Alan Segal Quartet

Musician: a performer of music (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary).

 

Now that we know what a musician does the question is what is music? For that answer I went to the Harvard Dictionary of Music and found three pages of definition. It takes three pages to define what happens on stage and to define what every player does with their heart and soul. The original definition of music in the Harvard Dictionary of Music is the most telling and it is: “Originally this term included all the cultural endeavors represented by the nine muses but later became associated with Polyhymnia, the Muse of many songs”.

 

Moses and Pythagoras, considered the inventors of music had their definitions, which were expanded by Plato, St. Isidore of Seville and Theodoricus de Campo. I don’t know about you, but only some of these names are familiar to me. A true statement is that mankind has attempted to define music since the beginning of record keeping and writing.

And we keep on attempting to define what the musician does. What do we know? The music performed is either pleasing to us or not. It captures a feeling, an emotion and moves us to meet the musician half way. We listen to the melody lines, the rhythms, back beat, and the vocalist.

 

The music is performed and we smile, laugh, cry, tap our foot, snap our fingers, wave our hands or simply nod our heads all in time with the beat and feeling. We feel joyous or prayerful. We feel.

 

The musician performs and the audience feels. The musician feels and pushes that feeling out through an instrument, be it a reed, drum or vocal and the audience receives and pushes the feeling back. There is a harmony between the two. That’s the best I can write when discussing the question of what is a musician.

 

I know that I’m a musician and that many of my friends are too. I know what it feels like to be in the audience. We are all musicians, we all feel and embrace the feeling produced through the beat, tones, melody and energy of the musician.

—Alan Segal, Founder, The Jazz Sanctuary