Study Your Art and Practise It with an Earnest Purpose

Some thoughts settle quietly somewhere in the background of our minds, only to resurface years later with an altogether different meaning. The words themselves have not 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, and although it was spoken simply as advice to a young apprentice, it never really left me.

For years, I wrote those words on the first page of every diary I owned, never intending them as a motto or a quotation to be shared, but as a simple, quiet reminder of the sort of craftsman I hoped to become.

At the time, I understood them only in the context of the workshop.

Study the instrument before reaching for the tools. Learn from those whose experience exceeds your own. Never stop refining your judgement. Above all, remember that every piano leaving the workshop will one day belong to somebody else, and that they will live with the consequences of every decision you make.

It was practical advice, born from generations of accumulated experience.

Only recently have I begun to wonder whether it was also something more.

Last weekend, during a sermon at church, our speaker reflected on the idea of earnest work. Not simply hard work, nor work that attracts recognition, but work undertaken faithfully because it contributes something worthwhile to the world.

As part of that reflection, she recounted a story from the final months of Steve Jobs' life.

His friend, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma, visited him at home and performed music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Deeply moved, Jobs later remarked that Ma's playing was the finest argument for the existence of God he had ever encountered, confessing that he found it difficult to believe a human being could produce something so beautiful without God.

That thought stayed with me throughout the week. Not because it settles a philosophical argument, but because it raises a rather different question.

What sort of man writes music capable of moving people in that way three centuries after his death?

The question becomes all the more intriguing because Bach never appears to have set out to achieve such a legacy. His surviving manuscripts tell a different story. Many begin with the simple initials J.J., Jesu Juva ("Jesus, help"). Others conclude with S.D.G., Soli Deo Gloria ("To God alone be the glory").

Those brief inscriptions reveal a great deal.

They suggest that Bach did not regard composition as an opportunity for self-expression above all else, nor as the pursuit of artistic immortality. Music was work, certainly, but it was work first offered to God. He sought help before it began and, when it was finished, gave the glory elsewhere.

Take the Prelude in C Major, one of the most recognisable pieces ever written for keyboard. It has been arranged, adapted and performed countless times, yet it continues to sound remarkably unassuming. There is no theatrical flourish, no attempt to astonish the listener with virtuosity. The harmony unfolds with such natural inevitability that the craftsmanship almost disappears behind the beauty itself.

The more I have reflected on Bach's work, the more it has come to resemble the finest craftsmanship generally. A well-restored piano should not constantly remind the pianist of the technician who regulated its action. A beautifully made instrument should invite the musician into the music, not into admiration of the workshop. The countless hours spent refining friction, balancing touch weight, voicing hammers and aligning mechanisms exist so that music may speak more freely.

As I have found myself returning to those words from my apprenticeship, I have begun to suspect that this was the lesson my mentor was trying to teach all along.

The purpose of craftsmanship is not merely to become more skilful. It is to cultivate skill that serves something beyond ourselves. Whether composing a fugue or restoring a piano, the work finds its highest expression when it quietly enables something greater than the craftsman.

Few of us ever see how far the consequences of faithful work may travel. Johann Sebastian Bach could scarcely have imagined that music written in eighteenth-century Germany would one day move a dying technology pioneer to speak of God, or continue to shape the lives of listeners across centuries and continents.

We are simply entrusted with the work before us, the responsibility to do it well, and the hope that, in ways we may never witness, it leaves the world a little richer than we found it.

Study your art, practise it with an earnest purpose, and leave the rest, perhaps, no longer ours to measure.