You Can’t Have Sheep and Money

It’s strange how most of us will only live one version of life.
We choose a path, often early, and walk it for decades.

There’s no real way to know what it would be like to live a dozen lives:
To be a surgeon, a pianist, a carpenter, a farmer, a philosopher.
I guess it would be possible to start over at 40 and see what else we’re capable of but we can do that only a few times given the length of an average lifetime.

Some fields don’t allow much switching.
You don’t get to decide in your thirties to become a concert violinist or an Olympic sprinter.
By then, it’s too late.

Careers like music or sport demand that we start investing while we’re still kids.
Not just in skills, but in body, in time, in mindset.
They ask for everything and they don’t promise anything in return.

No fast track. No five year plan.
Just discipline, repetition, and the long wait for progress.

And yet...
People still dream about music and sports more than they do about accounting or real estate.

Why?

I think it’s because those fields do something to the brain.
There’s something in the feel of them, something irrational, obsessive, deeply human.

And ironically, we don’t love great musicians because they’re perfect.
We love them because they’re not.

We love the scratch of the bow on the string,
The hearable breath before the phrase,
The almost perfect intonation,
The risk of a fragile expression.

We say we want perfection.
But what we really want is to feel something real.
We want to hear the humanity behind the performance.
That’s where all the value is.

Speaking of probable imperfections...

This week I finished an arrangement of Handel’s Aria Venti, turbini, prestate le vostre ali from the opera Rinaldo in two versions:

• One for soprano and 4 cellos

• One for soprano, solo cello, and 4 cellos

Both are available here:
→ Download the sheet music

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Take care,

Mislav Brajković
KingsString