Performing Classical Music Argumentative Essay

I am something of a creature of two worlds, or at least of two great interests. I used to wonder which would be the greater mastery and how I could better serve the world: as a scientist or a musician? I have slowly come to realize that the best answer to that question is simply that the question is irrelevant.

Sitting alone at my piano playing the works of the long-gone masters, I cannot help but wonder if I am worthy of such music. Would Chopin approve of my small hands spanning his massive chords? Would Mozart, with all his innate, eccentric genius? What about Bach, with all the chaos of his mathematically perfect polyphony? Performing classical music is like speaking another’s words, but lending to them an accent of my own.

In all but

Yet the piano itself is a marvel purely mechanical in nature. Its rich strings and ivory keys are every bit as important as the performers who use them and the people who originally transcribed the music into reality.

I can see no reason in the world ever to choose between passion and practicality, when the two are so inextricably intertwined that neither exists meaningfully alone. We must see the world’s imperfections with compassion, contemplate how we might improve upon them, and then wrest that idea into a solution within the constraints of reality.

This is the definition of greatness as I perceive it: to have at once the insight both of a scientist who sees the world as it is and of an artist who sees the world as it might and maybe should be. The true wonders of human invention do not obscure the dreams of their creators. It is no contradiction to say that I love science because of art. It is the method by which we snare our audacious dreams and pull them into the physical world. I saw it when I watched my first model plane spiral impossibly up into the air on wings of balsa wood and tissue. It was evident this past summer watching my twin robots successfully and seemingly intelligently simulate the children’s game of tag. I hear it every time I translate a line of notes from a page into