There’s a beautiful quote attributed to Bob Moog on the Moog site today:
“What you do with our instruments helps us to be more human too, and I want to thank you all for that.”
Sometimes I actually find this very sentiment is hard to express in words.
You get into a lot of abstractions. I hear people trying to explain it. Is it being a musician, or is it teaching music? Is it about the musician, or is it about the machine? Is it the music, or is the theory or the technology?
But this line, spoken by a machine creator, explains why we can devote ourselves to all those things at once, without conflict. We push the limits of technology not because we believe in machines, but because we want to push the limits of being human. And if we’re optimistic even on dark days about the future, it’s because we believe we haven’t yet reached the limit of how human we can be.
My own belief in that doesn’t come from me, but from the people I get to meet – in person and by using the instruments they create. It’s because of all of you. For that I’m endlessly thankful, every day.
-Ed.