They are four ornamented boxes with some strings attached. No, I am not referring to someone’s Christmas shopping of a few months ago, but rather to the components of a string quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello. These instruments of sophisticated technology date back some four hundred years, with their antecedents, the viol family, much older than that. They, and the bows that go along with them, were originally made of various woods and animal materials, and are objects of physical beauty. But their primary purpose is not to beguile the eye but to be instruments of beautiful sound creation; sounds that express the human soul, and that, when organized into a quasi-linguistic framework, are called music. They are played with the fingers and hands. They also transmit something of the physical nature of their human performers, as well as something of their soul. It is no secret that while it is not so complicated to reproduce electronically many wind and brass instruments, those most difficult to duplicate include these string instruments as well as the human voice. It is as if their singular voices, a mixture of the human body and spirit, refuse to be copied or synthesized. Which is to say that the music formed directly of human experience is irreducible to some other medium. Recordings can capture and reproduce much of the sound, but this is not the same as lived experience. But the best recordings can lead us into new vistas and allow us to experience something new that otherwise we most likely will not be able to access in any other way.