nanoseconds

A great song takes a lot of hard work. Beautiful, touching prose takes time – you refine it over and over again. An amazing performance means reworking the same notes until they tap into something beyond the ink on a page. Cooking a memorable meal is more than a few hours in your kitchen – it is years of experience and knowledge coming together with motion, heat and quality ingredients that meet the edge of a well sharpened knife before they are remade into something amazing.

I forget all of this sometimes. Sometimes I find myself thinking about how hard everything in life seems. I find myself frustrated with the time and effort required. On the verge of regression I will take a deep breath and remember what it is to play those same four measures for hours on end.

When I came to college, I had the good fortune of studying oboe with Marc Lifschey. He was amazing. In particular, I remember one lesson where he made me play whole notes (very slowly for more than an hour) while he lectured me on birth and death and the color red.

He insisted that as a musician it was my challenge and responsibility to craft a life for every note. That every note, no matter how brief for the listener, has a birth and death. That each note was a lifecycle and together they create a universe.

He had been painting a lot and was quite fond of red at the time. He would talk about his fascination – so many shades of red. His exploration, as he approached death, was with how he could express life and death with a single color. The brush stroke, the textures, the shading. . . .

There might be a lot of things I forget about life but I will never forget these lessons.