The Music We Make

If you walk on the footpath outside our house when the windows are open, there’s a good chance you’ll hear music. Our whole family loves listening to music, and we appreciate a wide variety of styles. We love well played instruments and well thought out lyrics, and we love them even better when they’re put together. Music is powerful, far beyond any rational understanding of sounds. It bypasses all of that and aims straight for the heart. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. I’m just thankful God made the world this way.

I’m also thankful that we live in an age where we can hear musicians we’ve never met, on demand, anytime, anywhere. We can choose from the best of the best, near and far, living and dead. Who in history could have dreamed of such a thing? But we don’t have to dream—we just play whatever music we want and never think twice about it.

So if you walk on the footpath outside our house when the windows are open, there’s a good chance you’ll hear music. Sometimes, it will be a selection of the best of the best from studios and concerts in far away corners of the world. Other times, it will be something less perfect, from much closer—we have a lot of instruments in the house that we play with varying degrees of skill. The best musician among us is my wife Jessica, who plays the piano beautifully.

It’s mesmerising when she plays. The house fills up and (if the windows are open) overflows with the feeling she pours through her fingers into the keys—how does music express so much, without a word? We can play all the recorded music in the world with the push of a button, but when she plays I don’t care about any of it. I’d stop it all to hear her play in our house, on our piano. No, it’s not a studio recording, taken and re-taken and mixed and re-mixed to perfection. It’s not always 100% perfect—and somehow that makes it even better. Maybe this is why so many of us pay significant money and go out of our way to attend live concerts and hear less-perfect versions of songs we already have perfect recordings of. When it comes to music, the closer we can get to the source, the more powerful it becomes.

And the closest you can get to the source of music is to be the source. There are times when I join in with my wife and strum away on my guitar and sing some lyrics and she sings harmony and we’re not nearly as good as the recordings but in those moments the mysterious power of music is amplified through our participation. That’s why people love to sing along with the professionals at concerts, and we sing alone in the car and in the shower, and we sing together at sports matches. We sing together in church as well—when we could just recite true things together—but we sing instead because there’s a real difference between saying “joy” and singing for it.

I’ll always be thankful that we are able to hear and appreciate the far away talent of the world’s best musicians. That’s amazing. But no matter how technically skilled or beautiful that music is, it can never have the same power as the music we make ourselves.