I had the pleasure last night of listening to a young musician who is at the point in his development where you can tell he has all the tools he needs to go as far as luck and the crazy music business will take him.
Most of my musician friends are older, much older, and past the point where we can ever hope to catch lightning in a bottle. Yet all of us keep trying, one way or another. I can’t speak for them, of course, but I know what my experience feels like.
Writers I know tell me that they write because they must write. No matter how hard it gets, they keep at it because they are driven to do it. Visual artists are the same. Writers and painters make their art for an audience they probably won’t ever see, but they keep making their art. For writers and painters, the normal physical limitations imposed by aging aren’t usually a factor in the quality of what they produce.
For most musicians, aging is a problem. There are those gifted few who maintain their dexterity into their older years, but for most of us, age slows our hands, dulls our hearing, weakens our embouchure. I am painfully aware that I can practice hours and hours daily without discernible gains in technical skill on my guitar, violin, or saxophone. Some of this is simply hitting the outside limit of the gifts I was given by God, but more of it is physical, pain, muscle weakness, slower reflexes. A performing musician’s medium is not his or her instrument, it is his or her body interacting with the instrument. This interaction changes, and for most of us, becomes technically weaker over time. Our voices can’t hit the notes we used to, we can’t pick as fast as we once did, we can’t do a two hour show without exhausting ourselves.
There is an upside, and it is common to all musicians. Age, when it comes without the severity imposed by serious illness, does not rob us of our ability to be creative, to make something that was not in the world before we made it. We may play slower, our hands may shake, we may miss a note now and then, but our music, our songs, our performances, are enhanced by the years we bring with us, by the experience of living through the disappointments and triumphs of our lives.
My advice to the young musicians I teach is to not give up. Even when life’s necessities demand that you work a “real” job, even when people say you must grow up, even when audiences don’t listen, even when you tell yourself you don’t have the talent. Do not give up. If you are driven to be a performing musician, as a writer is to write and a painter to paint, then do it. Do it on weekends, do for friends and family, but do it. When you are an old musician, you’ll look back and thank your younger self for having the courage to try.
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