I want to talk about something that probably sounds ridiculous until you sit with it for a second, and then it sounds like the most obvious thing anyone has ever said.
Some instruments don’t just make music.
They make places.
Not metaphorically, not in a “the music really transported me” greeting-card kind of way. I mean it more literally and more weirdly than that. I mean that when I hear certain instruments, my brain doesn’t just register sound. It arrives somewhere. There’s a shift, like loading into a new map. The scenery changes. The temperature changes. I can tell you what season it is and whether there are trees nearby and how the light is sitting on whatever surface is closest to me in this imaginary but completely real place.
I know. I know how that sounds. Stick with me.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with music my whole life. I experience sound differently because of how my brain is wired, and for a long time I thought that was a liability. Certain sounds overwhelm me in ways that are hard to explain to people who don’t have that experience. But the flip side of that, the part I’ve been chewing on lately, is that music also lands on me differently. Harder. More specifically. Like it has GPS coordinates attached to it. This is my personal experience and I’m not making any grand universal claims here. But for me, instruments are geography. They are honest-to-goodness places I have been, or places I carry without ever having visited, or places that don’t technically exist except in the way that all the most real places don’t technically exist.
So here. Let me take you on a tour. Bring snacks. This is going to take a while.
The Cello Is a Lake at Dusk
I want to start here because the cello is the one I feel most strongly about and also the one that took me the longest to name correctly.
For years I just called it “the sad one” which is deeply reductive and also not quite right. It’s not sad. It’s vast. There’s a difference. Sadness has an edge to it, a specific ache that points at something. The cello doesn’t point. It opens.
When I hear a cello, I am at a lake. Not a dramatic mountain lake with postcard cliffs. Not a tourist lake with paddleboats and a snack bar. A quiet lake. A northern lake in late August when the light has gone golden and low and the water is doing that thing where it barely moves, just holds the sky on its surface like it’s in no rush to give it back. The air has that particular weight to it where you can feel summer already making its exit. Nobody is swimming. Maybe there’s a dock. Maybe there’s one canoe pulled up on shore, still wet.
The cello sounds like the feeling of sitting at the edge of that dock with your feet just touching the water and knowing, without dread, that things are going to change. It sounds like the theological concept I can never quite nail words to, the one that’s bigger than peace and quieter than joy. The thing Elijah heard after the fire and the earthquake. The still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12, for the record. That verse has lived in my body a long time.)
That’s the cello. Dusk. Water. The voice that doesn’t shout.
The Fiddle Is Every Prairie Road You Have Ever Driven at Midnight
Completely different energy. The cello and the fiddle are the same instrument in the way that a library and a barn dance are the same building. Technically similar bones, completely different soul.
The fiddle is a road trip. Specifically it is a road trip at night through flat country when there are no other cars and the windows are cracked and someone has their feet up on the dashboard and the conversation has gone easy and loose because you’ve been driving long enough that the performance of being together has dropped away and you’re just together. The stars in that kind of country are not polite about it. They just do the whole sky.
The fiddle has urgency without anxiety. That’s a thing I don’t think gets talked about enough. It moves, it insists, it pulls you forward, but it never feels panicked. It feels like being alive and knowing it. Like your body remembers it has a heartbeat and decides that’s worth celebrating.
Prairie roads. Summer, but late enough that the heat has finally stood down. Canola fields on both sides that you can’t quite see but can smell. Someone laughing in the passenger seat. The fiddle is that moment when you think: yeah, okay, this is actually pretty good. Not joy. Relief. The best kind.
The Piano Is a Church Hall and Also a Kitchen
The piano is the only instrument I’m putting in two places, and I’m prepared to defend this in a court of law.
A piano by itself, acoustic, the sound before the pedal gets involved, just the raw key-to-hammer-to-string mechanics of it, that’s a kitchen. It’s Sunday morning. There’s coffee. The floor is probably linoleum and the light coming through the window is doing nothing fancy, just being light. Someone is playing something they’ve played a thousand times, not performing, just thinking out loud in music. A hymn maybe. Or just scales. Or the same passage from something over and over because they haven’t gotten it right yet and they’re not in a hurry.
A kitchen piano is the most honest sound in the world. There’s no audience. There’s no reverb trying to make it sound bigger than it is. It’s just someone at a piano the way someone else might sit at a table with a cup of tea and stare out the window. Processing. Existing.
But then.
Then the pedal. Then the room opens up. Then it’s a church hall, not the sanctuary itself but the hall, the one where potlucks happen and folding tables get hauled out and kids run between the legs of adults who are catching up on everything they haven’t had time to say. The piano in a church hall has warmth and weight and a kind of communal gravity to it. It’s not sacred in the incense-and-silence way. It’s sacred in the way that showing up for each other is sacred. Sunday potluck sacred. Casserole-brought-in-a-dish sacred.
Both places. Same instrument. I stand by it.
The Guitar Is Complicated Because the Guitar Contains Multitudes
Okay, so. The guitar.
The guitar is the one that shifts depending on what it’s doing and I almost didn’t include it because it feels like cheating, like asking “where does water sound like?” But I’ve been sitting with this long enough to say: even the guitar has a home base, a default location it returns to when you strip everything else away.
An acoustic guitar, unplugged, sitting in someone’s living room, being played for no one or for three people on a couch. That’s a small town. Not small-town nostalgia. Not the Hallmark movie version. The real version, which is smaller and more honest and kind of beautiful in ways that catch you off guard because you weren’t expecting anything beautiful from a Tuesday night in a place with one gas station.
Guitar in a living room sounds like knowing someone for twenty years. It sounds like inside jokes that don’t need to be explained. It sounds like the particular comfort of a space where no one is performing, where someone can just pick up an instrument in the middle of a conversation and start playing and it doesn’t feel like an interruption because it is the conversation.
Electric guitar is different geography entirely. Electric guitar is a city, or at least a venue in a city, something with exposed brick and bad lighting and a sound system that’s slightly too loud but you’re okay with that because the loudness is part of the point. I love electric guitar but it doesn’t make me feel like a place I’ve rested. It makes me feel like a place I’ve woken up in.
Both valid. Different maps.
Woodwinds Are Winter Evenings and I Will Not Be Argued Out of This
Flute. Oboe. Clarinet. The whole family. Stay with me.
Woodwinds are a winter evening inside. This is specific. Not winter as a whole, not the brutal grey slog of February that makes everyone question their life choices. This is the good part of winter. This is the part where it’s dark by four-thirty outside and instead of being depressing, the dark feels earned somehow. The lights inside are warm. There might be candles or there might just be lamps but either way the light is doing something intentional. There’s a window with snow on the other side of it and it’s not threatening the window, it’s just there, just being snow, providing contrast.
Woodwinds have that quality of being precise without being cold. The tone is clear but it breathes. You can hear that a person made this sound with their own lungs, their own air, and there’s something intimate about that. It’s not bombastic. It doesn’t demand anything from you. It comes into the room the way a thoughtful guest comes in, quietly, taking the temperature before it makes itself known.
A flute in particular is the sound of light through a window at four in the afternoon in January, the kind of sideways winter light that hits something glass or a snow-covered branch and splits into something you weren’t expecting to find beautiful. There and gone. Makes you look up.
I have a lot of feelings about woodwinds, is what I’m saying.
Brass Is Mountains. Full Stop.
This one requires the least amount of explanation and also the most, because it’s so obvious to me that I almost can’t explain it, it just is.
French horn. Tuba. Trombone. Trumpet when it’s not being brash about it. The whole brass section when it swells together into something that makes the floor feel different.
Mountains.
Specifically the Rocky Mountains but honestly any mountains where the scale is large enough to make a person feel appropriately small. Not in a crushing way. In a corrective way. The way standing at the base of something enormous recalibrates your sense of proportion. The way you stop thinking about whatever petty thing was eating at you and instead just think: oh. That’s big. Okay. I’m small. Got it. That’s actually fine.
There’s a particular moment in orchestral music when the brass comes in and it’s like a mountain appearing through clouds. You knew it was there, you felt its presence, and then suddenly you can see it. The full thing. And it’s bigger than you prepared for. And something in your chest responds to that bigness in a way that isn’t quite emotion but isn’t quite physical either, it lives somewhere in between.
The Psalms talk about mountains a lot. “I lift my eyes to the mountains, where does my help come from?” (Psalm 121:1). I used to think that was just poetic. Now I think David knew something about scale and about how sometimes the thing you need isn’t comfort, it’s perspective. Brass gives me that. Mountains give me that. Same move, different medium.
Percussion Is Summer Fields and Also: Everything That Has Ever Been a Party
I need to split percussion into two categories because drums and, say, a xylophone or marimba are doing fundamentally different things emotionally even though they’re technically in the same family. It’s like lumping cats and lions together because they’re both cats. Technically correct, experientially bananas.
A drum. A real drum, something with skin and weight and that low resonance that you feel in your sternum before you process it as sound. That’s summer. That’s a summer field on a hot day when the air is thick and moving slow and everything feels like it’s vibrating slightly, the grass and the grasshoppers and the heat coming up off the ground. Rhythm is the most alive thing. Heartbeat is rhythm. Seasons are rhythm. The drum just makes that visible.
Percussion in a full ensemble, all the clatter and the shimmer of it, the cymbals and the snare and whatever’s happening with the triangle at the back, that’s a party. A real party. Not a curated social event but a party where someone’s grandmother is dancing and a kid fell asleep in the corner and the food is about two-thirds gone and someone just started an impromptu second round of whatever game you were playing and nobody’s checked their phone in an hour. That kind of party. The kind that doesn’t get planned, only stumbled into.
Percussion is the instrument that reminds you that music is, at its core, a body thing. Not just a brain thing, not just a feeling thing. Your body responds to percussion before your thoughts can form an opinion about it. That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.
So What Is This About, Really
I’ve been trying to figure out why this matters to me, beyond the obvious fun of mapping sounds to scenery. And I think what I keep landing on is something about how music carries meaning that language can’t quite reach.
I’m an autistic person who has always found language both necessary and insufficient. I can use words, I obviously use a lot of them, but there are entire territories of internal experience that words keep bouncing off of. They don’t stick. They approximate. And for a long time that felt like a limitation, like something was broken in the translation between what I experience and what I can say.
But music doesn’t need to translate. A cello doesn’t need me to find the right noun for what I feel at a lake at dusk. It just is that. It holds it. Carries it without needing to name it. And for a brain like mine that spends a lot of energy on the exhausting work of translation, that’s not just nice. That’s necessary. That’s rest.
I think about the way music shows up in scripture, not as background, not as decoration. David wrote poetry but he also played. The psalms were songs, not just texts. Music in those pages is always doing something that words alone can’t do. It’s carrying grief and praise in the same breath. It’s holding the complexity of being a person who loves God and is also often confused, scared, furious, and in over their head. Music doesn’t resolve that complexity. It just says: you can bring all of it. There’s room.
That’s what the lake sounds like. And the prairie road. And the kitchen piano. And the winter window and the mountain and the summer field.
Room for all of it.
Where Do You Live, When You Listen
I genuinely want to know. Not in a comments-section-engagement-farming way. In the actual way, the way where I’m curious what sound takes you somewhere specific and whether that place has weather and what time of day it is.
Because I think most people have this experience to some degree and not enough of us talk about it. We treat music appreciation as something aesthetic, something refined, something you learn to have opinions about. But I think underneath all of that, most of us are just trying to get back to some place that the music knows how to find when we don’t.
I’m going to go listen to cello music now.
It’s a good night for a lake.
Places matter. Music matters. The places music makes matter. The way sound carries what language can’t hold matters.
You don’t have to explain why a fiddle takes you somewhere. It just does.
Trust that.