Recitals as Acts of Hospitality

I tell my piano students that in their task there are two miracles. The first is that our rather clumsy notation of dots and lines translates through practice and imagination into music, that conversant and dynamic adornment of time. The second is that this music, when heard by others, conjures images in their minds and affections in their hearts. Even without words, our ordered sounds tell stories. We labor at length to explain these phenomena, but we never quite succeed. Dots become music, music becomes meaning. Miraculous they remain. So go practice.

Practicing, at its best, is the art of a) pursuing the first miracle and b) clearing away any technical, emotional, or mental blockages that would stand in the way of the second miracle. Once you walk out on stage, you must surrender to your preparation — and pray an epiclesis upon your work.

On a few rare nights, I have felt my efforts transfigured in this way. A shared shalom descends on me and my listeners — a Spiritual enjoyment that somehow both relies upon my preparation and is utterly independent of it. It is mysterious and unpredictable. It has come when I am well-prepared and when I am ill-prepared, though the latter case is much more rare. My preparation, while it cannot guarantee the miracle, can apparently aid in its appearing. In my own mind, this is both the great cause of my performance anxiety and its great cure: my responsibility, while great and serious, is not ultimate. So I must practice as if it all depends on me, and I must pray as if it all depends on God. 

In my limited experience, the act of hospitality is the closest analog to this phenomenon. True hospitality — the soul-nourishing, mutually uplifting, holy kind — is at its heart a work of divine grace. To claim otherwise would place all hosts and hostesses under the law, measuring their worth by the symmetry of a centerpiece or the crimp of a pie crust. Rather, as Proverbs 15:17 teaches us, the secret ingredient is Spiritual, not domestic:

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.

Much to the relief of young, apartment-dwelling, poor, single Christians like myself, this means that even if the offerings are meager, it is love that multiplies the feast. No amount of menu planning or mood lighting can guarantee that souls will be nourished. In fact, our concern for perfection may actually prevent us from being open to the spontaneity of love.

As musicians, adopting this mindset tears down the barrier between performer and listener. In certain discussions of performance anxiety, I have heard the audience spoken of almost as a threat — a cluster of potential distractions that must be wholly filtered out if the performance is to succeed. Even the slightest cough or shuffle (or, heaven forbid, a cell phone ringing) could ruin months of labor. Thus, the performer must create a ‘bubble’ around herself — a fortress of focus, drawbridge lifted. 

While effective for many in overcoming anxiety, I find this attitude deeply inhospitable. To carry it to a radical conclusion, why have an audience at all? Having scrubbed the house from top to bottom, why expose oneself to the angst of a misplaced cushion, a leaf tracked in from the driveway, or a mug set down without a coaster? Mary E. Wilkins’ short story A New England Nun captures this same sentiment:

[Joe Dagget] came twice a week to see Louisa Ellis, and every time, sitting there in her delicately sweet room, he felt as if surrounded by a hedge of lace. He was afraid to stir lest he should put a clumsy foot or hand through the fairy web, and he had always the consciousness that Louisa was watching fearfully lest he should. 

If my listener-guest feels this way, I have failed her as a host. Why should the beauty of the music not be heightened by her presence? Why should I not be freshly, improvisationally inspired by the face I glimpse in the dark, playing not only for the glory of God but for the love of that soul? On a few precious, miraculous nights, I have seen that love, not preparation, is the source of the second miracle. We practice so that we can love.

In the recital hall and around the kitchen table, this leaves performer-hosts with a grand responsibility and a great hope. As curators of these space-time phenomena called recitals and dinner parties, we must give our very best, prayerful that God will establish the work of our hands. Rather than “playing wrong notes all the more that grace may abound,” we must seek the kind of others-serving excellence that the Spirit may suffuse. Our Lord provided the wedding guests at Cana with the best wine. This does not mean being perfect, but it does mean being prepared. Above all, it means being honest. The rest — more properly, the whole — is the Lord’s work.

As a closing note, when we witness Spiritual miracles as performer-hosts or as listener-guests, we do well to see them with an eschatological eye. In the striking words of Geerhardus Vos, the present work of the Spirit is actually a future work, fallen backwards into time:

The Spirit’s proper sphere is the future aeon; from thence he projects himself into the present, and becomes a prophecy of himself in his eschatological operations.

If this is true, then the shalom of a Spiritual gathering is far more than a momentary pleasure; for the Christian, it is also an eternal promise. In the breaking of silence and the breaking of bread, we see glimpses of our end — crumbs of the coming feast, fallen from the Lamb’s table into our days.