Music Interpretation Quotes

The pianokeys are black and white but they sound like a million colors in your mind

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.' That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked. One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered.

Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted?

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.

If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master "there is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend rather, you should long for perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught

Ahhhh... I see. I think. Perhaps I don't. It may be easier to grasp if you presented it in a musical format. A lyrical song or two, accompanied by a whimsical dance to interpret the words.

When we are in front of an abstract painting, we have the license to interpret in any way we want. Or music—music is a medium that we might not understand, but that we feel and enjoy. But in the case of cinema many expect to receive a clear and unified message, but what I’m suggesting is that a film could be experienced as a poem, a painting, or a piece of music.

Music Doesn’t Need Interpreters and Translators

We don't want to give people straight answers. We'd rather they question things for themselves.

That's totally their interpreter," a girl with a lip ring informs us. "Even though they totally record their music in English, they totally speak in Inuktitut. Totally.

The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.

Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.

Hembry," he said, not lifting his gaze from Juliana's. "We will retire to the music room. Lady Juliana wishes to play with me." She laughed at his outrageous statement as the butler disappeared to light the lamps in the music room. "Play for you, you rouge. Music. Nothing else." "Hmmm...," he enigmatically replied. Sinclair allowed her to put her own interpretation on his intentions as they entered the house.

But ignorance of divine revelation affects all of thought and life, from one's view toward history and philosophy, to one's interpretation of music and literature, to one's understanding of mathematics and physics.

Alright. Let's get realistic now. You know and I know that the function of that number was just to provide some sort of warm-up trash before we do something HEAVY. Something a little bit harder to listen to, but which is probably better for you in the LONG RUN. The item in this instance, which will be better for you in the LONG RUN, and if we only had a little more space up here we could make it visual for you, is "Some Ballet Music," which we've played at most of our concert series in Europe. Generally in halls where we had a little bit more space and Motorhead and Kansas could actually fling themselves across the stage, and give you their teenage interpretation of the art of The Ballet. I don't think it's too safe to do it here, maybe they can just hug each other a little bit and do some calisthenics in the middle of the stage.

They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus’s unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

Bach has taken us on a journey that we interpret and experience through our own memories, feelings and conditioning. You will respond differently from the way I do, and vice versa. That is the glory of music, especially music as immortal as this.

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. [Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)]

The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time -- music and poetry -- and not the arts of space -- sculpture and painting.

It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

He who is capable of really reading a writer will have his every question answered by the works themselves. For example, Kafka depicts the dreams & visions of his lonely, difficult life and it is these dreams & visions alone that should preoccupy us & not the interpretations that sharp-witted critics can give these writings. Their interpreting is an intellectual sport, one that is good for clever people who can read & write books on African sculpture or 12-tone music but who never get to the heart of works of art because they stand at the gate fumbling with their 100 keys, blind to the fact that the gate is not really locked.

There is no such thing as art," he said. "There is only this painting, this piece of music, that sculpture. And it either resonates with you or it doesn't." He paused for a moment and then added, "There is no such thing as art, there are only works." ... In those two moments, Antonioni taught me something profound.

That is the thing about films. They don't change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.

Intent is in the composer, interpretation is in the conductor, rendering is in the instrumentalist, perception is in the listener, sound is in the notes, and rhythm is in the intervals. Music is the harmonious relationship between them all. Relationship is beauty.

Scriptural interpretation is properly an ecclesial activity whose goal is to participate in the reality of which the text speaks by bending the knee to worship the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Through Scripture the church receives the good news of the inbreaking kingdom of God and, in turn, proclaims the message of reconciliation. Scripture is like a musical score that must be played or sung in order to be understood; therefore, the church interprets Scripture by forming communities of prayer, service, and faithful witness.

In 1963, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootenanny, featuring such Caucasian interpreters of the black experience as the Chad Mitchell Trio and the New Christy Minstrels. (Perceived commie Caucasians like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez were not invited to perform.)

The song reminds me of my life lately and the way things that happen devastate you so badly but then turn around and totally surprise you by growing into something unexpected and astounding. Of course, i could be wrong. I mean, who knows what the song is really about except whoever wrote it? But that's one of the many things about music that's so great. You can interpret a song and relate it to your life any way you want.

Interpretation was a matter of great subtlety, a word with many contexts, for example it is often said that an actor interprets a role, or a musician a piece of music.

Music is exciting and easy to enjoy, the rhythm and voice. It does not need interpretation. That is why it is called the Universal Language.

It's as if Mom was expressing herself in a language other than English; a language that Grandma wouldn't be able to interpret simply by looking at the music notes.

Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.

Life is a dream interpreted by death.

Musicians are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, they face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get real jobs, and their own fear that they’ll never work again. Every day, they have to ignore the possibility that the vision they have dedicated their lives to is a pipe dream. With every note, they stretch themselves, emotionally and physically, risking criticism and judgement. With every passing year, many of them watch as the other people their age achieve the predictable milestones of normal life – the car, the family, the house, the nest egg. Why? Because musicians are willing to give their entire lives to a moment – to that melody, that lyric, that chord, or that interpretation that will stir the audience’s soul. Musicians are beings who have tasted life’s nectar in that crystal moment when they poured out their creative spirit and touched another’s heart. In that instant, they were as close to magic, God, and perfection as anyone could ever be. And in their own hearts, they know that to dedicate oneself to that moment is worth a thousand lifetimes.

What power was it which liberated Prometheus from his vultures and transformed myth to a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It was the Herculean power of music. Music, which attained its highest manifestation in tragedy, had the power to interpret myth with a new significance in the most profound manner, something we have already described before as the most powerful capacity of music.

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today’s truths become tomorrow’s disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d’art.

Edelman, who once planned to be a concert violinist, uses musical metaphors as well. In a BBC radio interview, he said: Think: if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quartet players and that, even though they weren’t speaking words, signals were going back and forth in all kinds of hidden ways [as you usually get them by the subtle nonverbal interactions between the players] that make the whole set of sounds a unified ensemble. That’s how the maps of the brain work by reentry. The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.

I must have been about twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and held then many rather wild ideas on the subject of women: conceptions largely the result of having read a good deal without simultaneous opportunity to modify by personal experience the recorded judgment of others upon that matter: estimates often excellent in their conclusions if correctly interpreted, though requiring practical knowledge to be appreciated at their full value.

Music, even at terrible moments, can make you accept so much more- accept your dark sides, or the things that happened to you. Maybe it's just because you see that we are not alone. And that's what the concert situation is about for me, when I'm sitting in the hall and also when I'm playing myself. It's about communication - I almost want to say 'communion'. As a player, you really don't interpret anymore. You listen, together, with the audience.

Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland. ‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.

Only Mr. Hosokawa and the priest completely understood the importance of the music. Every note was distinct. It was the measurement of the time which had gotten away from them. It was the interpretation of their lives in the very moment they were being lived.

I thought a voice had to be about what you could do. It wasn’t until I heard Billie Holiday that I realized a voice could be a collection of compensations for things you couldn’t do. It could be an ingenuity – in the same way some writers wrote books that coursed between the boulders of what they couldn’t do, and went faster, and tumbled over, fell in rills and rushed breathlessly over the stones. The great singers were also the great interpreters. She had just a single octave, and she made it her lifelong subject. I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your faltering, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.

Load your bookshelves with the best literature you can find. Hang beautiful, thought-provoking art work around your house. Watch history and science documentaries as well as good movies and television programs. Listen to beautiful music (which, of course, is open to interpretation).

Ésa es una lección que se olvida con frecuencia: no intentes comprender, no deduzcas, no interpretes: eso lo puede hacer cualquiera en una oficina a mil kilómetros de distancia. Da igual que la situación te resulte ininteligible. Cuenta lo que ves, lo cercano, lo comprobable. Ya está.

She and Miu shared similar musical tastes, it turned out. They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven’s Sonata no. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus’s unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.

A book may outlive its author, and it moves too, and it too can be said to change - but not in the manner of the telling. It changes in the manner of the reading. As many commentators have remarked, works of literature are recreated by each generation of readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them. The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or "interpreted" by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes its own interpreter.

It had mostly been around his mommy that time, and he had been in constant terror that she would pluck the word from her brain and drag it out of her mouth, making it real. DIVORCE. It was a constant undercurrent in their thoughts, one of the few he could always pick up, like the beat of simple music. But like a beat, the central thought formed only the spine of more complex thoughts, thoughts he could not as yet even begin to interpret. They came to him only as colors and moods. Mommy’s DIVORCE thoughts centered around what Daddy had done to his arm, and what had happened at Stovington when Daddy lost his job.

What interests me when I'm listening to Gould is the way he deliberately brings contrapuntal elements into performances of Beethoven. He doesn't just try to harmonize with the orchestra but deliberately overlays their music with his, and, as a result, creates a natural tension between the two. This was a fresh interpretation of Beethoven.

Mr. DuBois, you are a rehearsal accompanist. I do not pay you for your musical interpretation.' The impresario marched down the aisle and stood in the middle like the commander of a mutinying ship. 'No, Mr. Ziegfeld. I'm not. I'm a songwriter. My songs are a damn sight better than this garbage.' One of the midwestern chorus girls gasped. 'Forgive my language,' Henry added.

Em uma peça de Shakespeare, podemos obter vários graus de significado. Para o público mais simples há a trama; para os mais instruídos, o caráter e o conflito dos personagens; para o mais literário, as palavras e as frases; para os dotados de maior sensibilidade musical, o ritmo, e para os de maior sensibilidade e capacidade de entender, um significado que se revela gradualmente.

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the languages of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music.

When I work with Godfrey, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don’t want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like “Buy these shoes” or “Go to this casino.” The strategy of art is precisely the opposite. I would describe it this way: When you listen to a piece of music and you look at an image at the same time, you are metaphorically making a journey to that image. It’s a metaphorical distance, but it’s a real one all the same, and it’s in that journey that the spectator forms a relationship to the music and the image. Without that, it’s all made for us and we don’t have to invent anything. In works like Godfrey’s, and in works, for that matter, like Bob Wilson’s, the spectators are supposed to invent something. They are supposed to tell the story of Einstein. In Godfrey’s movies Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, the words in the title are the only words there are. The journey that we make from the armchair to the image is the process by which we make the image and the music our own. Without that, we have no personal connection. The idea of a personal interpretation comes about through traversing that distance.

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood." "That's rather a broad idea," I remarked. "One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,

Once music is detached from function, once it becomes a repertory art, it explicitly strives to define itself, out of itself, to become "mathemat- ical"—that is to say, to begin from premises and proceed to conclusions by interpreting its own universe, finding its own laws. Systems of harmony and counterpoint become tools for elaborate musical explorations. A great deal of Western music is as much a manifestation of idealism as is mathematics.

It is extremely interesting, then, to think about the meaning of the word ‘form’ as it applies to constructions of arbitrarily complex shapes. For instance, what is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty? Is if the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina? Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us feel that we are not merely looking at a two-dimensional surface; we are responding to some sort of inner meaning inside the picture, a multidimensional aspect trapped somehow inside those two dimensions. It is the word ‘meaning’ which is important here. Our minds contain interpreters which accept two-dimensional patterns and then ‘pull’ from them high-dimensional notions which are so complex that we cannot consciously describe them. The same can be said about how we respond to music, incidentally.

MY FIRST ASSIGNMENT AFTER BEING ORDAINED as a pastor almost finished me. I was called to be the assistant pastor in a large and affluent suburban church. I was glad to be part of such an obviously winning organization. After I had been there a short time, a few people came to me and asked that I lead them in a Bible study. “Of course,” I said, “there is nothing I would rather do.” We met on Monday evenings. There weren’t many—eight or nine men and women—but even so that was triple the two or three that Jesus defined as a quorum. They were eager and attentive; I was full of enthusiasm. After a few weeks the senior pastor, my boss, asked me what I was doing on Monday evenings. I told him. He asked me how many people were there. I told him. He told me that I would have to stop. “Why?” I asked. “It is not cost-effective. That is too few people to spend your time on.” I was told then how I should spend my time. I was introduced to the principles of successful church administration: crowds are important, individuals are expendable; the positive must always be accented, the negative must be suppressed. Don’t expect too much of people—your job is to make them feel good about themselves and about the church. Don’t talk too much about abstractions like God and sin—deal with practical issues. We had an elaborate music program, expensively and brilliantly executed. The sermons were seven minutes long and of the sort that Father Taylor (the sailor-preacher in Boston who was the model for Father Mapple in Melville’s Moby Dick) complained of in the transcendentalists of the last century: that a person could no more be converted listening to sermons like that than get intoxicated drinking skim milk.[2] It was soon apparent that I didn’t fit. I had supposed that I was there to be a pastor: to proclaim and interpret Scripture, to guide people into a life of prayer, to encourage faith, to represent the mercy and forgiveness of Christ at special times of need, to train people to live as disciples in their families, in their communities and in their work. In fact I had been hired to help run a church and do it as efficiently as possible: to be a cheerleader to this dynamic organization, to recruit members, to lend the dignity of my office to certain ceremonial occasions, to promote the image of a prestigious religious institution. I got out of there as quickly as I could decently manage it. At the time I thought I had just been unlucky. Later I came to realize that what I experienced was not at all uncommon.

The piece seems simple technically, but it’s hard to get the expression right. Play it just as it’s written on the score, and it winds up pretty boring. But go the opposite route and interpret it too intensely, and it sounds cheap. Just the way you use the pedal makes all the difference, and can change the entire character of the piece.” “Who’s the pianist here?” “A Russian, Lazar Berman. When he plays Liszt it’s like he’s painting a delicately imagined landscape. Most people see Liszt’s piano music as more superficial, and technical. Of course, he has some tricky pieces, but if you listen very carefully to his music you discover a depth to it that you don’t notice at first. Most of the time it’s hidden behind all the embellishments. This is particularly true of the Years of Pilgrimage suites. There aren’t many living pianists who can play it accurately and with such beauty. Among more contemporary pianists, Berman gets it right, and with the older pianists I’d have to go with Claudio Arrau.” Haida got quite talkative when it

When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art. For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors. The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses. Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion. Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights. Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago. In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further. The Classical is health, the Romantic disease.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

Then why, I asked, is the world so fractured? “Well, you can look at it this way. Would you want the world to all look alike? No. The genius of life is its variety. “Even in our own faith, we have questions and answers, interpretations, debates. In Christianity, in Catholicism, in other faiths, the same thing—debates, interpretations. That is the beauty. It’s like being a musician. If you found the note, and you kept hitting that note all the time, you would go nuts. It’s the blending of the different notes that makes the music.” The music of what? “Of believing in something bigger than yourself.

For instance I do not want a cross to be interpreted as a symbol of redemption in Christian understanding, because I focus on atmosphere, music, mood. I perceive it very musically, every image. Perhaps others see it differently, or maybe their perception of music is different than mine... I definitely deny the term 'symbolic art', I don't define something for someone. A painted sea is not meant to be the collective unconsciousness of Carl Jung... I don't paint with a dictionary of Mircea Eliade in my other hand. When I create, simple associations appear. Associations of several objects collide with eachother, creating an apparent content. But the content is not intended by me.

All of the stimuli of awe and wonder, whose capacity is invested in the human mind, have been appropriated by religious faiths across centuries, in masterpieces of literature, the visual arts, music, and architecture. Three thousand years of Yahweh have wrought an aesthetic power in these creative arts second to none. There is nothing in my own experience more moving than the Roman Catholic Lucernarium, when the lumen Christi (light of Christ) is spread by Paschal candlelight into a darkened cathedral; or the choral hymns to the standing faithful and approaching procession during an evangelical Protestant altar call. These benefits require submission to God, or his Son the Redeemer, or both, or to His final chosen spokesman Muhammad. This is too easy. It is necessary only to submit, to bow down, to repeat the sacred oaths. Yet let us ask frankly, to whom is such obeisance really directed? Is it to an entity that may have no meaning within reach of the human mind—or may not even exist? Yes, perhaps it really is to God. But perhaps it is to no more than a tribe united by a creation myth. If the latter, religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap unavoidable during the biological history of our species. And if this is correct, surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender and enslavement. Humankind deserves better.

Arianna simply wasn’t up to it. She had a pretty voice, she could carry a tune—that was never a problem. But she had no depth. She couldn’t interpret a song, place her stamp on it. Unlike Lesley, who fairly stomped on it! And that’s what you need in folk music. These are songs that have been around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They existed for centuries before any kind of recording was possible, even before people could write, for god’s sake! So the only way those songs lived and got passed on was by singers. The better singer you were, the more likely it was people were going to turn out to hear you and remember you—and remember the song—whether it was at a pub or wedding or ceilidh or just a knot of people seeking shelter under a tree during a storm. It’s a kind of time machine, really, the way you can trace a song from whoever’s singing it now back through the years—Dylan or Johnny Cash, Joanna Newsom or Vashti Bunyan—on through all those nameless folk who kept it alive a thousand years ago. People talk about carrying the torch, but I always think of that man they found in the ice up in the Alps. He’d been under the snow for 1,200 years, and when they discovered him, he was still wearing his clothes, a cloak of woven grass and a bearskin cap, and in his pocket they found a little bag of grass and tinder and a bit of dead coal. That was the live spark he’d been carrying, the bright ember he kept in his pocket to start a fire whenever he stopped. You’d have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that’s what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark. Folk music is like that. And by folk I mean whatever music it is that you love, whatever music it is that sustains you. It’s the spark that keeps us alive in the cold and night, the fire we all gather in front of so we know we’re not alone in the dark. And the longer I live, the colder and darker it gets. A song like “Windhover Morn” can keep your heart beating when the doctors can’t. You might laugh at that, but it’s true.

breath, life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. seventy three years on this earth is a lot of taking in and giving out, is a life of coming from somewhere and for many a bunch of going nowhere. how do we celebrate a poet who has created music with words for over fifty years, who has showered magic on her people, who has redefined poetry into a black world exactness thereby giving the universe an insight into darkroads? just say she interprets beauty and wants to give life, say she is patient with phoniness and doesn’t mind people calling her gwen or sister. say she sees the genius in our children, is visionary about possibilities, sees as clearly as ray charles and stevie wonder, hears like determined elephants looking for food. say that her touch is fine wood, her memory is like an african roadmap detailing adventure and clarity, yet returning to chicago’s south evans to record the journey. say her voice is majestic and magnetic as she speaks in poetry, rhythms, song and spirited trumpets, say she is dark skinned, melanin rich, small-boned, hurricane-willed, with a mind like a tornado redefining the landscape. life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. gwendolyn, gwen, sister g has not disappointed our expectations. in the middle of her eldership she brings us vigorous language, memory, illumination. she brings breath. (Quality: Gwendolyn Brooks at 73)

A “scientific” interpretation of the world, as you understand, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning. This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based as on the ground floor. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a “scientific” estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is “music” in it.

The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms.

Music of the Grid: A Poem in Two Equations _________________________ The masses of particles sound the frequencies with which space vibrates, when played. This Music of the Grid betters the old mystic mainstay, "Music of the Spheres," both in fantasy and in realism. LET US COMBINE Einstein's second law m=E/C^2 (1) with another fundamental equation, the Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula E = hv The Planck-Einstein-Schrodinger formula relates the energy E of a quantum-mechanical state to the frequency v at which its wave function vibrates. Here h is Planck's constant. Planck introduced it in his revolutionary hypothesis (1899) that launched quantum theory: that atoms emit or absorb light of frequency v only in packets of energy E = hv. Einstein went a big step further with his photon hypothesis (1905): that light of frequency v is always organized into packets with energy E = hv. Finally Schrodinger made it the basis of his basic equation for wave functions-the Schrodinger equation (1926). This gave birth to the modern, universal interpretation: the wave function of any state with energy E vibrates at a frequency v given by v = E/h. By combining Einstein with Schrodinger we arrive at a marvelous bit of poetry: (*) v = mc^2/h (*) The ancients had a concept called "Music of the Spheres" that inspired many scientists (notably Johannes Kepler) and even more mystics. Because periodic motion (vibration) of musical instruments causes their sustained tones, the idea goes, the periodic motions of the planets, as they fulfill their orbits, must be accompanied by a sort of music. Though picturesque and soundscape-esque, this inspiring anticipation of multimedia never became a very precise or fruitful scientific idea. It was never more than a vague metaphor, so it remains shrouded in equation marks: "Music of the Spheres." Our equation (*) is a more fantastic yet more realistic embodiment of the same inspiration. Rather than plucking a string, blowing through a reed, banging on a drumhead, or clanging a gong, we play the instrument that is empty space by plunking down different combinations of quarks, gluons, electrons, photons,... (that is, the Bits that represent these Its) and let them settle until they reach equilibrium with the spontaneous activity of Grid. Neither planets nor any material constructions compromise the pure ideality of our instrument. It settles into one of its possible vibratory motions, with different frequencies v, depending on how we do the plunking, and with what. These vibrations represent particles of different mass m, according to (*). The masses of particles sound the Music of the Grid.

the consciousness that joins self and world is analog, and the energetic potential for exchange between them might be named the analog axis. In the way that analog audio technology leans on the vibrating source—the music—and enables its waveform to shape the groove in the LP, the analog axis allows our sensitivities to lean on the One Source—the present—and receive the impression of all the subtle waveforms of Being. Taken together, those waveforms, those currents of exchange, are the one reality. On the subatomic level, even so-called ‘particles’ can be understood in those terms. Physicist Heinz Pagels explains, The electron is not a particle … it is a matter wave as an ocean wave is a water wave. According to this interpretation … all quantum objects, not just electrons, are little waves—and all of nature is a great wave phenomenon.199 We might also say that Being is a great wave phenomenon—and that its every ripple conveys information.

Pythagoras, as everyone knows, said that 'all things are numbers'. This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense. He discovered the importance of numbers in music, and the connection which he established between music and arithmetic survives in the mathematical terms 'harmonic mean' and 'harmonic progression'. He thought of numbers as shapes, as they appear on dice or playing cards. We still speak of squares and cubes of numbers, which are terms that we owe to him. He also spoke of oblong numbers, triangular numbers, pyramidal numbers, and so on. These were the numbers of pebbles (or, as we should more naturally say, shot) required to make the shapes in question. He presumably thought of the world as atomic, and of bodies as built up of molecules composed of atoms arranged in various shapes. In this way he hoped to make arithmetic the fundamental study in physics as in aesthetics.

During an individual's immersion in a domain, the locus of flow experiences shifts: what was once too challenging becomes attainable and even pleasurable, while what has long since become attainable no longer proves engaging. Thus, the journeyman musical performer gains flow from the accurate performance of familiar pieces in the repertoire; the youthful master wishes to tackle the most challenging pieces, ones most difficult to execute in a technical sense; the seasoned master may develop highly personal interpretations of familiar pieces, or, alternatively, return to those deceptively simple pieces that may actually prove difficult to execute convincingly and powerfully. Such an analysis helps explain why creative individuals continue to engage in the area of their expertise despite its frustrations, and why so many of them continue to raise the ante, posing ever-greater challenges for themselves, even at the risk of sacrificing the customary rewards.

A Spinoza in poetry becomes a Machiavelli in philosophy. Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings. So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will never disappear. If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men. The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life. If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature. The classical is health; and the romantic, disease. When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art. For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors. The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses. Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion. Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights. Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago. To praise a man is to put oneself on his level. In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses"). The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. It may also be divided among art music and folk music. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics. Music may be played and heard live, may be part of a dramatic work or film, or may be recorded. To many people in many cultures, music is an important part of their way of life. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound. Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez summarizes the relativist, post-modern viewpoint: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.

My intention, this time, was to transfer a play to the screen while keeping its theatrical character. It was in some senses a matter of walking, invisibly, around the stage and catching the different aspects and nuances in the play, the urgency and the facial expressions that escape a spectator who cannot follow them in detail from a seat in the stalls. Apart from that, I had noticed how effective a play becomes when you have a bird's-eye view from it, for example from the flies, that is to say from the viewpoint of a voyeur. The Audience is enclosed with the characters in a room lacking its fourth wall and listens to them on equal terms, without the element of my story conferred on scenes of intimacy by the whimsical shape of a keyhole.” “L'aigle à deux têtes is not History. It is a story, an invented story lived out by imaginary heroes, and I should never have dared venture into the realistic world of cinema without being able to rely on the help of Christian Bérard. He has a genius for situating whatever he touches, for giving it a depth in time and space and an appearance of truth that are literally inimitable.” (...) “A drama of this kind would be unacceptable, and almost impossible to tell, unless it was interpreted by superb actors who could instill grandeur and life into it. Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais, applauded evening after evening in their parts in the play, surpass themselves on the screen and give of themselves, as I suggested above, everything that they cannot give us on the stage.” “George Auric's music and the Strauss waltzes at the krantz ball make up the liquid in this drama of love and death is immersed.” (...) “In L'aigle à deux têtes, I wanted to make a theatrical film.” (...) “I know the faults of the film, but unfortunately the expense of the medium and the constraints of time that it imposes on us, prevent us from correcting our faults, Cinematography costs too much.” (...) “In Les parents terribles (1948), what I determined to do was the opposite of what I did in L'aigle à deux têtes; to de-theatricalize a play, to film it in chronological order and to catch the characters by surprise from the indiscreet angle of the camera. In short, I wanted to watch a family through the keyhole instead of observing its life from a seat in the stalls.

Dominant people and groups used power to: • declare what styles of music will and will not be used • determine what historical religious leaders looked like racially • decide which teachings to emphasize, and which to downplay • determine what religious education literature to use • decide which pictures or other art goes on the walls • declare who the spiritual heroes are and why • decide which aspects of history to remember and how to interpret the past • decide who is mature in their faith, and who is not • determine how much race and ethnicity will be talked about • declare that race is not important and will not be discussed • declare that the race of those in leadership does not matter • look at and treat the non-majority groups with paternalism • force others to assimilate or leave the congregation • determine the culture through which the faith will be interpreted • determine the culture through which faith will be practiced • make others feel powerless • remain ignorant about other cultures • determine if change will happen and the pace of change (almost always, slowly) • make people feel small, unimportant, like outsiders • deny having power

I taught mathematics here at the university for many years. But before that time, I used to create beautiful music with my beloved wife, who passed away. Her name was Sarah.” He paused for a moment to gather himself after uttering her name, but then continued. “I didn’t play for many years after she died, but one thing that loss has taught me is that keeping a gift locked away only brings harm. It is essential to express ourselves. Walls and doors keep out not just the bad but also the good. It is our job to own the keys of our freedom, and to be able to open those doors. I spent many years behind a closed door without knowing where to find the key to my life, but thanks to my music, I am now finding my way out. To quote an extraordinary but lesser-known philosopher, my late wife Sarah Held, ‘What is life without the beauty of art or music or poetry to help us interpret it, encourage us to know how to feel, how to love and how to live?’ In music I see the darkness, the light, the messiness, the beauty, and the complexities of life that simply can’t be summed up like an equation. Music, for me, helps bring down the walls, to open those locked doors. And I hope it has been that way for you too, tonight.

My mother never seemed to listen to much music, but she loved Barbara Streisand, counting The Way We Were and Yentl as two of her favorite films. I remembered how we used to sing the song "Tell Him" together, and skipped through the album until I found it on track four. "Remember this?" I laughed, turning up the volume. It's a duet between Babe and Celine Dion, two powerhouse divas joining together for one epic track. Celine plays the role of a young woman afraid to confess her feelings to the man she loves, and Barbara is her confidant, encouraging her to take the plunge. "I'm scared, so afraid to show I care... Will he think me weak, if I tremble when I speak?" Celine begins. When I was a kid my mother used to quiver her lower lip for dramatic effect when she sang the word "tremble." We would trade verses in the living room. I was Barbara and she was Celine, the two of us adding interpretive dance and yearning facial expressions to really sell it. "I've been there, with my heart out in my hand..." I'd join in, a trail of chimes punctuating my entrance. "But what you must understand, you can't let the chance to love him pass you by!" I'd exclaim, prancing from side to side, raising my hand to urge my voice upward, showcasing my exaggerated vocal range. Then, together, we'd join in triumphantly. "Tell him! Tell him that the sun and moon rise in his eyes! Reach out to him!" And we'd ballroom dance in a circle along the carpet, staring into each other's eyes as we crooned along to the chorus. My mom let out a soft giggle from the passenger seat and we sang quietly the rest of the way home. Driving out past the clearing just as the sun went down, the scalloped clouds flushed with a deep orange that made it look like magma.

Man, rather the Superman, by participating with his Self, not with his 'I', in the immense process of Energy, which Nietzsche calls Will of Power, He does it without changing anything, accepting the fatality of chance of the Eternal Return, because you can not modify it, you can not change a single blade, or a detail, or a star. However, by accepting the Eternal Return, having had the 'vision' (which includes nostalgia) has passed, in an instant (at the Gateway of the Moment) to modify everything irremediably and forever. How? Giving The Sense your acceptance. That is, he has created, he has invented an Inexistent Flower, but it is more real than all the flowers of the gardens of the earth. We will not try to explain this mostly, because you can not. the same Superman is a creation of this kind, non-existent, an illusion. Pure magic. It is not real and it is more real than everything real. Without us everything will return, without doubt, but when we enter to intervene, wishing it with the Self and from the Self, everything will return in a different way, everything will be different, even when nothing has changed apparently. However, the alteration is essential, definitive: chance has been transformed into destination. Amor fati takes ownership of the process. This is why Nietzsche is a magician, a poet-magician. We will return to this key point and center of the Drama, which is thus transmuted into game, in the Great Game of the Maya-Power, in the Dance of the Shakti-Power. It's a Comedy, a Gay-Comedy, a histrionics, a slapstick, an affair cheerful, or a joy of pain, as Nietzsche would like to say, imagining that 'the highest music would be the one that could interpret the joy of pain and none another.' It is a Divine Comedy.

She has a genius,” distinguished Simon Iff. “Her dancing is a species of angelic possession, if I may coin a phrase. She comes off the stage from an interpretation of the subtlest and most spiritual music of Chopin or Tschaikowsky; and forthwith proceeds to scold, to wheedle, or to blackmail. Can you explain that reasonably by talking of ‘two sides to her character’? It is nonsense to do so. The only analogy is that of noble thinker and his stupid, dishonest, and immoral secretary. The dictation is taken down correctly, and given to the world. The last person to be enlightened by it is the secretary himself! So, I take it, is the case with all genius; only in many cases the man is in more or less conscious harmony with his genius, and strives eternally to make himself a worthier instrument for his master’s touch. The clever man, so-called, the man of talent, shuts out his genius by setting up his conscious will as a positive entity. The true man of genius deliberately subordinates himself, reduces himself to a negative, and allows his genius to play through him as It will. We all know how stupid we are when we try to do things. Seek to make any other muscle work as consistently as your heart does without your silly interference—you cannot keep it up for forty-eight hours. All this, which is truth ascertained and certain, lies at the base of the Taoistic doctrine of non-action; the plan of doing everything by seeming to do nothing. Yield yourself utterly to the Will of Heaven, and you become the omnipotent instrument of that Will. Most systems of mysticism have a similar doctrine; but that it is true in action is only properly expressed by the Chinese. Nothing that any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle. All our little great men, our one-poem poets, our one-picture painters, have merely failed to perfect themselves as instruments.

No Mirrors in My Nana’s House” Sweet Honey in the Rock LYRICS BY YSAYE MARIA BARNWELL Sweet Honey in the Rock is a Grammy Award–winning vocal group of black women vocalists founded in 1973 by Bernice Johnson Reagon. The group’s members have changed during its long tenure, but it retains a core of five vocalists and a sign-language interpreter. Their performances are deeply embodied celebrations of black women’s lived experiences. The group’s name is derived from Psalm 81:16: “But you would be fed with the finest of wheat; with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” Sign-language interpreter Dr. Ysaye Barnwell joined Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1979 and appears in more than thirty recordings with the group. She is the author of one of the group’s most popular recordings, “No Mirrors in My Nana’s House.” It is a stirring piece that reveals how the loving protection of black women can shield black girls from a painful world that seeks to negate their beauty and worth. In 1998 the lyrics became a children’s book published by Harcourt Brace. There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house, no mirrors in my Nana’s house. There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house, no mirrors in my Nana’s house. And the beauty that I saw in everything was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun). I never knew that my skin was too black. I never knew that my nose was too flat. I never knew that my clothes didn’t fit. I never knew there were things that I’d missed, cause the beauty in everything was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun); . . . was in her eyes. There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house, no mirrors in my Nana’s house. And the beauty that I saw in everything was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun). I was intrigued by the cracks in the walls. I tasted, with joy, the dust that would fall. The noise in the hallway was music to me. The trash and the rubbish just cushioned my feet. And the beauty in everything was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun). . . . was in her eyes. There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house, no mirrors in my Nana’s house. And the beauty that I saw in everything was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun). The world outside was a magical place. I only knew love. I never knew hate, and the beauty in everything was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun). . . . was in her eyes. There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house, no mirrors in my Nana’s house. There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house, no mirrors in my Nana’s house. And the beauty that I saw in everything was in her eyes (like the rising of the sun).

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends. In this condition of apprehensive sobriety we are able to see that the contents of literature, art, music—even in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics—are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good reason that they had no intellectual methods for dealing with them. In the arts, in philosophy, in religion men are trying—doubtless, without complete success—to describe and explain the non-measurable, purely qualitative aspects of reality. Since the time of Galileo, scientists have admitted, sometimes explicitly but much more often by implication, that they are incompetent to discuss such matters. The scientific picture of the world is what it is because men of science combine this incompetence with certain special competences. They have no right to claim that this product of incompetence and specialization is a complete picture of reality. As a matter of historical fact, however, this claim has constantly been made. The successive steps in the process of identifying an arbitrary abstraction from reality with reality itself have been described, very fully and lucidly, in Burtt’s excellent “Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science"; and it is therefore unnecessary for me to develop the theme any further. All that I need add is the fact that, in recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one—the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religious experiences and intuitions of significance. Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed—and the belief often caused them considerable distress—that the product of their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience. The masses, on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today’s scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.

He was but three-and-twenty, and had only just learned what it is to love—­to love with that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. And this blessed gift of venerating love has been given to too many humble craftsmen since the world began for us to feel any surprise that it should have existed in the soul of a Methodist carpenter half a century ago, while there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time when Wesley and his fellow-labourer fed on the hips and haws of the Cornwall hedges, after exhausting limbs and lungs in carrying a divine message to the poor. That afterglow has long faded away; and the picture we are apt to make of Methodism in our imagination is not an amphitheatre of green hills, or the deep shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of rough men and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy. It is too possible that to some of my readers Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical jargon—­elements which are regarded as an exhaustive analysis of Methodism in many fashionable quarters. That would be a pity; for I cannot pretend that Seth and Dinah were anything else than Methodists—­not indeed of that modern type which reads quarterly reviews and attends in chapels with pillared porticoes, but of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots, and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at hazard; having a literal way of interpreting the Scriptures, which is not at all sanctioned by approved commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—­if I have read religious history aright—­faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—­thank Heaven!—­to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour’s child to “stop the fits,” may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost. Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah and Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions.

A sea change. A transformative change. The sister arts no longer reflecting the natural bent of shared rules but giving way to a chaos of art forms. An expression of a newfound freedom, indication of a cognitive shift. General intelligence took over from hard-wired proclivity. It was a change of mental place, a shift in where problem solving was done, whether in making a work of art or coming up with a scientific explanation. That shift in mental activity is what we call modernism. Artists used a different part of the brain to create art. Modernism and post-Newtonian science were both part and parcel of the same thing: the brain relinquishing natural proclivities for the products of general intelligence. Art interpretation as the ultimate Turing test.

They instinctively know that, in order to grow, they have to fail. The faster the better. Falling to the ice isn’t interpreted as a personal failing, but as priceless feedback.

You have to be more than an interpreter. You have to be a creator as well. Music is a dream, as life is a dream. It is never finished. It is always becoming. It is not your task to play every note with arithmetical precision. It is your task to allow the music to flow through you and become what it wants to become.

The important point here is that music for the Greeks and the wider classical tradition was not so much understood as something performed, composed, practiced, or played; rather, music was interpreted as a mathematical discipline that sought to discover and formalize the symmetrical relations between sounds.6 It was an integral component to the mathematical disciplines that comprised the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. For the classical mind, arithmetic revealed “number in itself,” geometry revealed “number in space,” music revealed “number in time,” and astronomy revealed “number in space and time.” In this sense, music was an integral part of the Greek educational curriculum which functioned as a metaphor for this whole cosmic chain of interrelationships and harmonies. Indeed, Plato could say: “The whole choral art is also in our view the whole of education” (Laws, Bk II). The Greeks understood the nature of reality and its systems of relations in musical terms.

Over the last few decades there have been some fascinating studies that revealed that people who get a physical reaction from music might have structural differences in their brain. Some people have a physical response while others will just hear the songs, enjoy it, but it doesn’t transport them anywhere. Brain scans have shown that the people who get a more palpable response have a higher volume of fibres that connect their auditory cortex to the areas associated with emotional processing, which means the two areas communicate better. They also tend to have a higher prefrontal cortex, which is involved in certain areas of understanding, like interpreting the world more metaphorically, and that obviously helps them develop not just a natural gift interpreting music, but also creating it.

No one tries to talk me out of a migraine aura. I never try to interpret the shimmering geometric shapes or figure out the scintillating stairways crawling in the corners of my vision. No matter how hard I stare, I’ll never see my friend’s eye. I just navigate by what I can see. I’m gentle with myself, and my friends care for me while I wait for it to go away. This same gentle patience is the treatment for OCD. I needed the patience to remember that OCD is a broken record, thoughts endlessly looping between the thalamus, cortex, and cingulate gyrus. The scratch that connected the record grooves was only deepened by researching, ruminating on, and then carefully avoiding things that scared me. I had to find a new way of knowing—so I could move on with the music.

Nonsense! It doesn’t matter whether or not something actually happened to the writer—or to the person interpreting the song. On the contrary, it is the music and the lyrics that trigger the emotions within us, rather than the other way around. We don’t make music—it makes us. Which is maybe the point of this whole book.

The insatiable ambiguity of sentimental resonance with which we interpret music purely on the basis of emotions is evident through the impotency speech possesses in defining them.

The past is us,’ Catherine said without removing her eyes from the letter. ‘That’s why history is so significant. It defines nations, and in turn countries and smaller family units. We need to study and interpret the past to make sense of the present.

Such creatures were what they saw, because they now rigidly coded the neurons responsible for the sight. For humans too, the brain loses some of its unbounded intelligence whenever it perceives the universe across boundaries. That partial blindness remains inescapable without the ability to transcend. Impressions on our neurons are constantly being set for each of the senses, not just sight. Though we usually call the heavier impressions "stress," all impressions actually create some limitation. For illustrate: In the early 1980s, M.I.T. experts began studying how human hearing function. Hearing seems passive, but in fact every person listens quite selectively to the world and puts his own interpretation on the raw data that comes into his ears. (For example, a skilled singer hears pitch and harmony where a tone-deaf person hears noise.) One experiment involves people listening to fast, basic rhythms (1-2-3 and 1-2-3 and 1-2-3), and teaching them to hear the rhythm differently (1, 2, 3-and-l, 2, 3-and-l, 2). After the noises started to be interpreted distinctly, the participants indicated that the sounds became more vibrant and fresher. The experiment evidently had taught people to change their unseen limits somewhat. The really interesting result, however, was that when they went home these people found the colours seemed lighter, music sounded better, the taste of food immediately became more pleasant, and everyone around them seemed lovable. Just the slightest consciousness opening induced a change in reality. Meditation causes a bigger shift because it opens more channels of awareness and opens them to a deeper level. The shift does not separate us from the normal way we use our consciousness. Building borders will continue to be a fact of life. The twist provided by the rishis was to infuse this behavior with liberation, increasing it to a level which transcends the alienated ego's petty thoughts and desires. The ego typically has no choice but to actively waste life erecting one wall after another.

All of this speculation is fitting in assessing the life of a composer whose music seems to demand interpretation but resists it, a man who learned to live behind a mask, a father who realized that, in order to keep his children safe, he had to create speech that was silent, and silence that spoke.

Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both. ‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions. After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’. Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’. The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’. Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.

...musical interpreters should put themselves at the service of the composer, instead of perverting their music as an opportunity for image cultivation. I am not ready to give up my belief that human beings have an inborn longing for real profundity. I am firmly convinced that the deep emotion that music can evoke in us is not to be found on its surface. That which is truly great develops out of intimacy and humility towards the work of art.

I would also say that poems are impressionistic, but that impressionism is a kind of truth. Poems shouldn’t be read for their evidence of rights and wrongs nor for their voyeurism into a person’s life, but for the ways they make atmospheres, music, and imagery communal with the reader for a brief moment. All writers struggle with this issue of being fair or not, presenting episodes or interactions in ways that are just or truthful. I guess I’d say that poems are not meant to be fair and that all artists should be allowed to present complexity and multidimensionality in ways that expand our humanness. A good poem doesn’t necessarily take sides, but offers layers to interpret. I think my poems about family really begin from a place of uncertainty and confusion, not necessarily from a place of authority. To me, this distinction matters. I’m figuring out something with the reader as the poem unfolds, I’m not going in there with an agenda.

The nice thing about jazz is its imperfection….Imcompleteness distinguishes jazz from any other type of music. In classical music, for example, the score contains all the notes to be played. The performer reads it and plays the written notes, nothing less but also nothing more. His performance is all about the many different ways he can interpret those notes, but the notes are always the same. In jazz, the score in just the starting point.

He’d just interpreted his brother’s enthusiasm, blending his own fantasies in to add a little extra flavouring. But this new music had a spiritual thing going for it. This was his music, the sound of his soul rising up, and as he leaned forward to embrace it

The solfeggio is a six-note scale and is also nicknamed “the creational scale.” Traditional Indian music calls this scale the saptak, or seven steps, and relates each note to a chakra. These six frequencies, and their related effects, are as follows: Do 396 Hz Liberating guilt and fear Re 417 Hz Undoing situations and facilitating change Mi 528 Hz Transformation and miracles (DNA repair) Fa 639 Hz Connecting/relationships Sol 741 Hz Awakening intuition La 852 Hz Returning to spiritual order Mi has actually been used by molecular biologists to repair genetic defects.115 Some researchers believe that sound governs the growth of the body. As Dr. Michael Isaacson and Scott Klimek teach in a sound healing class at Normandale College in Minneapolis, Dr. Alfred Tomatis believes that the ear’s first in utero function is to establish the growth of the rest of the body. Sound apparently feeds the electrical impulses that charge the neocortex. High-frequency sounds energize the brain, creating what Tomatis calls “charging sounds.”116 Low-frequency sounds drain energy and high-frequency sounds attract energy. Throughout all of life, sound regulates the sending and receiving of energy—even to the point of creating problems. People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder listen too much with their bodies, processing sound through bone conduction rather than the ears. They are literally too “high in sound.”117 Some scientists go a step further and suggest that sound not only affects the body but also the DNA, actually stimulating the DNA to create information signals that spread throughout the body. Harvard-trained Dr. Leonard Horowitz has actually demonstrated that DNA emits and receives phonons and photons, the electromagnetic waves of sound and light. As well, three Nobel laureates in medical research have asserted that the primary function of DNA is not to synthesize proteins, but to perform bioacoustic and bioelectrical signaling.118 While research such as that by Dr. Popp shows that DNA is a biophoton emitter, other research suggests that sound actually originates light. In a paper entitled “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” which was featured in Stanley Krippner’s book Psychoenergetic Systems, a team of researchers led by Richard Miller showed that superposed coherent waves in the cells interact and form patterns first through sound, and secondly through light.119 This idea dovetails with research by Russian scientists Peter Gariaev and Vladimir Poponin, whose work with torsion energies was covered in Chapter 25. They demonstrated that chromosomes work like holographic biocomputers, using the DNA’s own electromagnetic radiation to generate and interpret spiraling waves of sound and light that run up and down the DNA ladder. Gariaev and his group used language frequencies such as words (which are sounds) to repair chromosomes damaged by X-rays. Gariaev thus concludes that life is electromagnetic rather than chemical and that DNA can be activated with linguistic expressions—or sounds—like an antenna. In turn, this activation modifies the human bioenergy fields, which transmit radio and light waves to bodily structures.120