(Author unknown but believed to be an Australian who posted on an early website from 2002. Artist for the image also unknown; please advise if either are known.)
Music is often considered to be one of the highest art forms, due to its wholly abstract nature and yet uncanny ability to evoke emotions and feelings in the listener directly without the literal intervening use of words, paint or stone. It is that most intellectual of pursuits which demands the abeyance of the intellectual faculties for its enjoyment. This consideration of music is also due to its ephemerality; the moment a note sounds it is also disappearing into the abyss of silence which existed before it started, and which ultimately awaits every composition at its conclusion.
In a book we can reread a passage as often as we wish, or we may contemplate a painting or sculpture for hours if we so choose, but this is not so with music (though the moment can be recreated through a recording, or envisaged by reading a score, neither of these are what the composer intended: the performance, the actual act of producing the music). Participation heightens this beauty, as anyone who plays a musical instrument will testify. To actually play the notes the composer set down is to walk with the composer, and to understand more deeply his aims, and the forms and structure of his work.
Riding, too, should be such an outstanding art form, though there are many dilettantes lacking all talent who would lead us to believe otherwise. It too is a most ephemeral thing, constantly created and recreated at the moment of riding, and it too is formed of the direct interaction between the artist and her material, between rider and horse.
While riding can be thrilling to watch, participation heightens the understanding and the appreciation of all the subtle things occurring in the performance (this is why dressage will never be a great spectator sport – to understand it properly you need a specialized knowledge and, if you are aware of the difficulties involved from first-hand experience, you become much more appreciative of the effort applied).
Is it so strange that many fine riders also have a fine musical sense? Even the terms we use are often the same: rhythm and cadence and harmony. Yet riding takes art a step further than music; no longer are we dealing with an inanimate aspect of nature (vibrations in the air, or sound) but an animate being with its own thoughts and reactions. True riding, as an art, seeks a melding of two disparate beings, of a conjunction of yin and yang, into a single functional and impressive unit.
Music and riding are art forms that rely on that fragile and poorly understood aspect of our minds…memory. We can reread a book or see a film as often as we like, but no two performances of a musical score, or of a dressage test, can ever be exactly the same. Only in our memory can they continually exist and, as everyone’s perceptions are slightly different, each individual possesses a unique aspect of that performance that will never reoccur, but which certainly can be emulated and, sometimes, even bettered.
Those who do not believe that riding is an art, as supreme as music, who do not believe that the horse should willingly and actively participate in that beauty, who have never experienced the pleasure of orchestrating horse and self into a recreation of nature, will never experience the full pleasure of riding.
(Originally found at: http://memebers.ozemail.com.au/~xenophon/horses/inride/inride11.html)