Denver asked Mr. Kniss to set the stand-up instrument aside and play the electric.
Devastated, he set the instrument aside for 10 years, until two holy men assured him that his music was actually "a gift from heaven" and that it was in fact his duty to play.
Though Mr. Randolph was nervous playing his first shows as a boogie, blues and gospel act, he has adapted quickly, putting on three-hour-plus shows, playing his steel guitar with his nose and mouth, and pushing the instrument aside to stomp and dance onstage.
Lutz Rath, the festival's music director and one of its cellists, left his instrument aside to give a dramatic, tightly focused reading of the poem, and if the strings sounded shrill and the piano brittle at first, the brash timbres seemed to suit the work's spirit.
"This was more practical than glamorous – lots of time sitting indoors, lots of instruments about – and aside from picking up a few geographical working titles, I [don't] think that it had any effect where, on tour, it was written".
Besides, setting aside their instruments is not, typically, what they want to do.
The guitarists set aside their instruments for a while and taught themselves to use heaps of electronic equipment.
The band members became more comfortable with setting aside their instruments; at one point last winter they actually split into two groups in two different rooms, one of them charged with making and recording noises and musical snippets without using guitars or drums, the other with reworking this material technologically with studio gizmos and computers.
Even if it is for the beyond -- truth or transformation, say -- do you get there by looking past the instruments (the surgeon putting aside the knife for a moment; the general silencing the guns) or by using them with greater exigency and abnegation?
