Study Your Art and Practise It with an Earnest Purpose

Some thoughts settle quietly somewhere in the background of our minds, only to return many years later with an altogether different meaning. The words themselves haven't changed, but we have, and so we hear them differently.

For me, one such thought has followed me since the earliest days of my apprenticeship:

“Study your art and practise it with an earnest purpose.”

An elder technician offered it as advice to a young apprentice, and for years I wrote those words on the first page of every diary I owned. At the time, I understood these words entirely in the context of the workshop. Study the instrument before reaching for the tools, learn from those whose experience exceeds your own, understand why something was made as it was before deciding that you know how to improve it, and never allow familiarity with the work to become an excuse for carelessness or complacency.

Those principles have stayed with me, and much of what we do at Sykes & Sons still follows from them. Restoration begins with understanding. The original maker deserves our respect. Not everything that is old needs replacing, and not every intervention represents an improvement. Whatever decisions we make at the bench will eventually become somebody else's piano to live with.

For years, that was what I understood by an earnest purpose.

Recently, I heard those words differently.

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Bach, Jobs, and the Work Between

During a recent sermon at church, our speaker told a story from the final months of Steve Jobs’ life. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma had visited Jobs at his home and played music by Bach for him. Jobs was so moved by the performance that he later described Ma’s playing as one of the strongest arguments he had encountered for the existence of God, and remarked that he found it difficult to believe that human beings could produce something so beautiful alone.

As I listened, I found myself thinking about the extraordinary distance between Steve Jobs and Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach could never have known that, three centuries later, his music would reach a dying technology pioneer in California and cause him to contemplate the existence of God.

Bach could not have imagined an iPod or an iPhone capable of carrying thousands of pieces of music in a pocket, or a pair of AirPods through which his own compositions might one day be heard. The recording equipment that now allows us to capture a performance of his work at its source would have been equally unimaginable to him.

Bach knew none of this. He knew only the work before him, within the world and circumstances of his own time. Yet his manuscripts tell us something about the spirit in which he approached it.

At the beginning of many he wrote J.J., an abbreviation of Jesu Juva: Jesus, help.

At the end of others appeared S.D.G.:

Soli Deo Gloria. To God alone be the glory.

Between that prayer for help and the giving of glory came the work itself. Bach did not ask for God’s help and then wait for the music to write itself. He brought to it everything his craft demanded: knowledge, discipline, practice and judgement, together with the mistakes, corrections and patient labour required to make the music worthy of the ability he had been given.

His faith did not replace the work. It gave him a reason to undertake it earnestly.

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What Passes Through Our Hands

I have thought about that a great deal since.

I still care as deeply as ever about craftsmanship for its own sake, but I have begun to wonder whether the purpose of becoming good at something can ever be the satisfaction of being good at it.

Paul writes in Colossians:

“And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.”

What struck me was the breadth of whatsoever ye do.

Most of life is ordinary. Most of my own working life is spent not in moments of great revelation, but at a bench, dealing with the accumulated practical problems of old pianos. There are centres to ease, felts to replace, actions to regulate, measurements to take, and decisions to make which nobody outside the workshop is ever likely to notice. Yet perhaps there is something important in doing ordinary work well, particularly when nobody else is watching.

A piano arriving in our workshop is only temporarily in our care. It may have existed for a century before reaching us and, if we make good decisions, may continue long after we are gone. Sometimes it has already passed through several generations of one family, and in other cases, we know almost nothing about where it has been. For a short period, however, the responsibility for it rests with us, in our workshop, at our bench.

That is why I have always been uncomfortable with restoration which seems principally concerned with leaving evidence of the restorer behind. Our task is not to impose ourselves upon an instrument, but to understand it well enough to know what it needs. The best work can be remarkably inconspicuous. A pianist does not need to know who corrected the friction in an action, rebushed the keys or spent hours balancing and regulating the mechanism beneath their fingers. Ideally, they cease thinking about the mechanism altogether and simply play the music.

For years, I would have simply called it good craftsmanship, and I still would, though I have come to increasingly think of it as stewardship. We spend years acquiring knowledge and skill, but none of us creates those things entirely for ourselves. We learn from people who came before us, work upon instruments made by people we will never meet, and prepare them for people whose lives we cannot know. We occupy only a small part of the piano's story.

A piano may leave us and become the instrument upon which a child learns their first notes. It may accompany a congregation, sit in a teaching studio, become part of a family home or simply give somebody somewhere to turn when words are inadequate, or when they need to escape the world for a while. Years later, it may pass into another pair of hands and begin another chapter altogether.

We are unlikely ever to know most of that. Our part is simply the work before us.

That has brought me back, after all these years, to the advice I received as an apprentice:

“Study your art and practise it with an earnest purpose.”

If the ability to practise a craft is itself something for which I should be grateful, and if the work passing through my hands is entrusted to me only for a time, then doing that work faithfully matters whether anybody notices it or not.

Perhaps that is the earnest purpose I could not have understood when I first wrote those words inside my diary.

Bach began with a prayer, did the work before him, and returned the glory to God. He could never have known where the consequences of that work would eventually travel.

Neither can we.

We can only study our art, practise it earnestly, and be faithful with what has been placed in our hands.

S.D.G.

Soli Deo Gloria.