Please read Mr. Cosmo’s essay on Bach’s Musette in D-major and his Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach first.

As musicians we are always wondering about how we sound.  Whether the notes we play or sing are pretty enough, loud enough, soft enough, or even the right ones. After performances we ask ourselves if we were good, if people liked us, if we could have done any better. If we feel we did not give our best performance, we then want to know how bad was the bad one.

When Johann Sebastian Bach presented his second wife, Anna Magdalena, with a notebook of compositions, it contained many different types of music, everything from minuets to rondeaus, polonaises, chorales, sonatas, preludes, musettes and gavottes.

It seems fair to imagine that such a wonderful gift must have been received with an incredible amount of gratitude and joy.

Here is The Lightbulb Moment.  Even though I suppose it is natural to wonder how our music sounds to people, something I think that is much more important is how the music makes people feel.  Musicians must remember that the endless hours of study and practice in a studio is not done just to play things perfectly, but to fill the listener with great emotion, understanding, satisfaction, joy, and sometimes, even sadness or melancholy.  

I have heard it said that there is nothing worse than a polished performance that doesn’t shine.  That means that if your playing has become so perfect that there is no emotion in it, it has lost its purpose.  Music heard at a concert should inspire the listener to wake up the next morning and feel that the world is a better place. That whatever burdens they brought into a concert became a little lighter once the music began. That the music gave way to a solution to a problem that was troubling the listener just because his mind became focused long enough for a door to be opened in the mind and heart that created a path past the difficulty. This is the true gift of music. To lift us above everything in our lives so that we can see a passageway to better things, happier times, more joyous moments, and the strength inside us that is always there to move us to next steps, even when we’re frozen with worry or fear.

As a performer, your music is not just music—it is medicine.  Don’t just perform to make people like you.  Perform to heal them.