Performing music with Obama

I was watching Barack Obama's speech last night, accepting the nomination for president at the Democrat party's national convention. It struck me how much his performance as an orator resembles an expert musician performing at the highest level. He has been lauded for soaring themes in the past etc. but this speech required him bring a different theme, appropriate to the context of reaching voters he had not previously connected with, defining and embracing the whole of his party. I watched the self control and pacing of his meter, the contrasts of strong emotion with relaxed conversation. He was able to bring a dramatic crescendo of emotion to what amounted to a policy speech on how he would run the country. When a musician is asked to perform a piece of music with such a dyamic range of content and emotion, you're cooked if you get caught up in the wave of it all. There's too much to execute, from the notes you're playing to building the larger phrases of music that the audience is ultimately following. It requires a highly disciplined mind to integrate the intellectual framework of text or music and communicate these abstract ideas to your audience on an emotional, visceral level. Many people will vote on the candidate who feels right. Striking the right chord of what feels right is a complicated matter. Obama's performance demonstrates his virtuosic understanding of this.