Would you rather be a master of every musical instrument or be fluent in every language?
0 voters
(I saw this on Twitter and thought it was a very good question.)
At age 59, I’d have to go with language. Being a master of all musical instruments would be amazingly cool but I’m too old to start a new career. I’m just the right age to travel the world.
I have an iPhone and Google translate.
I have yet to be able to play a song on ocarina. I vote music.
I went with language. I see a lot of online communities doing fan-translated works in English that don’t have a formal translation and think it would be fun to contribute. Plus, there’s cost. Several years of COVID and other factors have hurt me financially, and even being proficient in multiple musical instruments doesn’t make it easier to BUY them.
Language is far more useful.
source: lifelong musician
Language for practicality, music for personal enrichment.
My now deceased first wife was an accomplished gigging musician. Over manyy ears in many smoky dives and coffeehouses and concert venues I explained to many people that my job was to carry the heavy stuff from gig to gig. They’d often ask what instrument(s) I played. I responded that I had mostly mastered the CD, being able to both play and rewind, but was still working on fast forward.
Music. I could never master every language, but music transcends that. You don’t have to know German to find Beethoven or Bach moving. You don’t have to know Russian to appreciate Tchaikovsky. Music is the language all humans understand. It is therefore more “useful.”
Be that as it may, though, music unfortunately often isn’t much use unless you’re exceptionally good at it. If you are a world-class composer or musician, then yes, you can win over huge audiences from Amsterdam to Moscow to Singapore.
But 99.9% of the time, any music that you or I could play isn’t going to be be usefully better than what you might hear at any roadside cafe or in a church or airport elevator music. And it might only be a few minutes out of each day.
With language, though, you open up a whole new world and can interact with a whole nation of people, 24/7.
But you don’t have to be master of a musical instrument in order to appreciate the music that comes from it when it’s played by a master.
OTOH, it’s hard to fully appreciate literature and poetry and subtleties of meaning expressed in a language in which you are not fluent.
I already love music; I don’t need to know how to play every instrument. I’ll take the all-languages implant, please.
Music, for sure. I love languages and dabble in a number of them (as well as growing up in a Polish-English household), but I would far prefer to have master-level music skills, as they bring me pure, solitary joy (as well as can be entertaining for crowds). Both playing and listening to music has gotten me through some of the more difficult times in my life, and having a master-level handle of two or three instruments would be a source of incessant joy to me. I’m pretty good at piano/keyboards and can fake my way through some other instruments, but nothing approaching mastery. I love improvising, and being able to have the skills of someone like Oscar Peterson or Bill Evans would be pure joy to me, and a great psychological outlet. I just don’t get that kind of pure therapy from languages, even though I’d have access to all the literatures of the world. I love the written word – I love poetry, in particular – but nothing cuts through my soul the way the primal language of music does.
I can enjoy music a lot, yet making it is beyond me. I’m ok with that. But I have both a love of and a partial grasp of language, and really really get into improving my understanding of language. I’ve listened to every episode of “The History of English” podcast, and avidly follow “A way with words” and eagerly await more installments of both.
But the OP says " a master of every musical instrument," not merely able to play it at an amateur level.
'Right. The audience–that is, whoever hears the music–could be illiterate, and yet still appreciate the music. A true master of music can reach into the soul of whoever hears it, no matter what language they speak or how illiterate they may be. My mother came from Italy. Her dialect, like many in Italy, was very different from “formal” Italian. I could have been fluent in Italian and not been able to communicate really effectively through spoken language, but if I could have played Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” or his violin concertos, she and I could have communicated on a deep level.
If someone prefers to be fluent in every language, I respect that; please respect those of us who find music communicates on the level we find most important.
As someone who’s 40 years old, has a deep appreciation of music, and is a halfway decent vocalist, I voted for music. But it was a tough decision.
Can I have $10M or whatever instead?
The reality is that English is sufficient for getting around the majority of the planet. And while musical ability is nice in principle, if I were truly interested I’ve have pursued it already. So in reality I doubt I’d use the ability beyond showing off when there’s a piano around.
There’s also the downside that I tend to enjoy the learning more than the doing. If I did suddenly gain an interest in languages or music performance, I wouldn’t want to have mastered them already. In fact it’s hard to think of a quicker way of ruining my interest in something than to grant me mastery over it. I’ve “mastered” tic-tac-toe, and find it boring for exactly the same reason.
The answer is obviously music. How many people got rich and famous just talking well?
First I read that as “giggling musician”…
Obviously music. You will be a master of every musical instrument. Your language option simply makes you fluent in every language. Nice skill if you want to be a translator. I’ll take mastery over fluency.
I went with music. The human voice is also a musical instrument, so I’d be a master of everything from European opera to Mongolian throat singing. Throw in hip-hop (are you saying that’s not music?) and I’d also be a master wordsmith.
I went with language. Music is the language of my heart so I can have music too 
I went with language. It’s probably more immediately marketable but also fluency in “every language” would allow you to do a lot for language preservation or history if “every” includes dead languages. Even if dead languages are excluded, you could be helping preserve indigenous languages with only a handful of remaining speakers. While I get the attraction of the music choice, I think I’d contribute more via language.
Given that I am currently attending the 107th World Esperanto Conference in Montreal, I suspect that you all know where I’d fit in (languages!). But music is a language as well, so I actually get both.
Math is a language too…