And here I thought my migraines and backaches would be history once I stopped working. Apparently I live a rich fantasy life.

I’m lying in my bedroom working on my laptop. Usually I have music on, but right now there’s a saxophonist wandering through some pieces nearby. This is the sax player who completely enthralled me by playing “My Favourite Things” for twenty minutes last summer, arresting my motion as I swung into the bedroom with the intent to quickly grab a book.

There’s something particularly special about overhearing someone playing an instrument. Making music is such an intimate practice that listening in is a bit voyeuristic, in a way. Music has a different life if you’re aware that you have an audience; it becomes performance rather than an act of love, and while performance can be done lovingly it inevitably acquires a different dimension. Some might argue that it’s a necessary dimension – the old tree falling in a forest paradox. While performance adds spice to music, much the way an audience adds an essential element to a piece of theatre, I think that an audience of one – namely, the musician – can serve a more immediate purpose. The act of making music entails pulling emotion out of one’s soul and interpreting it through an instrument. That act of interpretation fulfils a desire within the musician whether anyone else is there or not – possibly in a purer fashion if they are alone, since there is no need to groom that emotion to present it to someone else. It’s music for the love of it, proven so by the fact that no audience is required.

Writing can be like that too. I know plenty of people who write to satisfy something inside them who, once a body of work is accomplished, quietly tuck it away somewhere. They feel no need to share the product; it was the act of putting thought to paper that satisfied some urge. I know others, of course, who seek to communicate to/with others via written word, and who have published, or who at the very least pass the writing on to someone else. The point is, the act can be done for the sake of the act itself.

I envy my saxophonist neighbour. Not just his (her?) talent and his technique, but his/her comfort in practicing with open windows. I cringe at the thought of anyone hearing me practice, to such an extent that my husband created a miniature practice room for me in our huge front hall closet in our last apartment. It was just big enough for me to sit in and have full bow arm extension in both directions, soundproofed with styrofoam and carpeting and yet I still was convinced that people could hear me. This terror of being overheard originates partially from my innate shyness, and partially from my first two years as a cellist in an apartment over a crusty elderly woman who complained if my cats ran up and down the hall.You can imagine her reaction when I practiced scales, or when a friend came over with her violin to play duets. Loud banging on my floor shattered whatever shreds of self-confidence I was struggling to establish, at a time when I was trying to figure out who I was, how to express myself as an individual, how to deal with being an adult learner with all the inhibitions that implies, and how to survive with my parents newly removed from the province. Reactions formed so early on have persisted throughout my eight years of cello-playing, which is one of the reasons why I love listening to this saxophone. Someone somewhere not only is comfortable enough to play without caring who hears, or who might complain, even if the same music is played for twenty minutes. The knowledge that someone that close to me (geographically, if not personally) is inspiring.

So, too, is my astonishing ability to play as much Bach as I have discovered I am capable of playing. A year ago, I was crushed at how poorly I played pieces I performed with capable technique when I was still studying with a teacher. Ten months of struggling in orchestra has restored much of the technique I’d thought lost. Which, of course, is one of the reasons I joined. That… and the ability to practice with less self-consciousness, as does that saxophone player nearby who will likely never know how happy s/he makes me, or what a wonderful example s/he sets me.