... the piano in my life: a sentimental biography of an instrument ...

“The Piano in My Life: 

A Sentimental Biography of an Instrument”

    In the beginning was the cry, the wail, the lament, the ecstasy: the voice. Not sound, not the note, not rhythm: the voice. The Word. Music is born from that breathing, from that embodied breath, from that articulated tremor which is song, which is the human voice. There is no musical art that does not ultimately stem from the human voice: from its need to invoke, to weep, to praise, to speak. Before any system, before any notation. And only much later, around it, like extensions or prostheses of the body, instruments were born. First as timid companions. Then as secondary narrators. Later as autonomous simulacra. Finally, as selfish usurpers of vocal sovereignty.

This is why instruments truly belong to the realm of the adjective, not the substantive. They were always adjectives to the human voice. And this distinction, between substantive and adjective, while seemingly grammatical, semantic, or rhetorical, is actually ontological. The substantive asserts its independence: "I am." The adjective exists in the humility of service: it modulates, nuances, accompanies. The tension between substantive and adjective is, ultimately, the tension between the whole and its parts.

I therefore assert, without shame, fear, or complex, the following: that the only truly substantive thing in music is the human voice. Melody and song, but NOT understood as historical categories, but as ontological ones. For crude materialists, the larynx, not those aforementioned hands (the "surgical" hands they claim so "transform" the world). Everything else, the instrumental, was always born as accompaniment, as echo, as shadow of the sung word.

Over time, however, these adjectives hardened, forgot their ancillary function, and began to feign substantiality: instruments became autonomous, selfish, forgot their accompanying origin and began to speak as if they were subjects, as if they were sufficient unto themselves. But they are not. They are not sufficient. I insist: the adjective is humble; it accompanies, qualifies, modulates, provides shade or accent, but never pretends to totalize the world.

This is what the piano is for me now (at last!). Not an end, but a mere way of saying something. Not a throne, but a worktable. Not an altar, but a small porch.

And yet, for years, the piano was both trap and center, idol and prison, mirror and distortion. The piano, my lifelong companion and conflict, embodies this paradox like no other instrument. This, then, is the story of my life with the piano, but also a meditation on the very status of the instrument and its place in the human soul. It is, in short, a philosophical and sentimental portrait of a relationship.

Let us begin. I was born musically singing. Not playing. And this distinction is not minor: singing is vibrating with the body, turning the voice into a symbol of the soul, letting language become music without losing its human root. I began in 1986, at four years old, in Valencia, under the Kodály method. There I learned the most important thing: that music is not a set of techniques, but a world of differences and similarities, silences and pulses, games and echoes.

I learned that the universals of music (identity and otherness, movement and rest, impulse and fall, high and low, unity and multiplicity, variation, change, ornament, the supporting column) are not taught with rules, but with the body. Singing, dancing, living, trembling, vibrating. Emulating, not imitating. Before my fingers touched a single key, my soul already knew what a bar was because it had walked it. It intuited tonal space because my voice oscillated between tones like someone swaying gently and slowly in a summer hammock.

This period was crucial. It was the age of my musical paradise, where the idea of an instrument as an object of prestige, as an institution, did not yet exist. There was no "interpretation" yet. No virtuosity. No judgments. Only expression. Music as an extension of the body, a prolongation of play, a language prior to language.

The guitar arrived soon. I remember records by the Australian guitarist John Williams (1941), which in my childhood were like wordless stories. And I remember my mother, who told me the guitar "sang." That marked me: the idea that an instrument could be a voice, that it could sing to someone. The guitar, so intimately Spanish, was still a bridge between music and affection. It was not yet a professional symbol. It was an affective, domestic, tender object.

Then, at eight, came the piano, almost by chance. Like so many fundamental decisions in life, it was contingent. My mother was asked if I might like to play another instrument besides the guitar. "Piano," she replied. And so it was. There was no epiphany. It was not a calling. It was a convention, a happenstance. Like being born in Valencia, or my mother tongue. Once again, the instrument was an adjective: it had no weight of its own, it was a tool for making music, not a fetish.

But the piano, by its nature, is not innocent. It is an instrument with a deep history, a civilizational burden, an ideological shadow, a semantic baggage. It is the instrument of bourgeois salons, of soloist virtuosity. Moreover, it is also the instrument most distant from the voice. It doesn't vibrate with you. It doesn't breathe. It has no corporeal soul. The pianist doesn't blow, doesn't sing, doesn't pluck a living string. They strike. They translate. They mediate. The piano doesn't embody: it describes. In a certain sense, it is a purely intellectual, intellectualist instrument.

Luckily, for years, I didn't feel like a pianist. I felt like a musician. The piano was merely a means. But over time, as happens in so many artistic lives, the means became absolute. As one "improves technically" (horror!), wins prizes (double horror!), enters the rituals of the conservatory (triple horror!), the piano ceases to be an adjective and becomes a substantive. It becomes the center, the identity.

Thus, from ten to eighteen, I was simply a musician who played the piano, dedicated mainly to studying counterpoint, harmony, and fugue, and to singing everything that passed through my hands (not as a professional singer, but as a musical human being).

But gradually, the piano began to name me. I was first "pianist," then "interpreter," then "virtuoso," and finally "rhapsodist." Each stage was a distorting mirror. The more I believed I knew the instrument, the more I confused myself with it. Until I no longer knew if I spoke through the piano or if the piano spoke through me. There was even a moment when I believed virtuosity was a form of truth. Today I know, of course, that it is not. Virtuosity is a side effect. At best, and sometimes, a mere glimmer on the water's surface. But never the water itself.

The piano's rise paralleled the modern split between composer and performer. For centuries, they were the same person: the troubadour, the singer-songwriter, the spiritual luthier. But the 19th century canonized the separation, which became institutionalized after World War II. The composer becomes a figure of dead authority (or avant-garde delirium); the interpreter, a kind of lay priest. And the piano, with its polyphony (or rather, diaphony) and self-sufficiency, becomes the ideal temple of this new hermeneutic religion.

In this culture where hermeneia (interpretation) has triumphed over poiesis (creation), the pianist is no longer a creator. They are always an exegete, reproducer, glossator, commentator, doxographer. They are the official doxographer of the classical music guild. They are the bearer of "works." Their "manager," their "custodian." They are the one who "interprets" the "greats." They become an almost sacred figure, but ultimately hollow: a medium without their own voice.

All this seems profoundly problematic to me today. How can someone play music without being able to compose? How can one embody another's thought without having their own musical thought? It's like reciting poetry without ever having written a verse. It is, fundamentally, a kind of fraud. It's not that all performers must be professional composers. But the act of playing must spring from one's own musical interiority, not from deference to the authority of the past.

Today, after many years of relationship with the piano, I have finally returned to the beginning. In my imagination, I have redeemed the instrument by recognizing its place: the adjective. The piano has become, for me again, what it was at the start: an instrument for saying something else. Therefore, I no longer idolize it, nor owe it any special loyalty. I don't fetishize it. I simply use it. I use it to compose, to accompany, to read music. I play my own music, or that of other living composers with whom I share a vital breath. I'm not interested in the canon as a museum. I'm interested in music as an event. As an act. When I play a recital, I don't want to be a priest of Hans von Bülow's Kunstreligion (not Wagner's, by the way, whose philosophical and musical work, properly understood, is more necessary today than ever). I would like to be a troubadour. To play as one who accompanies a story. As one who sings in an ancient tongue, even if not fully comprehending it. The piano is my psaltery, my lyre. Not an end, but a means.

My life with the piano has thus been a very slow and progressive pedagogy of the limit: of how a mute instrument can come to sing, how a cold technique can be a bridge to authentic emotion, how the adjectival can illuminate the essential. And so, today I try to keep playing. Not to demonstrate, nor to exhibit, but to accompany: to accompany meaning, allegory, story, lament, love. Like one who walks beside someone. Like one who whispers a story. Like one who, in the end, returns to singing.

Because, despite all these tribulations, these doubts, despite the wound between body and sound that the piano opens like no other instrument, precisely because of its ontological distance from the voice, there is in its cold opacity an unparalleled possibility of transfiguration. Because the piano is, perhaps, the instrument most susceptible to having the container substantialized instead of the content, form instead of living matter. It is the medium that threatens to eat the message, as McLuhan would happily say. And in music, when the medium becomes more important than the message, when sound becomes more important than song, we have lost the essential. But it is also, for all that, perhaps the instrument most susceptible to being transformed into something else, into its own opposite.

The piano, with its neutral, undefined, impersonal timbre, its white chromatophony, its mechanical pulse, its perfect diction, can easily become an emblem of disembodied formalism. It is an instrument in which soulless music can be made very easily. In which one can be perfect without needing to say anything. In which one can shine without illuminating. That's why the difficult, the truly difficult thing, is to make that instrument sound like something it is not. Like a sigh. Like a child singing. Like an old man praying. Like the trembling voice of someone about to speak a truth. And that is, for me, the only path to the piano's redemption: when it passes itself off as what it is not. When it disguises itself as a choir, when it becomes a lament, a burst of laughter, a breath, a tear. When it sings.

That is my humble troubadour's intuition: that if melody and song – not as styles, but as ontologies of musical utterance – are the core, the nerve, the mystery of all music, then the piano is only worthy if it is forced to sing. To sing like one who weeps. To sing like one who remembers. And that's why I like pianists like Cortot, like Horowitz, like Rachmaninoff when he trembles, like Friedman or Jonas when they breathe. Because their piano is imperfect, uneven, full of cracks, with crooked teeth, like real smiles. Not the tempered, syllabic piano of the 20th century, that computed, quantized, dissected piano. It is the lunar piano, the lame piano, the human piano.

Perhaps that's why these musicians, who could have sung with a violin, with a voice, with an oboe, insisted on playing the piano. Because making the piano sing is like bending metal: it requires a kind of faith in the impossible. A poetic faith. An ontological faith. The faith that even marble can weep. The faith that even a machine can pray.

And I, who am a pianist not by choice but by circumstance – like one who says they are Spanish or German because that's how it fell – know today that over-identification with the instrument, or with technical or aesthetic schools, is the death of music. Music is not a technique or a school: it is a way of being in the world. And if the piano sometimes allows me to say something true from that being, then, and only then, does it deserve to remain my instrument.

The piano, then, if understood as something adjectival – adjectival to composition, to accompaniment, to dance, to being a sketchpad, a notebook of drafts, a wooden outline of a future melody – reconciles with its deepest origin. Because the piano does not come from Olympus, nor from bourgeois theaters, nor from virtuosity competitions: it comes from the harp, the psaltery, the dulcimer, the cimbalom, the lyre of the wandering bard. And there it becomes kin to the guitar I began to play, the guitar of Joni Mitchell, or Diego del Gastor, that of the troubadours, the singer-songwriters, those who recited Homer while strumming chords by the sea. It is there that the piano makes sense.

But to achieve this, centuries of grandiose, pompous, overloaded, bombastic writing must be stripped away (centuries of technical muscle, sonic exhibition) and it must be returned to its truth: to be an emulation, not an imitation, of the voice. The human voice in all its registers: speaking, singing, wandering, suffering, witnessing the world. Not an athletic instrument nor one of surgical precision, but a liquid, imperfect, vulnerable instrument, full of soul. Like the non-professional actors in Pasolini's films, like the untrained gazes of the actors in the films of Antonioni, Godard, or Truffaut.

That's why I love and have always loved out-of-tune upright pianos, and why I hate instrument fetishism: that idolatry of brands, mechanisms, power, brilliance. I ask nothing of the piano. And I almost never ask anything of tuners. Because I believe the focus must be taken off the instrument and returned to the interiority, the inner song, the musical voice. The music is not in the piano. It is in the one who sings with it.

The piano, moreover, is an instrument especially susceptible to becoming a refuge for those who, deep down, are not truly musicians. Because it allows execution without understanding, moving fingers without ever having composed a line, improvised a single phrase, or sung a melody from within.

You can hide behind its mechanism as you cannot behind a trumpet, a violin, or certainly the human voice. In that sense, the piano is the perfect hiding place for practical musicologists, for theorists without poetry, for technicians who have never written their own score but seem to understand them all. And yet, they understand nothing because they have never embodied the gesture from the creative void.

It is an instrument that allows dissociation between doing and feeling, expressing suffering without enduring it, controlling the body while feigning an emotion that was never born. That is modern technique: mastery without tremor, expression without risk, muscle without wound. They call it biomechanics, kinesiology, and other synonymous labels. That's why the piano can be profoundly fraudulent, even dangerous, and many who hide within it would be exposed if they took another instrument in their hands or sang a simple folk melody. Because in no other instrument can they so easily disguise the absence of inner solfège, creative ear, melopoeic song – the true sign that one has been touched by music.

Furthermore, the piano allows for that external shell of precision or that empty fluency so abundant today: the precision of the keyboard as a manual interface, ways of seeming to be inside the music without the music ever touching, let alone tearing, the soul. Without feeling the pain between the intervals, without palpating with inner hands the dramatic, almost material volume of a poetic or musical story.

The piano offers the illusion of participation without surrender, of expressivity without exposure. I often see this in students, or even professional pianists, whom I simply ask to sing a phrase: they have played a Chopin étude with digital perfection and impeccable rhythm, but upon opening their mouths to intone a note, their voice doesn't respond, cannot find either pitch or breath. This paradox pains and intrigues me: How is it possible to play without ever having sung? How to approach the piano without first having passed through the cry, the song, the prayer? And what is even more serious, how is it possible to play without composing, without having passed through the vertigo of the blank page and the pain of writing?

There is something profoundly wrong, or at least profoundly symptomatic, in that culture so common among pianists: trying twenty or thirty instruments before a concert or recording like someone tasting wines in a cellar or comparing car bodies at a dealership. That anxiety to find "the perfect piano," the one with just the right action, the ideal balance of resonances, the pedal that doesn't sink, the bass that doesn't growl, the treble that doesn't whistle, the escapement that doesn't fall short, has become a kind of superstitious rite, a technical liturgy that replaces the true encounter with music with a sickly devotion to the interface. They speak with the tuner like a chef with their knife, but never asking what dish they want to cook or why. They demand from the instrument a type of perfection that becomes idolatry, because it ceases to be a means for pouring out an interiority and becomes an excuse for not confronting it. I prefer to sit down, play whatever piano is there, and accept that it contradicts me. Because an instrument that does not contradict me is not an instrument: it is a prosthesis of my vanity.

This phenomenon has deeper roots. The piano has become precisely a kind of manual prosthesis, a mechanized interface that allows access to music without necessarily passing through its inner body. In this sense, the piano is to singing what the computer or typewriter is to handwriting. When we write by hand, with pencil, with pen, on paper that offers resistance, there is still an almost physical relationship with thought. Words flow like ancient neumes: curves, inflections, waves of the soul. Every accent, every pause, every height has weight and direction. Conversely, when we write with a machine, the process becomes more syllabic, more binary, more rhythmic: pressing a key, generating a mark. Thought is no longer drawn: it is typed. Something analogous happens with the piano. Singing, arising from the body, has curves, slurs, internal dissonances. The piano, however, allows an abstract description of those curves, a kind of relief-less map. It's the difference between tracing a line between two cities with your finger and walking between them under the sun, wind, and rain. The piano can describe that journey perfectly, but it doesn't suffer it, doesn't sweat it.

    Therefore, I insist: the only true way to redeem the piano is to de-idiomatize it, but not as some contemporary composers have understood it, with extended techniques, striking the case, or unusual noises. That is still playing within the fetishism of the instrument, only via the negative route. No, the true act of de-idiomatization is not what you do with the piano, but how you play it. That the playing itself be a critique of the instrument. That the way the keys are played says: "They have locked you in here, music, and I will use this prison to free you." To play the piano as one would write a poem with a broken typewriter. That every note sings not because it imitates the voice, but because it invokes it. That the piano sound like something that never meant to sound like this, but was brought to it by the need to sing. That the sound not be clean, nor perfect, nor clear, but necessary. That every sound be the vestige of a song wanting to return home, even if it lacks the body that emitted it. Thus, the piano ceases to be a machine and becomes a witness: a witness to the lost song, the yearned-for song. And then, yes, it becomes a true instrument.

Nowadays, the piano interpreter has largely become a technical and standardized figure, a sort of professional manager and reproducer of scores, whose value seems to reside primarily in three pillars perfectly aligned with market criteria: first, clarity of diction, a kind of musical HD (High Definition), a rhythmic and metric hyper-definition that eliminates any expressive or poetic ambiguity; second, textual criticism (ecdótica), or rather, stylistic philology, understood as a supposed adherence to "style" guaranteed by a positivist historical science that dictates what can and cannot be done, how this or that sounded according to treatises, sources, or period instruments; and lastly, a veneer of personality, but superficial, never bold or dangerous or philosophical, rather charmant, "charming," like an aesthetic accessory that doesn't bother, a touch of character that functions as a brand.

Faced with that figure, so applauded and awarded today, I would prefer to be something like a troubadour (from trovar, to find) who uses the piano as the means at hand to accompany a drama. A drama that, unfortunately, has lost the word, lost the body, and been reduced to pure instrumental music. That original schism – music separated from voice, from poetry, from gesture, from dance, from song – renders every piano recital slightly ridiculous, a tragic simulacrum. But perhaps for that very reason, it deserves to be saved, redeemed. How? Definitely not through perfection, clarity, or textual fidelity, but through an allegorical, symbolic, intensely poetic approach. To make every note a sign, not of itself, but of something missing. That every passage carry within it a tremor of meaning, that there be no abstraction but incarnation, no technique but necessity. That playing be a saying, even without words, and that what is said, though without text, be legible on the listener's face as a memory, a yearning, or a wound. Because only then can instrumental music become, in some sense, true song, true signification. And only then can the pianist become again, not a reproducer, but a witness, a singer without words who, through the keys, at least still tries to speak.

The piano recital, as I conceive it and would like to offer it, should not be an apotheosis of virtuosity nor an exercise in exact reproduction of the absolute instrumental tradition, but rather the melancholic act of an epigonal troubadour, an itinerant bard traversing the remnants of a fractured musical civilization. The piano, in this context, is not an altar, but a tombstone: the stone upon which a constant elegy is pronounced for the ancient union between music and word, between song and meaning. Not because all the music I play must be sad – for in every elegy there is also humor, light, irony, tenderness – but because what drives it is mourning, the threnos, the awareness of a painful fracture and an exile that has not yet found its return.

Understood thus, the recital is not a culmination, but a footnote, an appendix to an instrumental tradition that has already given all it could give, yet can still be redeemed if it becomes a rite of farewell, an act of collective detraumatization. Perhaps, after this elegiac gesture, it will be possible to return, not by regression but by transfiguration, to the original union of music and word, of logos and melody, of drama and song. That's why every passage, every musical instant must carry a gesture, an allegory, a lived scene: a caress, a march, a ritual dance, a bucolic game, an inner agony, a grotesque satire, an irreparable nostalgia. Let nothing sound like sound, let everything speak, even without words. Let the audience, at times, forget they are attending a recital of pure instrumental music, and feel they are before a total art, an invisible drama that breathes. Let what they yearn for after hearing the piano be not more piano, but more words, more word and music fecundating each other, more life, more song, more poetry, more lost unity. Let the recital, by bidding farewell to pure instrumental music, prepare the ground for something new, or rather something ancestral, to be reborn: the sacred and poetic union of music and word.

Therefore, if I must choose an aesthetic platform, I prefer the lame pianists, the soul-maimed, with teeth broken from biting doubt, with freckles and moles, with nails dirty like a musical peasant who has plowed centuries of melody with bare hands. I prefer metric inequalities if born of a trembling heart, the scrapes and "mistakes" of notes if they come from risking song for drama, the phrasings that collapse like bodies exhausted from trying to narrate the impossible. I am moved by pianists who tell stories, who sing without words but make us yearn for the word that almost appears, invoked in their playing; who, when playing, make the piano disappear, like a torn veil, like a prosthesis that no longer hides anything. Those pianists who barely exist anymore, and whom hearing leads you not to say "what a great pianist," but what a great musician, or better still, what a great poet, or almost, what a great artist. Those who play the piano like one born in a place without choosing it, like one inhabiting a body without mirrors. They do not love the piano, they do not fetishize it, they are not "loyal" to it, because they know its timbre, its structure, its mechanics (and indeed that of ALL instruments), are contrary to human song, to the nature of the voice, the one that grows from the chest and not from the key.

Moreover, the piano is tempered, syllabic, aseptic, cold as a surgical table: softer in the treble than in the bass, the opposite of the sonorous flesh of the human voice. Therefore, I distrust those who caress it like a fetish, who show expressionless faces while playing it, without a hair out of place, with flat affect, clinical gesture. To the uninitiated, they seem experts, virtuosos. But those who know how to listen with the soul feel there is no music there: there is taxonomy, diagnosis, a flat encephalogram. There is no poet, there is an entomologist. No resurrection but the flaying of a corpse. No life, there is a sub-secretariat. They are functionaries of sound. And I no longer wish to be a functionary of sound. I want to be a witness. Rhapsodist. Mourner. Troubadour.

Therefore, I prefer, without hesitation, pianists who existentially appropriate the repertoire, as if they themselves had written each work, as if playing were not an act of reproduction but of poetic re-creation. Not those who distort capriciously, not those who distort out of vanity: simply those who embody what they play. Playing, in them, is already a poetic, full, absolute act. They are not transmission media, not telegraphs or telephone operators passing a coded message. They are not mere vehicles, but become the event itself.

That's why I am moved by pianists who neither know nor identify themselves as "pianists," those who are something else: conductors, singers, improvisers, even poets who occasionally play the piano. When asked which pianists I like, I say without hesitation: Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Bernstein, Celibidache. And people are surprised: "But they weren't professional pianists, they played the piano as a means, not an end!" And I reply: Exactly why I like them. Because in their hands, the piano is not absolutized, it does not become center or fetish. It is adjectival, not substantive. It is lyrical support, not mechanical altar. It is the bard's lute, the troubadour's echo. When the focus is not on the piano, a lightness, a freedom is born in the interpretation that cannot arise when everything is corseted in the professional identity of the "piano interpreter." I love the pianism of Stéphane Grappelli, Bernstein's, Karajan's (yes, even more than his conducting), because there the instrument sings without being pressured by the dictatorship of perfection.

In contrast, I struggle to feel anything in front of pianists over-identified with the piano as a professional function: those who no longer compose or improvise, who live to fix an interpretation as if it were a technical maquette, where everything is perfect diction, perfect tempo, not a note out of place, not a risky breath. A piano without soul, without deviation, without its own voice. The pianist devoured by the piano. I prefer to seek the musician who has devoured the piano and plays it like one caresses a memory.

In this sense, I like many pianists like Vladimir Horowitz, Ignaz Friedman, Josef Hofmann, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alfred Cortot, Maryla Jonas… But I don't like them as those connoisseurs of musical antiquity like them, those collectors of 78 rpm records who seek high notes like someone seeking a specific vintage of Bordeaux, or art appraisers who no longer paint but are experts in determining if a violin is a Stradivarius or a Guarneri. No. Not for that. What attracts me to those pianists, so different from each other, is not their museum value, not even their style or their "sound" (horror!), but something more essential: they all composed. That is the key. They all composed, improvised, taught, lived music as a totality. The piano, for them, was not a prison of perfection, but a space of expression, a means, never an end. They weren't afraid to err if it meant reaching a phrase charged with truth. The vocal always predominated. There were inequalities, frictions, vernacular intonations, silences made fertile, not effects. There was allegory, symbol, meaning. They played like one narrating a dream or recalling a family story. That's why they move me. Not because they are old, but because they are human, poetic, imperfect. Because they were still musicians in the full sense, and not functionaries of interpretation.

In contrast, what do today's interpreters do, who have stopped composing, who no longer improvise, who have merged to the point of confusion with the functional identity of the "pianist"? They record discs. Many discs. The disc has become their new form of symbolic production, their ersatz composition. They speak of their "latest work," their "new release," as if they had really done something, as if they had created something from nothing, as if recording were a form of poiesis.

And while it's true that the disc, as a form of writing, has its legitimacy, its form of permanence and recorded voice, it cannot compare to the creation of a new work, to the radical and generative act of composition. Recording a disc is much easier, ontologically weaker, than composing a score, because it remains a hermeneutic act, of reading, of interpretation, not of invention.

But the interpreter who no longer creates clings to the disc as an ontological alibi, as a simulacrum of poiesis. Thus, the piano becomes even more fetishized, turning into the altar of a repetitive practice that needs to fix itself on supports to appear significant.

And what truly interests that type of pianist is the most superficial plane of the artwork, what we might call its autogoric dimension: the fingerings, the difficult entrances, the passages that usually fail live, the precise attack of such a chord, the technical resolution of such a devilish passage. But they rarely ask: What inhabits here? What gesture of soul appears in this phrase? What does this bar say? Does it weep, beseech, sing, remember, invoke, dream?

The technical interpreter masters the work, but does not inhabit it; they know it from the outside, but do not suffer or celebrate it from within. They play like an archaeologist digging, not like a troubadour resurrecting a story. And in that vacuum of meaning, what should be art becomes an exercise, and what could be song becomes a shiny surface without voice...