I recently spoke with a young composer about what I think music does. What do good musicians try to do? It is not as easy as you may think to explain what great music does. It is harder to explain to someone in our historical moment because so few great artists still walk among us.

It is hard to explain because it is an abstract thing, and if two people sitting in a noisy restaurant can't share concrete examples, the discussion can slip like sand through fingers.

And part of the reason it is hard to explain is because it doesn't happen predictably. It doesn't happen on cue. Not every performance is good; some are not even adequate. Sometimes we are not ready. Sometimes we are ready but we stifle a good thing by expecting the wrong thing; sometimes we can walk right by a wonderful thing because we are looking for something else. An awful lot of people really just "use" music.

Part of the reason it is hard to explain is so few people even know how to listen to music. If you don't know a canon from a rondo, you really don't know what you are hearing. The string of notes that makes for a great fugue doesn't tend to make for a great berceuse. If you don't know what the music is trying to do, you are just left to your own devices. And given today's entertainment environment, people tend to do what I call tune-scavenging.

While looking for something tangible to help make the abstract more comprehensible, I found this.

This is David Stern, son of Isaac Stern, talking about Ivry Gitlis. It may help you to watch it. Here a real, live musician and the son of an artist talks about the work of another artist. Stern is talking about a man who worships music. And before some among us run off to choke on their tongues, remember he is using the English word worship "in the original": weorthscipe.

We used to gather at weddings before God and men to hear someone say, "With my body I thee worship". We don't worship a wife as God, and we don't worship music as God. We worship a wife as a wife, music as music, and God as God. And notice how profaning things and people has led us down a path to profaning God himself.

Can we worship God with profaned things do you think?

These comments may at least get you to look for something you haven't been looking for, and so much of art is a matter of simple looking.

It is ironic that I had that discussion the Monday evening after Monday morning's post; among men for whom labels mean nothing, it is hard to feature a place in the imagination where "every note means something".

Watch it.