Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

The same is true of a poem, song lyrics, an editorial, a painting, a sculpture, a novel, spoken words of a conversation. I would contend that each in this representative list could be deemed a symbol or collection of symbols on a certain level. Each represents its creator’s attempt to communicate meaning to some audience. At times, the audience is the self—and even then the meaning or feeling evoked can shift over time.

I work daily in the realm of the symbols of music in teaching young musicians to decode them. Some days the enigma they feel in their early attempts is palpable. The sounds as well as the feels are rustic—but rustic is its own kind of beautiful. The shift from the basic learning of the meaning of the symbols to how they should make a musician feel and then to how the musician may then connect those sounds to the emotions and feelings of life and communicate in the process of decoding is often mysterious but also very beautiful.