In Praise of Amateurs

I love listening to amateurs make music.

This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy hearing professionals making music. I do.

But as a professional musician myself, I can’t escape the fact that I’ve seen behind the curtain. I’ve glimpsed the levers and pulleys, the grinding machinery, and I can’t unsee it. Playing music professionally can be joyful, but that joy is freighted, because it carries with it the weight of work. So most of the time, when I go to a professional concert, I see, well...people working.

But take me to, say, an amateur choral concert and I’m all ears. Because there’s something incredibly moving about people who are coming together to make music not because it’s their job, but simply because they can.

According to Ye Olde Google, the word “amateur” comes from the Latin “amare,” to love. When I listen to amateurs making music, that’s what I hear: Love made audible. And I can hear that love even if notes are wrong, chords are sour, or things come apart.

This is not to say that I think amateurs are off the hook in terms of working toward quality. They’re definitely not! (With the notable exception of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.)

Love, after all, comes with responsibility. If you love something, you have a duty to care for it to the very best of your ability– and, in fact, to enlarge your abilities when possible.

Nor am I laboring under the misconception that amateur music-making is free from the ego drama, competitiveness, and hierarchies that can plague the professional world. Human beings making music are still, after all, human beings.

But among the things I love most about human beings is the way in which we’re willing give ourselves not only to what is necessary for survival, but to what is beautifully superfluous. And so I try, in my own playing, to remind myself to begin from a place of love.

I hope, when I grow up, that I can be an amateur. I’ve got my crumhorn ready.