lyrical beauty to shine forth.

This is the nectar--the elusive flower of tonal beauty which is only attained by extracting it amist the garden of percussive weeds that form the basic landscape of this instrument.

In life, I think it is often necessary to rise above what is the natural tendency. It is refinement in the highest sense of the word.

But why should we make the extra effort? Why NOT take the easy way out? After all, sound is sound...Who will notice?

In art and in life the extra effort required to extract the beauty within the weeds will not only lead to finer results--it will open a channel for communing in the aesthetic Garden of Paradise where blossoms the Divine.