In the world of the performing arts, actors, dancers, and singers are all able to express their artistry by themselves, solo. Classical musicians, however, must always have a partner. They cannot create the exquisite, affecting, often poignant sounds that constitute their art without a vessel to channel their talents.

For this reason, musicians can be very particular about the instruments they play. They will go to great lengths to find instruments which suit them, which are sympathetic to their artistic abilities and sensibilities, which respond to them sensitively, which, in short, help them make beautiful music.

And for this reason musicians develop very special relationships with the instruments they play. They care for them, are tender with them, treat them almost as living things. It can be seen in the ways they handle the instruments, the way flesh wraps around wood or metal, presses down or brushes across strings.

In the images for this essay, photographer Bret Brookshire sought to capture on film some of that singular relationship between musician and instrument. He visited a number of Austin’s busiest and most accomplished classical musicians and recorded them as they assembled their instruments, held them, played them. The instruments he photographed are a fascinating array of “lovely, resonant vessels,” to borrow Dell Hollingsworth’s phrase — antique, newly crafted, delicate, massive, golden, varnished, simple, elaborate — and one thing that comes through so clearly in Brookshire’s portraits is the richness of the materials used in making them. There is a sensuality to these musicmakers that we aren’t always able to perceive in the concert hall, and Brookshire amplifies it by contrasting them with the flesh that manipulates them. But as remarkable as these images for the tactile pleasures they suggest, the photographs are more remarkable for the way they communicate an elusive, intangible bond between artist and instrument, a connection through which music is born.

This article appears in November 17 • 2000.

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