Playing Music

Although a large number of languages use the verb “to play” for musical activity, as well as for theatre, the relationship between the playful and the artistic is not immediately obvious. They do share the notions of pleasure and apparent gratuitousness (despite their pedagogical virtues), but it often seems wrong to confuse them for this reason alone. The popular opinion, the doxa, as it is called, claims a superior value for art, which play lacks. The metaphor that sometimes equates sportsmen with artists does not work the other way round, except ironically. It is not only the absence of a prize such as victory or record that prevents music from being compared to cycling or the game of belote; it is, at least in European civilisation and its offshoots, a different kind of ambition and prestige.