PLAYING THE VIOLIN: ANOTHER CURRENCY OF WEALTH

On mastery, inner expansion and the forms of wealth that have to become part of the person who possesses them

Wealth exists in more than one currency.

We are accustomed to recognising it when it takes a material form because material wealth is wonderfully visible. Property, financial capital, an investment portfolio, a successful company, exceptional cars, jewellery, art, travel and access to beautiful experiences all speak languages we understand immediately. We know approximately what they cost, what level of access they represent and, very often, how much work was required to acquire them.

There are other forms of wealth that are considerably harder to display on a balance sheet because the asset cannot be separated from its owner.

The ability to play the violin belongs to this category.

You can buy an exceptional violin, a beautiful bow and a room in which to practise. You can afford an excellent teacher, create time in your schedule and remove many of the practical obstacles that make serious learning difficult. Money can give you extraordinary access to the process, but eventually you have to pick up the instrument yourself, and from that point another currency takes over.

The capacity has to be built into you.

DIFFERENT CURRENCIES OF THE SAME LIFE

I spend enough time around entrepreneurs and people with ambitious professional lives to see how differently human beings can develop.

Someone can become exceptionally sophisticated in business while other dimensions of life remain comparatively unexplored. Another person can possess an extraordinary intellectual or creative world and remain financially incapable of constructing the life they want. Someone can have enormous professional success and discover that relationships are the area in which they continually encounter difficulty.

None of this makes one form of development superior to another. It means that they are not interchangeable.

Financial wealth is extremely useful at doing what financial wealth does. It creates security, freedom, choice, access, comfort and opportunity, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise. The problem begins only when we expect one currency to perform the function of another.

Financial enrichment cannot substitute indefinitely for inner enrichment any more than inner richness can be expected to pay the mortgage.

A genuinely rich life can contain many currencies.

WHEN EXPANSION CHANGES DIRECTION

There is genuine pleasure in acquisition. Anticipation itself can be exciting, and finally acquiring something you have wanted can be deeply satisfying. A beautiful home continues to be beautiful after the purchase, an extraordinary car can continue giving pleasure, and a work of art can remain meaningful for decades.

Yet people whose psychology is strongly oriented towards growth tend eventually to ask the same question again: what next?

Perhaps this is one reason accomplished people voluntarily choose difficult things long after they have solved the problems necessary for survival. They climb mountains, run marathons, build another company when they could comfortably stop, learn another language or deliberately enter disciplines in which they are beginners again.

They are still expanding, but expansion does not always have to mean acquiring a larger version of something they already possess.

Sometimes the next frontier is inside the person doing the acquiring.

This is where I find the violin particularly interesting.

PLAYING THE VIOLIN IS A LUXURY OF DEVELOPED CAPACITY

Some forms of wealth are scarce because relatively few people can afford them. Others remain scarce because acquiring them requires the owner to develop a capacity that cannot be transferred through a transaction.

You can buy Cartier without becoming a jeweller, drive a Ferrari without learning to engineer one and own a remarkable painting without knowing how to paint. You can even purchase an extraordinary violin if your financial circumstances allow it.

The ability to make that violin produce the sound you hear in your imagination is not included in the purchase.

Playing the violin well exists in your hearing, perception, nervous system, coordination, accumulated knowledge, attention, discipline and the increasingly sophisticated relationship between musical intention and physical action. No matter how much money surrounds the process, that particular asset has to be developed inside its owner.

This is why I think of the ability to play the violin as another currency of wealth.

It is a luxury of developed capacity.

THE VIOLIN IS REMARKABLY UNIMPRESSED BY STATUS

There is something wonderfully uncompromising about the violin.

A person may run a company, employ hundreds of people, manage considerable capital and be accustomed to solving complicated problems by finding the right specialist. Then a relatively small wooden instrument presents a completely different negotiation.

The violin can be extremely stubborn. Professional status does not improve intonation, financial success does not produce a beautiful sound, and authority acquired elsewhere does not persuade the body to perform a movement it has never learned.

This can be fascinating for someone who has already become highly competent in another field because the usual hierarchy temporarily disappears. Expertise can be purchased, and an excellent teacher can shorten the route enormously, but the learning itself cannot be delegated.

At some stage, the instrument asks what you can do.

And it is perfectly capable of refusing to cooperate until you find out.

PERHAPS THIS IS WHY PEOPLE RETURN TO IT

Many adults return to the violin after years or even decades away from it, and sometimes I think the instrument has remained somewhere in their lives as an unresolved problem.

They tried. Something never opened. Life continued in another direction, yet a question remained somewhere in the background: why couldn't I do it?

For a certain type of person, an unresolved problem can be extraordinarily persistent.

The violin is particularly good at creating one because desire alone does not unlock it. You can want the result enormously and still discover that the instrument requires a different quality of attention, patience or understanding from the one you initially brought to it.

In that sense, the violin is selective. Money may buy admission to the room, but it does not guarantee access to what happens inside it.

Perhaps that difficulty is part of the attraction.

There is always another door.

THE VIOLIN AS A PRISM FOR SELF-KNOWLEDGE

The violin itself is physically small, while the system required to play it is the entire human being.

The body, attention, hearing, expectations, emotional responses, patience, coordination and problem-solving habits all eventually enter the sound. This makes playing an unusually precise way of encountering aspects of yourself that can remain less visible elsewhere.

Impatience, excessive control or an inability to listen carefully do not remain abstract personality characteristics when they begin affecting a physical and musical result. At the same time, persistence, curiosity, sensitivity and the capacity to stay with a difficult problem long enough to understand it become equally tangible.

The violin reflects these things with very little interest in protecting the story we prefer to tell about ourselves.

You may approach it believing that you need to learn a particular piece and discover that the more interesting education is happening elsewhere. Your perception becomes more refined, your body awareness changes, your understanding of movement becomes more sophisticated and you begin distinguishing useful effort from effort that creates additional resistance.

Eventually the question is larger than how to play the notes.

You are learning how you function.

SOMETIMES THE PERSON HAS TO DEVELOP BEFORE THE SOUND CAN

This is one reason I find violin playing interesting far beyond repertoire.

A person begins with a musical intention: I want to make this sound.

Between that intention and the physical sound that appears in the room sits an entire human system.

If something in that system cannot yet translate the intention, the instrument exposes it. You have to investigate, experiment, notice relationships and discover why the result differs from what you imagined.

For someone accustomed to solving problems through force, speed or additional resources, this can become an especially interesting education because the violin does not always reward more effort. Sometimes the next level requires more perception.

That distinction can become valuable far beyond music.

ANOTHER KIND OF PROBLEM SOLVING

Violin playing is an extraordinary lifelong puzzle because its problems rarely exist in complete isolation.

What is actually producing this result? Is the place where I hear the problem also the place where the problem begins? Am I missing information, repeating an ineffective solution or failing to perceive a relationship between apparently separate elements? Do I need more effort, or does the entire problem need to be approached differently?

These are creative questions.

A person already highly developed in business, science, medicine, law or another profession may find that a serious creative discipline introduces another way of thinking: greater sensitivity to patterns, analogy, ambiguity and relationships between things that initially appear unrelated.

Then something interesting can happen. The new discipline begins feeding the old one.

The violin was supposed to be the thing you were learning.

Instead, it changes the person who returns to the rest of life.

THE ABILITY TO PERCEIVE MORE IS ITSELF WEALTH

Refinement is difficult to display because it does not necessarily produce another object.

Two people can hear the same performance while receiving very different amounts of information from it. Education changes what becomes available to perception.

A distinction that initially seems almost invisible can eventually become impossible not to hear. Attention becomes more precise, the ear becomes more discriminating and the world gradually contains nuances that previously passed unnoticed.

The same phenomenon exists in visual art, literature, architecture, movement, food and even our understanding of other people. Once perception becomes more sophisticated, the environment has effectively become richer because the observer can access more of it.

You have not acquired another possession.

You have increased the resolution through which you experience what you already possess.

That, to me, is wealth.

CREATIVE WEALTH CANNOT BE REPLACED BY CONSUMPTION

A beautiful destination can give genuine pleasure. So can a yacht trip, a new home, an exceptional restaurant, a car, jewellery or a work of art. I have no interest in pretending that material experiences become meaningless once a person develops an inner life.

Creation offers a different experience because instead of receiving something that somebody else has constructed, you participate in bringing something into existence.

A musical phrase exists internally and, through your attention and your body, becomes physical sound.

That movement from imagination into reality can be extraordinarily satisfying, partly because there is no final acquisition after which the subject is exhausted. There is another phrase to understand, another quality of sound, another technical problem, another interpretation and another level of sensitivity.

For a person whose nature requires expansion, the violin can provide enough territory for an entire lifetime.

WHY SPEND YEARS ON SOMETHING YOU DO NOT NEED?

This question interests me because it assumes that value must be justified by utility.

Why climb a mountain when there is nothing at the summit that cannot be obtained below? Why solve a difficult puzzle? Why read philosophy? Why develop extraordinary physical capacity after your body is already perfectly capable of performing ordinary daily tasks?

At a certain stage of life, one of the privileges of having solved enough practical problems is that every remaining challenge does not have to be practical.

Some challenges are valuable because of the person required to meet them.

A violin does not have to become your profession to justify the years invested in it. The process can deepen attention, creative thinking, perception, problem solving and self-knowledge while giving you access to an entire cultural and emotional language that previously existed mostly outside you.

For someone with an already demanding professional life, it can also create a rare environment in which another hierarchy applies. Your business title cannot improve the note, your investment portfolio cannot solve the phrase and your reputation cannot perform the movement.

You encounter the task as yourself.

That can be an extraordinary luxury.

WEALTH CAN EXIST IN MORE THAN ONE PORTFOLIO

Wealth can accumulate in many forms: financial and social capital, intellectual depth, physical capacity, aesthetic perception, creative ability, emotional range, knowledge and mastery. None of these currencies makes the others redundant, and a genuinely rich life can contain several of them at once.

You can own the house and continue developing the person who lives inside it. You can build an investment portfolio while expanding the mind that makes those investments possible, enjoy the Ferrari while pursuing a form of mastery that no amount of acceleration can deliver, and collect remarkable art while developing your own ability to perceive what makes it remarkable.

Learning to play the violin belongs to this other economy of wealth because money can provide the instrument, expertise, time and environment, while the capacity itself has to become part of you.

The violin is especially interesting because it can exist in both economies at once. The instrument itself may be an extraordinary material object, while the ability to play it remains an internal asset.

One can be purchased.

The other has to be developed.

A STORY ABOUT VLADIMIR SPIVAKOV

There is a story Vladimir Spivakov has told about travelling by plane while deeply absorbed in a musical score. As musicians often do, he was working internally with music nobody around him could hear, physically responding to the score as he studied it.

Another passenger, a psychotherapist, had apparently been observing him and eventually approached him with the suggestion that Spivakov might benefit from professional help.

Spivakov arranged for the man to attend his concert.

After hearing him perform, the psychotherapist came backstage and reversed the original proposition: perhaps he was the one who needed something from Spivakov.

I like this story because deep engagement with art can look unnecessary, eccentric or even incomprehensible from outside. Someone is responding intensely to a structure that, for everybody else in the room, does not yet exist.

Then the music becomes audible.

The person who appeared strange turns out to possess access to a dimension of experience that the observer suddenly recognises as valuable.

ANOTHER CURRENCY OF WEALTH

I do not think financial wealth should be replaced by creative wealth, just as creativity should not be expected to replace financial security. They answer different needs, develop different parts of life and can coexist perfectly well.

The more interesting question begins when somebody has become extremely sophisticated in one currency and discovers that accumulating more of exactly the same thing is no longer producing the expansion they expected.

Perhaps nothing has gone wrong.

Perhaps another part of the portfolio is asking to be developed.

Learning to play the violin well is one possibility. It is difficult enough to remain interesting, exacting enough to expose you to yourself and deep enough that a lifetime does not exhaust it. It can develop capacities that no purchase can install and give access to forms of experience that exist only after the person has learned how to perceive them.

You can pay for an extraordinary instrument.

You can pay for access to extraordinary knowledge.

You can create the time and environment in which learning becomes possible.

The remaining wealth has to be built into you.

And perhaps that is precisely why the ability to play the violin belongs comfortably beside the other rare things people spend a lifetime acquiring: it is simply denominated in another currency.