I’m enjoying the lull between major sports events – the Euros Football Tournament and the Wimbledon Tennis Championships just passed, and the Olympics which start in Paris at the end of the coming week.
I got quite engrossed in both the tennis and the football, although I know very little about the technicalities of either sport. And I don’t even follow them during the rest of the year. But whenever there’s a big sport event on TV, I become fascinated by players whose level of skill combines expertise with gracefulness, fiery determination, ‘in the moment’ reflexes and remaining grounded. Roger Federer is still my favourite example, but there are plenty of other excellent sportspeople who can show us how to combine balance with speed and precision. We need those things in music too.
I did learn to play tennis, though only to the level where I felt depressed when it was my turn to serve because I knew I was likely to lose my service game. Football is a mystery to me, but over the past weeks I tried to follow the discussions about team formation and tactics. The importance of strikers is obvious, but I enjoyed hearing about the roles of midfield players and wingers.
I even started wondering if my ten fingers could be thought of as ‘a team’ with different fingers performing certain roles. The thumbs are clearly strikers, but what about the other fingers? There are some analogies to football teams in the way that energy has to pass along the fingers of the hands as they play. A weak finger can interrupt this flow. An over-developed finger can ruin a smooth line by playing too strongly. Ideally, any finger can be used to highlight an important note.
In some mysterious way, I feel I play better after watching elite athletes. It’s something to do with being able to get quickly into that ‘flow state’.
While I share your admiration for athletes and sportspeople, I proffer the view that musicians are higher in the ‘pecking order’.
Without underestimating their time and commitment to performing at the top level, an athlete’s ultimate goal is to win, without any need to consider aspects such as their appearance. For many sports, particularly athletics, their efforts last only a few minutes, or even seconds. Tennis is a notable exception, where a match can last over four hours with great intensity and physical effort, with only brief intervals. (They also try to play crowd-pleasing shots – Dan Maskell ‘Oh, I say!’).
In contrast, a concert programme of, say two hours, requires not just ‘playing the right notes in the right order’ but performing (often with others) varying musical styles with constant intensity in a way that rewards the audience. As you explain at the end of Olga Samaroff’s section in your book, it’s about more than being a slick pianist.
Sports people are routinely worshipped but musicians deserve the greater respect.
Thank you Eric – very nicely put! Musicians and athletes both train to a high level, but as you say, musicians have arguably more elements to master – ranging from understanding of the historical style of the music to matters of interpretation, communication skills and memorisation. You’re right that a concert programme of two hours requires an enormous amount of preparation, especially if it’s a solo programme.
Another aspect of this comparison is that musicians spend a much bigger proportion of their lives in practice and rehearsal. Athletes usually finish their careers in their twenties or thirties, but many musicians go on practising and trying to develop artistically for *decades* longer than that.