Charubel's image for this degree is a man playing on a violin, and the instrument is the interpretation. A violin is the most relational of instruments: it has no frets, so every note's pitch is found freshly by the player's ear, tuned against itself moment to moment, and its voice is proverbially the nearest of any instrument's to the human. Played well it is intimacy made audible; played badly it is famously unbearable, and nothing between hides the difference.
Read against the second degree of Libra the picture becomes the sign's method in miniature. Harmony here is not given, it is continuously produced, by listening, by minute adjustment, by a bow arm that must press exactly enough and no more, relationship as a performed skill rather than a settled state. The player is alone, which sharpens the point: Libra's work begins as solo practice, the ear trained before the duet is attempted. There is also the tenderness of the image, a machine of wood and gut held against the neck, close to the voice, music produced at the body's own register. The shadow is performance replacing feeling, the salon player whose sweetness is technique all the way down, charm with no one inside it. On a natal Venus or Mercury this degree tends to mark social musicianship, people who tune every room they enter, and its counsel honours the craft while naming its cost: keep practising the listening, and let some notes be played for no audience at all.