Don’t Just Play Notes. Make Music.

My sister is an orchestra director at a local high school. I stopped in to visit her at work this week and ended up staying to watch her teach, which I almost never get to do. While I see her at concerts, I do not usually get to see her in the daily, unglamorous, teenager-saturated reality of running an orchestra program.

I sat on a couch in her office while kids filtered in between classes. Several stopped to deliver news of varying urgency. One informed her, at noon, that he had forgotten his instrument but his mother was driving it over and it would arrive approximately twenty minutes into class. Another, upon being reminded that today was the last day to pay for an upcoming field trip, looked at her with genuine bewilderment and said: there’s a field trip? A third arrived slightly panicked because a piano had been placed in the middle of the room where his chair normally goes, and he needed guidance on how to proceed. She looked at him steadily and said: I feel like you can solve this problem. He left and returned a few minutes later to report that actually three of them were affected by the piano situation and to ask whether they should perhaps move it. She told him not to move the piano, and suggested he give it a little more thought.

I was the only one laughing. She is completely used to this.

When class started, she walked to the podium and the students tuned and settled and found their places. Then they began to play. She moved through the usual corrections: softer here, watch the tempo, listen to each other. And then she looked over at the cellos, who were concentrating very hard on a fairly new piece, and she said something that stopped me in my tracks:

Don’t just play notes. Make music.

She said it more than once, and I watched what happened in the room when she did. The concentration on their faces shifted. Their posture changed and something opened up in the sound that had not been there before.

I have been thinking about those four words ever since.

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If you have ever played an instrument, you know exactly what she meant. Playing notes is technical. There is absolutely a correct way to do it. What is written on the page is clear: this pitch, this rhythm, this tempo, no mistakes. And if everyone in the orchestra executes that correctly, it sounds fine. It sounds like people doing exactly what they were told.

Making music is different.

Making music is when you understand the phrase, not just the notes. When you feel the shape of the melody in your body and not just your fingers. When you listen not only to yourself but to the person beside you and the person across the room and the silence between the sounds. It requires presence and interpretation. You have to bring yourself into the sound, not just your technical ability, and you have to play from somewhere in the center of you, not just from your brain.

That is the difference between a beginner and a professional playing the same piece of music from the same sheet of paper. It is not only tone or strength or years of practice. It is that the professional is making music. They know how to feel it.

Beginners, when they first encounter a new piece, are immediately focused on the notes. That is where they have to be. And within weeks, they can be technically correct. But making music takes much longer, and it cannot be drilled. It is a kind of embodiment. Everyone in the ensemble has to be willing to stop performing their individual instrument and start feeling the thing they are all creating together.

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I come from musicians. I play flute and piano, my sister plays cello and directs orchestras, her husband plays in a Navy band, and my parents met in their college choir. My father plays piano and my mother plays guitar. I grew up understanding at something close to a cellular level what it feels like when music is being made rather than played, the way the energy in a room dances and the sound starts to move through your body instead of just past it.

I also spent twenty years in corporate leadership where I was, I will say this plainly, extraordinarily good at playing the notes.

Execution. Delivery. Following the score exactly, hitting every metric, hardly missing a beat. I was technically flawless by the measures the system used to evaluate me. And I felt, underneath all of it, like I was slowly disappearing because there was no room in that environment to make music. No one asked me to interpret, to bring my full self, to feel what I was doing and let that inform how I did it. The system did not know what to do with those things. That was not what was being asked. And so I gave them the notes, clean and correct and compliant, until I simply could not do it anymore.

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I look around at the world we have built and I see so many people playing notes.

Careers where someone is technically excellent but spiritually absent. Relationships that function but do not resonate, that move through the motions of partnership without generating the extra energy that happens between people who are actually present with each other. Days that are efficient but feel hollow at the end of them, because nothing that happened inside them meant anything.

We have built systems that reward execution, correctness, compliance, and output. And we have quietly convinced ourselves that if we just play the notes well enough, eventually it will feel like music. But it does not work that way. You cannot execute your way into aliveness. You cannot be so precise and efficient and technically flawless that meaning simply appears. Meaning does not live on the page, it comes from within us, from the part of us that interprets and expresses and feels, and from what happens between us when enough people are willing to bring that into the same room at the same time.

And here is the thing about playing notes: it is safe. As long as you have learned them correctly, you are beyond criticism. You did what was asked. You followed the score. No one can fault you for that.

When you make music, you are vulnerable. You are bringing interpretation, which means you can be wrong. You can try something and have it not land. I remember what it felt like to play a flute solo, to be the only instrument in the room for a passage, every eye on me, my full self exposed to the judgment of everyone listening. Not everyone finds that terrifying, but I did because when you make music, you are showing something real, and real things can be misunderstood.

So we keep playing notes - in our work, in our relationships, in the way we move through our days. We hit the beats, follow the tempo, try not to make mistakes, and then we wonder why something feels like it is missing.

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An orchestra is not a collection of people playing something correctly. If it were, you could program a computer to do it, and honestly it would be more precise. A human ensemble is a living system. It requires individual mastery and collective resonance. You have to know your part, yes, but you have to be more than technically solid. You have to listen, to respond, to know when to lead and when to support, when to fill space and when to leave silence. You have to trust that the person beside you is doing the same.

When it works, when everyone is making music rather than playing notes, something happens that cannot be explained by the sum of the parts. The sound becomes felt. It lands in your chest and moves through your body. The energy in the room changes profoundly. As a musician, you feel it from inside the thing that is creating it. I have gotten involuntary goosebumps in the middle of playing a piece because something clicked into place that I could feel but not see. It is like a third sound that emerges from two notes played together in a specific interval: you are only playing two things, but a third sound appears, made by the relationship between them. That is what happens in an ensemble when everyone is present. Something new is created that none of them could have made alone.

It has nothing to do with perfection. There is always something that could be improved. It is presence. It is the feeling of everyone in the room working toward something bigger than what any of them could produce individually.

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I want to quickly mention silence, because it matters here.

One of the things beginners struggle with most in music is the rests, the spaces written into the score where nothing is played. Silence feels like doing nothing. It feels exposed and vulnerable and most beginners rush to fill it. But those silences are written in deliberately. That is where the music breathes and it is an important part of the structure.

We have lost our tolerance for silence. For pauses and space where nothing is being produced or optimized or filled. I think this is one of the reasons so many days feel relentlessly loud and yet somehow empty. We have forgotten that the rests are part of the music.

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Music is a universal language in a way that very few things are. It bypasses logic. It does not need translation. It moves through your nervous system before your brain has finished processing what it is hearing. It can soothe you or energize you or break something open in you, and it does this across language and culture and age and experience. There is not a single culture in the world that does not have music. You do not need any technical understanding to be moved by it, you just have to be present with it.

And I find myself wondering why we do not try to build other systems that work the way music does. Why is music the outlier? Why do we not prioritize collective resonance over productivity, or connection over correctness, or presence over performance, in more of the places we spend our time?

I am not arguing against structure or skill or discipline. The orchestra needs all of those things too. But what if we stopped treating them as the destination and instead treated them as the foundation that makes the music possible, but not the music itself?

What if we pushed past the notes?

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Here is the invitation, if you want it.

Look at your days and notice where you are just playing the notes. There is no shame in it. It is what happens when systems reward execution and do not know what to do with expression. But notice it. Notice where you are technically correct and spiritually absent, or where you are executing flawlessly and feeling nothing. Where are you hitting every beat and wondering at the end of the day why it felt like something was missing?

And then get curious about where you might be able to make music instead. What would it look like to bring your full self into that? To feel what you are doing and let that inform how you do it? To listen not just to yourself, but to the people around you, to the silence between the sounds, to what is being created between all of you together?

Expression is not something you layer on top of a well-executed life. It is not the extra thing, the optional thing, the thing you get to do in the margins after the real work is finished. It is what turns existence into aliveness. It is what makes the sound become felt.

We are capable of so much more than playing the notes. I want to build a world where more of us are making music.

Don’t just play notes. Make music.

If this landed and you want a practical framework for bringing more aliveness into your everyday life, Applied Enchantment is where I would point you.

If this resonated, there is more where it came from. New essays every week, for women who are ready to stop performing their lives and start inhabiting them.