practicing music as entertainment

Mass communication has made the means of delivering and distributing music easier and easier: up to the point where if one were to want to escape the grasp of music in an urban setting the only means of doing so would be earplugs. It is ubiquitous. From radio to tv to all sorts of tape and vinyl formats to cds to mp3s to video games...

But if we go back in time, say, 200 years there wasn't such a machine in place. In fact then the only means of hearing music was to hear it performed live. And live performances are not a great mechanism of mass delivery. What did suffice back in the day for that was sheet music. You could buy a Beethoven sonata or your favorite Schubert lieder or a Rossini overture arranged for solo piano and take it home and play it. Of course this presupposes that one could play, or even that there's a substantial population of "amateur" (I detest the term...more on that later) musicians who would consume the media in question. And there of course seemed to be.

This brings me to my main point: that practicing music is a great form of entertainment. Of course practicing music is often seen as a means to an end: usually a performance-of-some-sort end, and in this sense the term is loaded with laborious overtones. Also the word practice is highly equivocal: it might mean running scales, sight-reading through pieces or actually performing live (because performance needs practice, too). But no matter what you're practicing it should be fun -- though admittedly some things are just more fun than others (that's our world after all).

Globally viewed there's an advantage here, too. Were the world filled with people who practiced/played music at home, even just for themselves, there would be so much more music in the world! And a nice benefit to "professionals" is that there would be a much, much, much more informed audience base. And even if Stockhausen and Ornette Coleman always fetch a microscopically small slice of the population's attention, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent is still a large number when 6 billion people are under discussion.