February 25, 2025

You decide what’s good

The pleasures and pitfalls of virtuosity.

My original working title for this piece was “Against Virtuosity” - and let’s just say that virtuosity fought back. It waited for me around every corner from the very day I started writing. My computer hadn’t been open for five minutes when my husband casually asked if I’d heard of this musician:

COME ON.

Late to the Tigran party, I’m now totally obsessed, and how could it be otherwise? It’s especially intense to find a new-to-me musician of this quality when I’m in the final stages of learning a new program myself, just when the sweat and boredom and frustration start to give way to sovereignty and ease. There’s nothing like the feeling of music finally housing itself in your body, of your ears and eyes and hands all knowing together where to go or how to fearlessly take a detour. That’s the mountaintop for me, a competent musician; what must it feel like to exist in a mind and body like Tigran’s? I will never know, but I understand just enough about playing music to imagine it.

The imagining takes my breath away: virtuosity strikes again.

But you don’t have be a player for virtuosity to get you. The thrill is primal, visceral. Our cells mirror the athleticism of fingers flying over keys at lightning speed or lungs and throats boldly extending their highest tones. Great athletes are more than the skills they execute, and so it is with musical virtuosi; with poetic grace they let us in on their risk, concentration, and joy. Even as we fellow humans dazzle at their daring accomplishments, we connect with their striving, with their pleasure, and with their relief.

Virtuosos will sometimes work to mask their knife-edge expertise by pretending to be arch or chill, but they can’t hide it for long.

There’s no getting around it. I stan the virtuosos.

But like…

(peering around suspiciously, in a stage whisper)

…do we need them right now?

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What are you talking about? Of course we need them!! Admiration - inspiration - goals!

Acquisition of expertise has long been likened to the ascent of a mountain: gradus ad Parnassum, steps to Parnassus (it’s a peak in Greece, stay with me). We on the slopes thrill to imagine the view from the mountaintop, but the old, worn trails to get up there are disappearing (I’m gonna ride the Parnassus metaphor as long as I can, so strap in). In fact, we’ve long been dismantling the pathways that lead to the virtuosity we so admire, cutting public arts funding and devaluing creative careers. Most of the entry level live performance opportunities of my youth were long ago supplanted by recordings, and even those are now algorithm-generated playlists, no human hand even clicking on “search,” never mind striking a piano key or plucking a guitar string.

I used to know by heart how to get from the foothills up to past the treeline. Now, as my students pull on their boots, I’m not sure how to direct them. Even if they’re moved by the virtuosos’ amazing dispatches from the summit, how are they supposed to get there over washed-out, neglected paths?

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In the middle of these musings, I practiced my new program, doing all the unsexy work behind the transcendent moments that sometimes coalesce onstage. Knit one, purl two, repeat, repeat, repeat. Students came through my door, and we worked together on learning to love the inevitable grind, leaving the jones for Parnassus behind on our way to the music mines. Chop wood, carry water, tap the subdivisions, check the tuning, so that when the curtain rises you can somehow forget all about it.

The day before I left, Jamie and Ran and I spent a few hours reading the music we’ll perform together at the end of March, a series of obscure songs for voice and clarinet. The piano part of these mostly holds down the harmonic fort, so I brought the one-four-five-one while my colleagues bloomed and bent melodies around one another, gorgeous and expressive on the very first try. Both of them blew into rehearsal straight from other meetings and lessons, and without the luxury of warming up simply slipped with no preamble into intense, generous listening.

Virtuosity. There it was again.

Virtuosity, I can’t quit you.

I got in my car and drove to Louisville.

Emily Albrink and I are debuting a new-to-us program on Sunday, not quite two years after we released Force of Nature. The original plan was for me to fly to Kentucky, but I bailed and roadtripped and listened on the radio as sexy chainsaw-wielding geniuses in DC continued to clear our government of unsexy - hard-won, knit one purl two - expertise.

I arrived just in time to attend This Little Light of Mine at the Kentucky Opera. This opera honors the work of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and its structure traces the path of Black American song from the fields and the churches to the streets. Ronnita Miller was like a Mississippi Erda as Fannie Lou, and the audience clapped along with the excellent chorus (I see you, Lisa Hasson!), and I didn’t know what to do with my heart when someone on stage said “We’ll never go back!”

The opera ends with Hamer’s speech to the Credentials Committee at the 1964 DNC convention, the words of a brilliant human with no recognized expertise beyond her own heart and mind:

…I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?

Thank you.

The audience erupted in applause.

Fannie Lou Hamer gave that speech when I was a year old. Two steps forward and who knows how many back in my lifetime so far.

Emily and I ran for the parking garage. We were late, and Louisville was not quite done with us.

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Thank you, said the lovely young woman with the large eyes and very short hair.

One concert’s ending was the next one’s beginning. This time, an opera singer who lives in the city was giving a performance in gratitude to all those who had helped her through her brutal treatment for cancer. Newly possessing the magic word remission, she sang with power and grace, embracing everything from Schubert and Gounod to the Beatles and the Indigo Girls. Her mom and her music therapist joined her, as well as pianist David George (the backbone of the Louisville vocal scene!), and they passed out dime store percussion instruments for the audience-participation finale of “Lean on Me.”

The singer slung her arm around the shoulders of her young music therapist, and it was clear that this woman’s work had been anything but soothing entertainment. With a clear, true voice and decent guitar skills, she’d helped to heal the opera singer.

Simple strums and basic chords. Virtuosity beyond description.

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Rehearsing with Emily today was a step back into a warm embrace of safety, ease, and space. It was an encounter with a sovereign partner ready for anything.

It was virtuosity.

Or maybe it’s more right to say we were enjoying the place where virtuosity can lead - a place where music-making feels like play. Or healing. Or revolution.

At our culture’s toxic intersection of More and Next - growth at all costs combined with blind worship of disruption, which devalues process and history - it’s the great middle ground of musicking that grabs my sorrowing heart and lights a way forward. Sovereignty in service, the authority of a Wagnerian goddess subsumed in the offbeat claps of an inspired audience, one woman’s years training of years married in gratitude to the sweet clear voice of another, every painstaking preparation made only to open the doors of possibility for a friend.

Go back to all the videos I posted earlier in this essay. Every one of these virtuosos is deeply connected to community, reaching forward with as much energy as they’ve ever reached back. They might seem to be at the top of Parnassus, depending on your vantage point. But they live right in the middle of music, and we hear them as neighbors even as their abilities dazzle us.

Expertise that isn’t given right back to serve the whole is wasted brilliance and vain effort.

I said what I said.

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The soprano who survived cancer sang

You decide what’s right, you decide what’s good.

and also

things will come out right now, we can make it so.

I will decide. And I will practice. Unsexy, knit one purl two.

Every day.

thanks for reading.