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.

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

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.

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)]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

She didn't much care if it was or wasn't the musical portrait of the cellist, it's likely that he'd fabricated in his mind any alleged similarities, real or imagined, but what impressed death was that she seemed to hear in those fifty-eight seconds of music a rhythmical and melodic transposition of every and any human life, be it run-of-the-mill or extraordinary, because of its tragic brevity, its desperate intensity, and also because of that final chord, like an ellipsis left hanging in the air, something yet to be said. The cellist had fallen into one of the least forgivable of human sins, that of presumption, when he thought he could see his face, and his alone, in a portrait in which everyone could be found, a presumption which, however, if we think about it, if we choose not to remain on the surface of things, could equally be interpreted as a manifestation of its polar opposite, that is, of humility, since if it is a portrait of everyone, then I must be included in it too.

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

Many resented how some expressions of Englishness were allowed, while others were not. It was acceptable to love the English countryside, English humour, English music and English Literature, and to see these aspects of Englishness as welcoming, humane, full of energy and creativity. But the moment Englishness took a political form it became anathema. Even mild forms of patriotism were frowned upon. The English flag was acceptable fluttering from a church tower in a picturesque village, but was instantly interpreted as a form of racism if hanging from someone's window on an estate.

It’s just fantastic. It was like scales falling from your eyes and from your ears at the same time. It broke open the dam. Ian Stewart used to refer to us affectionately as “my little three-chord wonders.” But it is an honorable title. OK, this song has got three chords, right? What can you do with those three chords? Tell it to John Lee Hooker; most of his songs are on one chord. Howlin’ Wolf stuff, one chord, and Bo Diddley. It was listening to them that made me realize that silence was the canvas. Filling it all in and speeding about all over the place was certainly not my game and it wasn’t what I enjoyed listening to. With five strings you can be sparse; that’s your frame, that’s what you work on. “Start Me Up,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” “Honky Tonk Women,” all leave those gaps between the chords. That’s what I think “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. I wasn’t thinking like that in those days, but that’s what hit me. It was the incredible depth, instead of everything being filled in with curlicues. To a kid of my age back then, it was startling. With the five-string it was just like turning a page; there’s another story. And I’m still exploring. My man Waddy Wachtel, guitar player extraordinaire, interpreter of my musical gropings, ace up the sleeve of the X-Pensive Winos, has something to say on this topic. Take the floor, Wads.

The other notable dissenter was playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wittily and acerbically expressed his view that the whole Titanic story had been created in the press to fit a rigid formula, which he called “an explosion of outrageous romantic lying.” The band playing on deck was, according to Shaw, part of the preordained story. He didn’t deny that it happened but offered a different interpretation of events. Possibly, he suggested, the music produced complacency rather than courage and therefore was in part responsible for the high death toll. What he referred to as “the romantic demand” was that “Everybody must face death without a tremor, and the band, according to the Birkenhead precedent,3 must play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.

Thanks so much, George Harrison, for the lyrics penned smoothly and interpreted by the help of music dragomen; for songs sung with the primal inhalation of rhapsody; for the oomph of demonstrable talents; for the mild, wind-tossed guitar riffs; and for The Beatles, whose melodies and Rock ‘n’ Roll verge on the brims of sustainable solace.

Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. 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 then could 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?

No one should ever underestimate the influence that Pete Townshend has had on popular music. There is no question in my mind that both he and The Who were every bit as influential as The Beatles and the Stones as the UK invasion took America and the rest of the world by storm. He was equally as innovative as a musician and lyricist, finding a way to state the feelings of the mod generation he and the band represented. The combination of these four unlikely cohorts interpreting Pete’s writing was something to behold, each of them contributing in his own original way. The seemingly uncontrolled explosion of energy they produced, glued together by exceptional musicianship.

The ‘magic’ of Lothlórien has many roots (some of them to be discussed later on), but there is one thing about it which is again highly traditional, but also in a way a strong re-interpretation and rationalization of tradition. There are many references to elves in Old English and Old Norse and Middle English, and indeed in modern English – belief in them seems to have lasted longer than is the case with any of the other non-human races of early native mythology – but one story which remains strongly consistent is the story about the mortal going into Elfland, best known, perhaps, from the ballads of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’. The mortal enters, spends what seems to be a night, or three nights, in music and dancing. But when he comes out and returns home he is a stranger, everyone he once knew is dead, there is only a dim memory of the man once lost in Elf-hill. Elvish time, it seems, flows far slower than human time. Or is it far quicker? For there is another motif connected with elves, which is that when their music plays, everything outside stands still. In the Danish ballad of ‘Elf-hill’ (Elverhøj), when the elf-maiden sings: ‘The swift stream then stood still, that before had been running; the little fish that swam in it played their fins in time’. Tolkien did not at all mind deciding that ancient scribes had got a word wrong, and correcting it for them, but he was at the same time reluctant ever to think that they had got the whole story wrong, just because it did not seem to make sense: it was his job to make it make sense. Lothlórien in a way reconciles the two motifs of the ‘The Night that Lasts a Century’ and ‘The Stream that Stood Still’. The Fellowship ‘remained some days in Lothlórien, as far as they could tell or remember’. But when they come out Sam looks up at the moon, and is puzzled: ‘The Moon’s the same in the Shire and in Wilderland, or it ought to be. But either it’s out of its running, or I’m all wrong in my reckoning.’ He concludes, it is ‘as if we had never stayed no time in the Elvish country…Anyone would think that time did not count in there!’ Frodo agrees with him, and suggests that in Lothlórien they had entered a world beyond time. But Legolas the elf offers a deeper explanation, not from the human point of view but from the elvish (which no ancient text had ever tried to penetrate). For the elves, he says: ‘the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.’ What Legolas says makes perfect sense, from the viewpoint of an immortal. It also explains how mortals are deceived when they enter into elvish time, and can interpret it as either fast or slow. All the stories about elves were correct. Their contradictions can be put together to create a deeper and more unpredictable image of Elfland, at once completely original and solidly traditional.

We await their creative interpretations of works by others and we love how they freely adapt and alter the music we like and enjoy. The wonderful magical alchemy they co-create is enough to spur the imagination of the audience. There is no need for other instruments or vocals. The music alone suffices. Listening to them, we can close our eyes and be taken away to a faraway place, we can envision a story or embellish a memory. We can connect to spirit and source and what we connect to in our deepest being is akin to religious experience. They dedicate themselves to each performance fearlessly, courageously, passionately, and generously.

Braid groups have many important practical applications. For example, they are used to construct efficient and robust public key encryption algorithms.7 Another promising direction is designing quantum computers based on creating complex braids of quantum particles known as anyons. Their trajectories weave around each other, and their overlaps are used to build “logic gates” of the quantum computer.8 There are also applications in biology. Given a braid with n threads, we can number the nails on the two plates from 1 to n from left to right. Then, connect the ends of the threads attached to the nails with the same number on the two plates. This will create what mathematicians call a “link”: a union of loops weaving around each other. In the example shown on this picture, there is only one loop. Mathematicians’ name for it is “knot.” In general, there will be several closed threads. The mathematical theory of links and knots is used in biology: for example, to study bindings of DNA and enzymes.9 We view a DNA molecule as one thread, and the enzyme molecule as another thread. It turns out that when they bind together, highly non-trivial knotting between them may occur, which may alter the DNA. The way they entangle is therefore of great importance. It turns out that the mathematical study of the resulting links sheds new light on the mechanisms of recombination of DNA. In mathematics, braids are also important because of their geometric interpretation. To explain it, consider all possible collections of n points on the plane. We will assume that the points are distinct; that is, for any two points, their positions on the plane must be different. Let’s choose one such collection; namely, n points arranged on a straight line, with the same distance between neighboring points. Think of each point as a little bug. As we turn on the music, these bugs come alive and start moving on the plane. If we view the time as the vertical direction, then the trajectory of each bug will look like a thread. If the positions of the bugs on the plane are distinct at all times – that is, if we assume that the bugs don’t collide – then these threads will never intersect. While the music is playing, they can move around each other, just like the threads of a braid. However, we demand that when we stop the music after a fixed period of time, the bugs must align on a straight line in the same way as at the beginning, but each bug is allowed to end up in a position initially occupied by another bug. Then their collective path will look like a braid with n threads. Thus, braids with n threads may be viewed as paths in the space of collections of n distinct points on the plane.10

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. —

It is a stupendous fact about nature that the territorial disputes of thousands of species [of birds] are something like artistic contests — song duels. The struggle is mainly musical (countersigning), not pugilistic.

The Moscow audience had of course heard it many times before, but Van’s interpretation was extraordinary. The work’s thundering octaves and delicate filigree were perfectly rendered. Musical lines soared and swooped and darted swiftly to and fro, unfolding a narrative that sounded both noble and ardent, majestic fanfares alternating with lovelorn airs. From the concerto’s opening piano chords, which pealed like colossal church bells, to its dark bass rumblings and songful melodies, every tone was imbued with an inner glow, with long phrases concluding in an emphatic, edgy pounce. The effect was simply breathtaking.

This is the—always rare—power of those who can both see the unknown and interpret it. For most of us, the other half of sanity lies simply in seeing and enjoying the unknown, just as we can enjoy music without knowing either how it is written or how the body hears it.

Inside the studio walls the alpha male personalities of James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich battled for territory, their sometimes discordant creative visions coalescing to the point where no aspect of the music being made was left unexamined or unsubjected to alternative methods of interpretation. The pair were learning that in order that an instrument in a song be emphasised, by definition another instrument must be de-emphasised, thus beginning a battle between guitarist and drummer, the energy from which would fuel the group for years to come.

we might not be fully appreciating Bach’s output if we take him simply or essentially to be a supplier of pitches, rhythms, and tone colors, however marvelous or magnificent these rich aspects of his works may indeed be. Likewise, we might not fully appreciate the range of plausible meanings projected by Bach’s works if we simply analyze the verbal content of his librettos. Accepting the idea that Bach’s musical settings can theologically expand upon and interpret his librettos need not involve downplaying the aesthetic splendor of his works. I would like to suggest, moreover, that insisting on exclusively aesthetic contemplation of Bach’s music potentially diminishes its meanings and actually reduces its stature.

There is a significant difference between skillful singing and artistic vocal interpretation. Although skillful singing brings joy to many listeners, only a remarkable vocal interpretation may cause people to be overcome with emotion.

If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as paint¬ ing or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

Perhaps it means that we are, in every moment, to remember the whole, to remember the gift of life, to remember the preciousness of every second. When we do this remembering, something shifts inside us. When we do this remembering, we talk differently, we act differently, and we treat self and others differently. When we keep our awareness on this moment with gratitude, we increase our ability to choose how we act and how we interact with the world. To worship is to remember the sacred, however we conceive of it. ... When we slow down and open our heart and mind, we realize that we can't conclusively answer any of the really big questions about existence, especially questions of meaning. Not that we should stop trying! But slowing own and opening up allows us to enter a state of wonderment and humility in the face of the vastness of creation. This state is one of worship, a silent and embodied worship that is not necessarily shaped by specific ritual. Rather it is shaped by our intention and our willingness to understand on a profound level our small place in the Universe. This embodied worship allows our kinship with all beings and all of nature to become more than just apparent to our conscious mind. This kinship is now lived from our very cells. To experience this level of joy is not only to worship it is also to become worship. ... You could say that to worship is to invite the sacred to fill our body, mind, and soul, to surrender to the great mystery, however we experience it and whatever name we give it. The great benefit of this willingness to invite the sacred in is that it helps us feel healed and whole in that moment. When we worship in this broad way, we surrender our struggling ego and mind to the wholeness of creation and thus feel a little less burdened, a little less overwhelmed, a little less afraid. ... Worship is rather an internal shift stimulated by the external activity that we call ritual. To worship is to assume a new relationship with yourself and all creation - with God. To worship is to be willing to be unsure, unresolved, to admit how much we don't know and will never know. I invite you, dear reader, to be open to daily worship, to set aside any narrow interpretation of what worship is. Instead, allow yourself to imagine the possibility of creating a continuous conversation with the sacred. That is the path of the mystic, and it can live as a comfortable companion in a secular life. Worship is the music of the soul and as much is the ultimate universal language. In the end, to worship is to acknowledge life on the deepest level. Perhaps life itself is the ultimate prayer, the ultimate worship.

In the clay, there is a tiger and the problem is neither in the question nor is in the text, it is in interpretation. You can listen or read the answer in folk literature and Sufi music. To belong is to have a grammar and in grammar there are exceptions. You can never belong fully except to the gravity of the universe. We belong anyways.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.

I was and still am a big Dylan fan and admirer, so I asked Bob Johnston if there was any way he could let me play on just one session. Sessions in Nashville are scheduled so you can fit four into a day: 10: 00 a.m., 2: 00 p.m., 6: 00 p.m., and 10: 00 p.m. As it happened, the guitar player they had scheduled for the 6: 00 p.m. session couldn’t make it and wouldn’t show up until the 10: 00 p.m. session, so Bob fit me in for 6: 00 p.m. I was the hungriest musician in the studio. I hung on every note that Bob Dylan sang and played on his guitar and did my best to interpret his music with feeling and passion. When the session was over, I was packing up my guitars to head to my club gig, and Bob Dylan asked Bob Johnston, “Where is Charlie going?” Bob told him I was leaving and that he had another guitar player coming in. Then Bob Dylan said nine little words that would affect my life from that moment on. He said, “I don’t want another guitar player. I want him.” And there it was. After all the put downs, condescension, and snide remarks, after all the times I’d driven to the hill above my house and shook my fist at Nashville and said, “You will not beat me.” After all that rejection, none other than the legendary Bob Dylan was saying that I might be worth something after all. It’s bits of encouragement like that that keep you going. Once in a while something just lights you up and you say, “Yeah, I can do this.

Marjorie’s father pulled her aside that night and asked her if she knew the answer to the white man’s question, and she had shrugged. Her father had told her that the word had come to mean something entirely different from what it used to mean. That the young of Ghana, itself an infant country, had been born to a place emptied of its colonizers. Because they didn’t see white men every day the way people of his mother’s generation and older had, the word could take on new meaning for them. They lived in a Ghana where they were the majority, where theirs was the only skin color for miles around. To them, to call someone “obroni” was an innocent act, an interpretation of race as skin color. Now, keeping her head down and fighting back tears as Tisha and her friends called her “white girl,” Marjorie was made aware, yet again, that here “white” could be the way a person talked; “black,” the music a person listened to. In Ghana you could only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world.

Interpreting literature was like performing a piece of music. It was a matter of lines and phrases, of hearing the resonance and learning where the stress falls. The note A has little significance by itself, just like the words love and yes. Yet placed just right, surrounded by other notes, other words, even a single tone can absorb all the forcefulness of our need, returning it to us as meaning.

Zwicker’s chief finding, accrued over decades of research with real-world test subjects, was that the human ear did not act like a microphone. Instead it was an adaptive organ, one that natural selection had determined should 1) hear and interpret language and 2) provide an early warning system against enormous carnivorous cats.

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.

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

Because people's experiences differ, what they hear in the music will be different, and how they relate it to broader life experience will also be different. Furthermore, idiosyncrasy in musical interpretation is something to be celebrated rather than condemned. [...] [W]e should think of the score not as the work itself but rather as a useful tool to help us arrive at our individual interpretation of a piece.

Because people's experiences differ, what they hear in the music will be different, and how they relate it to broader life experience will also be different. Furthermore, idiosyncrasy in musical interpretation is something to be celebrated rather than condemned. [...] [W]e should think of the score not as the work itself but rather as a useful tool to help us arrive at our individual interpretation of a piece.Because people's experiences differ, what they hear in the music will be different, and how they relate it to broader life experience will also be different. [...] [I]diosyncrasy in musical interpretation is something to be celebrated rather than condemned. [...] [W]e should think of the score not as the work itself but rather as a useful tool to help us arrive at our individual interpretation of a piece.

Because people's experiences differ, what they hear in the music will be different, and how they relate it to broader life experience will also be different. [...] [I]diosyncrasy in musical interpretation is something to be celebrated rather than condemned. Furthermore, we should think of the score not as the work itself but rather as a useful tool to help us arrive at our individual interpretation of a piece.

The “song” (he felt the word’s inadequacy, but knew no other word for it) had taken on for him all the significance of a historical, even a revolutionary event. He wondered how its existence had never been celebrated, or indeed mentioned in the newspapers. The music itself seemed to invite, even demand, a revolutionary interpretation. Not just in the sheer immensity of its sounds, the tremendous, earth-shaking importance asserted in its whispers and crashes, but in its progression, the very arrangement of its notes. The song began with trilling ups and downs that surely signified the fermenting, but disorganized, dissatisfaction of the pre-revolutionary proletariat; then, as though from afar, there entered for the first time the major melody, the sad but uplifting theme that came in to give sudden coherence, order, and direction to the impotent turmoil; and eventually, after a few unforeseen deviations, interruptions, and delays that could only signify the War itself, the rising and falling turmoil dropped entirely away, and only the theme remained, stronger and clearer than ever. And

In the development of its love story, Singin’ in the Rain follows a particular plotline that came to have a great deal of currency in Hollywood films, especially in “buddy” films (and most especially those directed by Howard Hawks), involving a kind of “love triangle” in which the long-standing friendship of two men (often a hero and his sidekick) is threatened by the attraction of one of them to a woman introduced early on (the ingénue, although often not exactly an innocent).26 Generally, this plot situation may be taken to carry homosexual overtones, so that the story becomes a parable about embracing heterosexual love. This interpretation is, of course, quite easily avoided, since most sidekicks have next to no discernible sex drive, at least during the film’s story,27 but it is surely significant that, in more recent times, the asexual sidekick is often replaced by a homosexual friend. And even the latter development may be explained away, given the utility of the sidekick plot situation and recent shifts in what audiences might accept as either “natural” or interesting wrinkles on the device. Nevertheless, the homoerotic tension in some of these relationships is significant enough to lay the entire tradition open to this interpretive avenue.

It thus became almost impossible to have one's music heard without first being profitable, in other words, without writing commercial works known to the bourgeoisie. To be successful, a musician first had to attract an audience as an interpreter: representation takes precedence over composition and conditions it. The only authorized composers were successful interpreters of the works of others.

So much that it seems consistent only for porosity37—seen as a kind of productive fragility that overcomes rigid dualisms—to be the key concept by which the nature of the city is revealed and interpreted in all its profundity. Porosity is the principle of the true life of Naples: At the base of the cliff itself, where it touches the shore, caves have been hewn. As in the paintings of hermits from the Trecento, a door appears here and there in the cliffs. If it is open, one looks into large cellars that are at once sleeping places and storerooms. Steps also lead to the sea, to fishermen’s taverns that have been installed in natural grottoes. Faint light and thin music rise up from there in the evening. As porous as those stones is the architecture. Buildings and action merge in courtyards, arcades, and staircases. The space is preserved to act as a stage for new and unforeseen configurations. What is avoided is the definitive, the fully formed. No situation appears as it is, intended forever, no form asserts its “thus and not otherwise.” . . . Because nothing is finished and concluded. Porosity results not only from the indolence of the southern craftsman but above all from the passion for improvisation. For that space and opportunity must be preserved at all costs. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable theaters, animated simultaneously. All share innumerable stages, brought to life simultaneously. Balcony, forecourt, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at once stage and theater box. Even the most miserable wretch is sovereign in his dim, twofold awareness of contributing, however deprived he may be, to one of the images of the Neapolitan street that will never return and, in his poverty, the leisure of enjoying the grand panorama. What is played out on the stairs is the highest school in theatrical direction. The stairs, never entirely revealed, but closed off in the dull northern house-

The plastic world has colonized us. When we climb into the car, airplane, board ships, when we purchase contemporary cuisines, get involved in the television world, from the studio and materials up the image of the world, we enter the world of artificial chemical universes, those of the cinema and their advertisements, of what we should buy and acquire. It is like this with the café-bars and discos, in other words the pleasure of children, and the same with the food that we consume, and the hospitals and schools, the hotels, all chemicals, a substitute. The ventilation of hotels without windows, the doors without keys, similarly the walls and doors and beds and baths, the water, the carpet and the floors. Everything a sham, paradises for allergies. One can say the same of the tones and music, and the attack on clothing cannot be overlooked, as well as the attitude of men resulting from it. The computers are made of this material and therewith our thought, our memory, the simulation of life. And thus life in genetic research begins and ends as a plastic creation and plastic death. Already the announcement has come to us that the museum bring the entire program closer to us on video screens, enlarged, interpreted, free and democratic and individually accessible. We will live in Leonardo’s world. The ground is prepared, now begins the attack on the blood. Much strength will be necessary to survive it.

Dance is how I love myself. The interpretation of music with your body is one of the most fulfilling acts of joy you can give yourself.

In the case of cultural goods, a particularly complicated equation determines value. The socially constructed nature of the valuation process in markets is most clearly visible in the creative and cultural industries because creative works such as art, books, music, and fashion have greater symbolic than material value. For example, readers value books not because of the physical materials (such as paper and ink) that go into the writing and publishing of a book but because of the ideas that the book symbolizes. Special knowledge is required to interpret, understand, and convey this symbolic value and to evaluate cultural goods; individuals need to understand something about art, the history of aesthetic movements in the art world, and the evaluation criteria for art (for example, originality, rarity, technique) to know not only why works by Raoul Dufy are valued but also why they are less valued (and therefore, also less expensive) than those by his contemporary, the abstract artist Pablo Picasso. Thus, the symbolism inherent to cultural goods—which distinguishes them from strictly utilitarian goods, such as, for example, paintbrushes—creates a barrier to their understanding and valuation.

Think of the new conception of time, Digital Presentism, like real-time streaming of progressively generated content in immersive virtual reality. We’re all familiar with online music streaming, too: When you stream music online, every bit is discretely rendered, interpreted and finally interwoven into your unitary experiential reality. Only with Digital Presentism 'music' is also being created in 'real time' as if right from your mind... Since time can’t be absolute but is always subjective, Digital Presentism revolves around observer-centric temporality. What we call ‘time’ is a sequential change between static perceptual 'frames,' it’s an emergent phenomenon, 'a moving image of eternity' as Plato famously said more than two millennia ago.

The moral interpretation makes the world unbearable. Christianity was the attempt to "overcome" the world by it; i.e., to negate it. In praxi, such a murderous attempt of insanity — an insane self-elevation of man above the world — resulted in making man gloomy, small, and impoverished: only the most mediocre and harmless type of man, the herd type, profited by it, was advanced by it, if you like. Homer as an artist of apotheosis; Rubens also. Music has not yet had one. The idealization of the man of great sacrilege (a sense of his greatness) is Greek; depreciation, slandering, contempt for the sinner is Judeo-Christian.

In that sense, the sacred music of the liturgy, like the sermon, has a kind of exegetical function in which explanation, interpretation, and commentary on Scripture are expected.

music or poetry to help us interpret it, encourage us to know how to feel, how to love and how to live?

a child experiences abuse, their brain may make an association between the features of the abuser or the circumstances of the abuse—hair color, tone of voice, the music playing in the background—and a sense of fear. The complex and confusing associations can influence behaviors for years; later in life, for example, being served in a restaurant by a brown-haired man who hovers over you while he takes your order may elicit a panic attack. But because there is no firmly embedded cognitive recollection—no linear narrative memory—the panic is often experienced and interpreted as random, independent of any previous experience.

Happiness Habits I have a series of tricks I use to try and be happier in the moment. At first, they were silly and difficult and required a lot of attention, but now some of them have become second nature. By doing them religiously, I’ve managed to increase my happiness level quite a bit. The obvious one is meditation—insight meditation. Working toward a specific purpose on it, which is to try and understand how my mind works. [7] Just being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?” I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second. [7] I try to get more sunlight on my skin. I look up and smile. [7] Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?” You’re going to find with the vast majority of things it’s just not true. [7] I think dropping caffeine made me happier. It makes me more of a stable person. [7] I think working out every day made me happier. If you have peace of body, it’s easier to have peace of mind. [7] The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. [77] Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person. [5] Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock. [11] The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be. [11] Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for rest of day. [11] Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, houses, clothes, money) than for natural things (food, sex, exercise). [11] No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. [11] A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? [11] It’s the news’ job to make you anxious and angry. But its underlying scientific, economic, education, and conflict trends are positive. Stay optimistic. [11] Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people. [11] Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.

Dylan, Duende, Death and Lorca Does Bob Dylan have Duende? DUENDE dancers perform moving, unique, unrepeatable performances Does Bob Dylan have duende? Do you have duende? What is duende? Duende is a Spanish word with two meanings. A duende is a goblin or a pixie that probably lives at the bottom of the garden and gives three wishes to old ladies who deserve a break. The duende was best defined by Spain’s great poet Federico García Lorca during a lecture he gave in New York in 1929 on Andalusian music known as cante jondo, or deep voice. ‘The duende,’ he said, ‘is a momentary burst of inspiration, the blush of all that is truly alive, all that the performer is creating at a certain moment.’ The difference between a good and a bad singer is that the good singer has the duende and the bad singer doesn’t. ‘There are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned.’ Some critics say Bob Dylan does not have a great voice. But more than any other performer since the birth of recorded music, Dylan has revealed the indefinable, spine-tingling something captured in Lorca’s interpretation of duende. ‘It is an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability to send waves of emotion through those watching and listening to them.’ ‘The duende,’ he continues, ‘resembles what Goethe called the demoniacal. It manifests itself principally among musicians and poets of the spoken word, for it needs the trembling of the moment and then a long silence.’ painting off hell by Hieronymus Bosch Hell & Hieronymus Bosch Four elements can be found in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death and a dash of the diabolical. I agree with Lorca that duende manifests principally among singers, but would say that same magic may touch us when confronted by great paintings: Picasso’s Guernica, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the paintings of heaven and hell by Hieronymus Bosch. The duende is found in the bitter roots of human existence, what Lorca referred to as ‘the pain which has no explanation.’ Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better. Death with Duende It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.

What many producers don’t understand is that lawyers by definition are not trained in solving business problems. They are trained in interpreting and propagating the law based on a set of precedents that have been laid down before. And as each branch of law is an entity unto itself, an entertainment lawyer that normally works in music may not necessarily be useful when dealing with theatre.  If you want to do a deal that might involve some creative thinking, you would do better to talk with someone that makes deals for a living, for example maybe a salesperson who has developed “outside of the box” thinking in order to make their business rise above that of the competition.  In my experience lawyers are not by definition the most creative business thinkers.

Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak. Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues. To save a lot of money, go against the grain. Mexico Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common. San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues. Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there. Chicago, Illinois Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza. Colombia Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee. The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD. In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable. Tennessee's Music City There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January. New York City, New York Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities. Canada Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway. In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling. The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.

Despite frequent interpretive assumptions to the contrary,68 there is little in the script (or in performances I’ve seen, which have in some ways deviated from the script) that confirms that Hedwig’s Hansel is in fact gay, although he does seem confused regarding his sexual orientation. As Hedwig makes very explicit, Hansel allows himself to be seduced by Sgt. Robinson specifically because of the taste of power that it gives him, and his agreeing to the unsuccessful sex-change operation is not driven by his sense of being a woman trapped within a man’s body but by political necessity, since it appears to be the only way that he can use Sgt. Robinson as a ticket to the West. Many transsexuals have understandably felt betrayed by Hedwig because it problematizes Hedwig’s sexual identity in any number of ways without providing any perspective whatever on how or why someone in a position to choose freely might decide to change her or his gender. But the show’s fundamental frame of reference, politically, is not sexual politics in the United States but rather postmodern global politics, enacted in sexualized terms; from Hedwig’s perspective, it is thus crucial that Hansel’s decisions and their consequences reflect basic truths about the chaotic, postmodern, and soon-to-be post-Soviet world he inhabits, in which promised freedoms prove elusive, choices are often few and onerous, and most attempts to improve things seem to make them worse.

In telling the stories of our lives—in replaying the music of our past—there is interpretation.

Composers imbue music with emotion by knowing what our expectations are and then very deliberately controlling when those expectations will be met, and when they won’t. The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that 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.

In the whole history of theological exegesis and interpretation I know of nothing so utterly faulty, illogical and wholly unscriptural as that exegesis which teaches the angel song at Bethlehem to be the announcement of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace and that as such He should establish it among the nations after His ascension to heaven and during His absence from the world. The angels sang glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to “men of good will.” The angel who spoke to the shepherds keeping the temple sheep for the morning and the evening sacrifice was testifying to them that there was no longer need to keep the sheep for such a purpose. The day of animal sacrifices had passed, the living God had provided the true sacrifice, He who was born beneath the chaplet of heaven’s music, the Lamb of God ordained before the foundation of the world. He had been born into the world that He might make peace by the blood of His cross, not between man and man, not between nation and nation, but between man and God. He had been born to die and by His death reconcile a rebel world to God; on the basis of this sacrifice yet to be and when He should have risen from the dead as witness of the efficacy of His death He would bring peace to every soul that should be of good will—every soul that should surrender to the will of God by believing on Him, offering Him by faith as a sacrifice and claiming Him as a substitute. Every such soul should be at peace with, and have the peace of, God. This was the meaning of that natal hour at Bethlehem. The angels were not singing over Him as the Prince of Peace who had come to abolish war among the nations, but as the ordained sacrifice who should bring peace between the individual man and his God. And yet—He is to be the Prince of Peace and reign and rule as such over the earth, putting an end to war and establishing perfect peace among the nations. The promise of His reign and rule as the Prince of Peace is clearly set forth in Scripture; as it is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his peace and government there shall be no end.” But when? Where? Listen: “Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom to order it.” And hear what Gabriel says to Mary when he comes to announce to her that she has been chosen of Almighty God to give birth to the Messiah of Israel. The angel says: “Thou shalt call his name Jesus . . . He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.” He is to be the Prince of Peace when He sits upon the throne of united Israel in their own land and not before.

We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted.

In the typical evangelical service, after a rousing sermon comes the “altar call.” This routine is strikingly similar to hypnotic induction methods in other contexts: The key is to get people to focus attention inward rather than outward, so that they see, hear, and feel internally rather than externally, through the five senses. At such times, you are much more susceptible to suggestions and less able to use your critical abilities. After an emotional sermon, which has likely already employed manipulative techniques such as fear and guilt, you are asked to bow your head and close your eyes. Soft music plays while everyone focuses inward. Quiet hymns repeat “Jesus is calling” or “Just as I am.” The minister then speaks softly into the microphone, suggesting that the Holy Spirit is present and moving in the congregation. Feelings are interpreted for you, as “conviction of sin,” “answering His call,” and so forth. With perfected timing, the preacher asks, “Can you hear Jesus knocking on your heart’s door? Won't you open it today?” You are then asked to raise your hand while keeping your eyes shut; then to get up and come forward. The effect is powerful, carefully orchestrated, and effective.

In Karnatik music, compositions are mainly in Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. Musicians will find that the aesthetics of the melody seems different when the same musical phrase is sung in two different languages. This is primarily because of the sound of the syllables, which are the pillars on which the melodic phrase is structured. This could be partly psychological – the result of the mind interpreting the melodic flow differently when other syllables are placed in the same position. The syllables and the compound sounds unique to each language register differently in our mind, making the structure of the phrase seem different.

Once there was a little girl who played her music for a little boy in the wood. She was the genius, he was the interpreter, and they were each the gardeners of the other's heart, taming, tilling, and tending the fertile soil of their souls until they blossomed into a far-reaching forest that encompassed the world.

secrecy that eventually landed him in jail? We are not just the sum total of everything that has happened to us, but also a testament to the way we have interpreted all that has crossed our path. The music of chance intersecting with the maddening complexities of choice – and how, in the wake of bad judgment and self-sabotage, we so often rewrite the scenario to create one that we can live with.

Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. 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 then could 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?

Ten shockingly arty events What arty types like to call a ‘creative tension’ exists in art and music, about working right at the limits of public taste. Plus, there’s money to be made there. Here’s ten examples reflecting both motivations. Painting: Manet’s Breakfast on the Lawn, featuring a group of sophisticated French aristocrats picnicking outside, shocked the art world back in 1862 because one of the young lady guests is stark naked! Painting: Balthus’s Guitar Lesson (1934), depicting a teacher fondling the private parts of a nude pupil, caused predictable uproar. The artist claimed this was part of his strategy to ‘make people more aware’. Music: Jump to 1969 when Jimi Hendrix performed his own interpretation of the American National Anthem at the hippy festival Woodstock, shocking the mainstream US. Film: In 1974 censors deemed Night Porter, a film about a love affair between an ex-Nazi SS commander and his beautiful young prisoner (featuring flashbacks to concentration camp romps and lots of sexy scenes in bed with Nazi apparel), out of bounds. Installation: In December 1993 the 50-metre-high obelisk in the Place Concorde in the centre of Paris was covered in a giant fluorescent red condom by a group called ActUp. Publishing: In 1989 Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses outraged Islamic authorities for its irreverent treatment of Islam. In 2005 cartoons making political points about Islam featuring the prophet Mohammed likewise resulted in riots in many Muslim cities around the world, with several people killed. Installation: In 1992 the soon-to-be extremely rich English artist Damien Hirst exhibited a 7-metre-long shark in a giant box of formaldehyde in a London art gallery – the first of a series of dead things in preservative. Sculpture: In 1999 Sotheby’s in London sold a urinoir or toilet-bowl-thing by Marcel Duchamp as art for more than a million pounds ($1,762,000) to a Greek collector. He must have lost his marbles! Painting: Also in 1999 The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting by Chris Ofili representing the Christian icon as a rather crude figure constructed out of elephant dung, caused a storm. Curiously, it was banned in Australia because (like Damien Hirst’s shark) the artist was being funded by people (the Saatchis) who stood to benefit financially from controversy. Sculpture: In 2008 Gunther von Hagens, also known as Dr Death, exhibited in several European cities a collection of skinned corpses mounted in grotesque postures that he insists should count as art.

Traditional music is the foundation of what the folk music revival was about—songs of unknown authorship handed down through the generations. I keep returning to these old, classic songs, often bringing them back to find new meaning and fresh interpretations. “Danny Boy,” “The Lark in the Morning,” “Barbara Allen,” “So Early, Early in the Spring,” and “The Gypsy Rover” have lasted for years and will endure for years more. They touch your heart, and for anyone trying to write new and original songs, they stand as an unspoken challenge: make something as good and as timeless as this and you will have won the heart of your listener. You also will have added something to the story of humankind. Traditional songs didn’t just spring from the earth, of course. Somebody somewhere came up with a melody through which to tell a story, and that story-song got passed along. These songs survive in the memory of a culture because they tell stories of universal emotion and experience—of love, heartbreak, mourning, abandonment, victory, and defeat—and because they are so very adaptable to so many times, to so many people. One person would add a verse; another would change a melody a bit. This is what we call the “folk process,” borrowing to fit the time, the person, the incident.

Senior citizens naturally lament the passage of a former way of life whenever a county undergoes massive infrastructure changes; all acts of change are disconcerting. It is easy to confuse feelings of nostalgia for an incorrect belief that our youth was the Golden Age of Civilization and now decadence and debauchery mars the county that we cherish. A democratic nation is always a roughhouse of bawdy conduct. Each thronging generation of Americans fought tooth and claw over politics and social engineering and America brims with its congeries of impatient groups. Every generation includes speculators wanting to obtain quick results and instant wealth. Every age group loudly squabbles over issues of local, national, or international import. Each passing generation of American citizens skeptically questions the art and music of the new generation and dubiously interprets change as severing America from its root structure when in truth America’s fundamental tenet is its mutability, the ability to transform its governmental mechanisms, quickly adapt to transformations in science, medicine, industry, and technology.

Artur Schnabel, one of the towering pianists of the twentieth century. Modified in tone but not spirit from Schnabel’s interview remarks in Chicago the same year Germany surrendered to the Allies. She also knew this was about as high a compliment as Paul Mandelbaum was capable of making. Schnabel’s performances of the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas were possibly the only thing her mentor was capable of carrying on about ad nauseam. You were never going to enter his pantheon of star pupils unless you gave yourself over, heart and soul, to Schnabel’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Klaviersonaten and the virtuoso’s idea that the greatest music was that which is “better than it can be performed.

We misunderstand the messages behind some of our most favourite songs.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

... he informed me coldly that I was in the hands of the Gestapo, and that I was about to learn that the German police are quite a different matter from their French counterparts. Following this amiable introduction, two or three officers entered the room. I was made to stand in the middle of the space as the Germans circled round me, looking me up and down with jerky, staccato movements, screaming like lunatics all the while, to the accompaniment of some sort of music emitted at top volume from an enormous radio. The din was indescribable....* I asked a typist, who also seemed to be an interpreter, if she would be kind enough to translate what the gentleman were shouting at me, as if they were questions I should be happy to answer them. *Though these techniques seem farcical today, this was how the SS embarked on their 'work' in Paris. When they realized that these ridiculous performances were eliciting no information they improved their methods, so gradually attaining the finesse of semi-drowning in bathtubs filled with ice water, electric shocks and the rest.

have some damned standards: Traditionally, language is used to make specific points and convey information. In the age of driving web traffic, usage is increasingly vague and misleading. Whether they’re acts of clickbaiting or dumbness, internet headlines routinely mischaracterize quotes, inaccurately paraphrase statements, and misuse specific terms, all to make readers click. Editors say they’re doing what they need to do, or they argue it’s a valid way to interpret the facts; I call it “lying.

Those who see Show Boat as the progenitor of the form mistake its epic grandeur for its essence. No: most of Show Boat inheres in the zany frivolity of musical comedy, though revisions have been stamping out much of the fun since 1946. Still, the comic nature of Captain Andy and other leads and the use of dance as decoration rather than interpretation place Show Boat in a category of its own.

See, books and music are all how we interpret them, and our view of those things is based on our experiences, sometimes our lack of experiences.

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the human mind perceives familiar patterns and shapes within chaotic and/or ambiguous stimuli (clouds, darkness, patterned wallpaper, etc.). In short, it is the brain’s tendency to interpret abstract stimuli as something meaningful and recognizable. Common examples include seeing animals in clouds, spotting faces on surfaces such as tree bark, and/or perceiving music or voices in white noise.

Poetry itself, whether we accept this gift or not, is an authentic and artistic way to express the unique story of our lives. As music notes are interpreted by musicians and carried out through different instruments, so too is poetry interpreted through the eyes of the heart.

Ambassadors, obedience to instructions by: "It should be noted that unswerving obedience fits only with precise and peremptory commands. Ambassadors have somewhat freer duties the filling of which, in several respects, entirely depends on their own dispositions. They do not simply execute, but form also and direct by their own advice the will of their masters." — Michel de Montaigne Ambassadors, qualifications of: Distinguished credentials in other fields are not a self-evident qualification for appointment as ambassador. A genius for battlefield maneuver does not necessarily presage a talent for the peaceful conciliation of differences. The ability to make a profit from an idea or an enterprise cannot be taken to imply political acumen, tact, or cultural adaptability. The capacity to do brilliant academic research and deliver thoughtful lectures does not certify a facility for listening, interpreting the subtleties of foreign leaders, and reacting deftly to them on the spot. Political skill honed in parliamentary maneuver at home may not translate into adroit practice of the art of the possible abroad. The capacity to represent private interests effectively in the courts may not foretell a capacity to advocate both public and private interests persuasively to a foreign system of government and society. Ambassadors, qualifications of: "An ambassador should be a trained theologian, should be well-versed in Aristotle and Plato, and should be able at a moment's notice to solve the most abtruse problems in correct dialectical form; he should also be expert in mathematics, architecture, music, physics, and civil and canon law. He should speak and write Latin fluently and must also be proficient in Greek, Spanish, French, German and Turkish. While being a trained classical scholar, a historian, a geographer and an expert in military science, he must also have a cultured taste for poetry. And above all he must be of excellent family, rich and endowed with a fine physical presence." — Ottaviano Maggi, 1596 Ambassadors, qualities of effective: To be effective, ambassadors must exemplify intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, foresight, courage, a sense of humor, and sternness. By doing so they may compensate, in part, for the not-infrequent lack of these qualities in the national leaders in whose name they act.

However, NDE-like phenomena are almost never seen in temporal lobe seizures, and electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes typically elicits fragmented bits of music, isolated and repetitive scenes that seemed familiar, hearing voices, experiencing fear or other negative emotions, or seeing bizarre, dream-like imagery, in addition to a wide range of somatic sensations that are never reported in NDEs.17 These putative neurological mechanisms, for which there is little if any empirical evidence, may suggest brain pathways through which NDEs are expressed or interpreted, but do not necessarily imply causal mechanisms.17 EFFECTS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES Positive Effects Regardless of their cause, NDEs can permanently and dramatically alter the individual experiencer’s attitudes, beliefs, and values. The literature on the aftereffects of NDEs has focused on the beneficial personal transformations that often follow. A recent review of research into the characteristic changes following NDEs found the most commonly reported to be loss of fear of death; strengthened belief in life after death; feeling specially favored by God; a new sense of purpose or mission; heightened self-esteem; increased compassion and love for others; lessened concern for material gain, recognition, or status; greater desire to serve others; increased ability to express feelings; greater appreciation of, and zest for, life; increased focus on the present; deeper religious faith or heightened spirituality; search for knowledge; and greater appreciation for nature.6 These aftereffects have been corroborated by interviews with near-death experiencers’ significant others and by long-term longitudinal studies.17 Negative Effects Although NDErs sometimes feel distress if the NDE conflicts with their previously held beliefs and attitudes, the emphasis in the popular media on the positive benefits of NDEs inhibits those who are having problems from seeking help. Sometimes people who have had NDEs may doubt their sanity, yet they are often afraid of rejection or ridicule if they discuss this fear with friends or professionals. Sometimes NDErs do receive negative reactions from professionals when they describe their experiences, which discourages them even further from seeking help in understanding the experience.18 Family and friends may find it difficult to understand the NDEr’s new beliefs and behavior, as many of their new attitudes and beliefs are so different from those around them.

However, NDE-like phenomena are almost never seen in temporal lobe seizures, and electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes typically elicits fragmented bits of music, isolated and repetitive scenes that seemed familiar, hearing voices, experiencing fear or other negative emotions, or seeing bizarre, dream-like imagery, in addition to a wide range of somatic sensations that are never reported in NDEs.17 These putative neurological mechanisms, for which there is little if any empirical evidence, may suggest brain pathways through which NDEs are expressed or interpreted, but do not necessarily imply causal mechanisms.17 EFFECTS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES Positive Effects Regardless of their cause, NDEs can permanently and dramatically alter the individual experiencer’s attitudes, beliefs, and values. The literature on the aftereffects of NDEs has focused on the beneficial personal transformations that often follow. A recent review of research into the characteristic changes following NDEs found the most commonly reported to be loss of fear of death; strengthened belief in life after death; feeling specially favored by God; a new sense of purpose or mission; heightened self-esteem; increased compassion and love for others; lessened concern for material gain, recognition, or status; greater desire to serve others; increased ability to express feelings; greater appreciation of, and zest for, life; increased focus on the present; deeper religious faith or heightened spirituality; search for knowledge; and greater appreciation for nature.6 These aftereffects have been corroborated by interviews with near-death experiencers’ significant others and by long-term longitudinal studies.17 Negative Effects Although NDErs sometimes feel distress if the NDE conflicts with their previously held beliefs and attitudes, the emphasis in the popular media on the positive benefits of NDEs inhibits those who are having problems from seeking help. Sometimes people who have had NDEs may doubt their sanity, yet they are often afraid of rejection or ridicule if they discuss this fear with friends or professionals. Sometimes NDErs do receive negative reactions from professionals when they describe their experiences, which discourages them even further from seeking help in understanding the experience.18 Family and friends may find it difficult to understand the NDEr’s new beliefs and behavior, as many of their new attitudes and beliefs are so different from those around them. Difficulty reconciling the new attitudes and beliefs with the expectations of family and friends can interfere with maintaining old roles and lifestyle, which no longer have the same meaning. NDErs may find it impossible to communicate to others the meaning and impact of their NDE on their lives.18 Researchers have noted that the value incongruities between NDErs and their families lead to a relatively high divorce rate among NDErs. The effects of an NDE “may include long-term depression, broken relationships, disrupted career, feelings of severe alienation, an inability to function in the world, long years of struggling with the keen sense of altered reality.”19

Flamenco performers often talk about 'el duende'. Duende is a quality, a resonance which makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is possessed, inhabited, by a force or a set of compulsions coming from outside her or his own self. Duende is a ghost from the past. And it is unforgettable because it visits the present in order to address the future. ... All the arts are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them, since they have forms that are born and die perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present. El duende works on the dancer's body like wind on sand. It changes a girl by magic power, into a lunar paralytic, or overs the cheeks of a broken old man, begging for alms in the wine shop, with adolescent blushes: it gives a woman's hair the odour of a midnight sea port: and at every instant works the arms of a performer with gestures that are the mothers of all dances of all the ages.

Flamenco performers often talk about 'el duende'. Duente is a quality, a resonance which makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is possessed, inhabited, by a force or a set of compulsions coming from outside her or his own self. Duende is a ghost from the past. And it is unforgettable because it visits the present in order to address the future. ... All the arts are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them, since they have forms that are born and die perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present. El duende works on the dancer's body like wind on sand. It changes a girl by magic power, into a lunar paralytic, or overs the cheeks of a broken old man, begging for alms in the wine shop, with adolescent blushes: it gives a woman's hair the odour of a midnight sea port: and at every instant works the arms of a performer with gestures that are the mothers of all dances of all the ages.