Hannah and I, along with our good buddy Ben, are seeing Califone perform tomorrow night, in Milwaukee. One of our favorite bands — thus, excited are we.
Videos and pictures from Pitchfork Festival 2006posted by MD
The family went last year. And we are going this year. In advertising for this year's fest (which is looking to be pretty fun), Pitchfork put up videos and pictures from last year. Check them out, because included are some very good performances. My favorite of the videos would be the performance of "Funeral" by Band of Horses.
From the Timaeus (28, a-b; or in this version, lines 420-424):
The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect, but when he looks to the created only and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect.
This is a bit of a thinker, is it not?
Well, let's think into it. Firstly, I ought add that Plato (here through the voice of Timaeus), never explicitly states that he refers to artists, or artistry. But on the premise that artists are creators, the logic that what is said about creators can bear transfer to artists (though maybe not inerrantly) for consideration by artists on how to conduct their creative affairs seems sound.
Secondly, I'll forgo giving background on the Timaeus, because such information is readily found through web search. But I will say that it is important to understand two things. 1) This was one of, if not the most, widely read books of the Middle Ages, after the Bible; and 2) to read its exegesis by the measure of contemporary science is to misunderstand its contents. Those contents are a length series of analogies, about how the world came to be. In other words, not scientific, not literal, but literary.
So, to what Timaeus says. The key word, clearly, is "unchangeable". What is this unchangeable, by which the form and nature of a work of art is fashioned after?
If, you believe as I do, that "unchangeable" is an analogy, then we must ascertain what in the world of art it is an analogy for. One thing I feel strongly is that something of this sort would be best understood in the particular contexts of each and every discipline of art. In other words, the "unchangeable pattern" for music is distinct from that for sculpture, poetry, dance, painting, and so on.
Of those, I can speak most confidently about music. In this discipline, I think the best way to understand what the "unchangeable pattern" is is to meditate upon what is known as "sonata form". Now, I don't advise mistaking the sonata form (as I describe it below) for the actual unchangeable pattern. I mean rather that composing a piece of genuine music based upon sonata form is to my eyes one of the surest (if not the surest) paths to understand unchangeable form.
Sonata form is this: exposition (A), development (B), recapitulation (A'). In this pattern, exposition introduces an idea; exposition elaborates upon the idea (stretching and bending); recapitulation returns to the idea in its original form. It goes without much comment that this basic form (A-B-A') can be spun out innumerable ways, such as returning to A after B; within B, fashioning a mini-drama that changes keys or tempos; also adding introductory and coda material, at the beginning and end. Overall, sonata form is the making of a home, the leaving of the home, and then the return to home.
The sense of transformation often comes when the development (B) gives way to the recapitulation (A'). The original idea comes back, changed and altered by the journey taken. It is a moment of deep excitement, when something familiar yet long-lost comes back, weathered and wise. Just like Odysseus, returning home after being gone so long, after such a wild adventure (the development (B).
While the case for many kinds of music (and kinds of musical sophistication), particularly finely composed music, allowed to establish its identity (exposition), mutate and grow organically (development) and then reclaim its sturdy identity (recapitulation) is the sort that tells a story. Such music grips us like a riveting narrative, and can be returned to for repeated listening, over and over again, to relive the story from the beginning. Such music, with rich tones, can be reborn as tones at play, over and over again.
The key thing, for composers, is I think to allow the original idea to grow of its own logic. A genuine idea, of the kind that one can base a long work upon, acts as a seed. It is regenerative, of more ideas, related but distinct to the first. These generated ideas, allowing them to take hold and find resonance in the composition, are what I mean by allowing the idea a logic of its own. One musical idea ought be developed in one way; another by a completely different course of composition. The idea itself dictates. Which is why it is so important to understand an idea thoroughly (to "over-learn" it), so as to be able to discern its offspring, which will be the basis for the development (B) section or sections.
An idea can only be "fair and perfect" if, in the process of establishing it, then elaborating on it, and then recapping it, the composer lets the idea lead. Else, to return to Plato, the composer is left with imitating only the already created (by himself or someone else), warping or altering material already composed elsewhere, yet still bringing in "alien" material — "alien" to the original idea, and what is born from it.
Thus, "unchangeable pattern" is, in music, found in the belief that within every genuine musical idea is embedded the nutrients for growth and regeneration, far beyond the mere idea itself. The composer, through artful irrigation over something of the sonata form, seeks to allow this to happen, to allow the logic of the idea its fullest rhetoric, its fullest representation. In turn, the audience is given the liveliest mimesis. Listening to the piece of music; sensing a world; finding their own soul in it. The unchangeable pattern we find when we realize that, fundamentally, this is just how music is, how it operates in aural perception, a story in time.
The world, and not just the music world, lost a giant. Do your soul a favor and make his recording of Bach: Cello Suites Nos. 1-6 an enduring companion along your musical journey, if you already haven't.
Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich dies at 80
By Martin Steinberg and Maria Danilova
MOSCOW (AP) -- Mstislav Rostropovich played the cello with grace and verve - and lived his life offstage the same way. His death at age 80 takes away one of modern Russia's most compelling figures, admired both for his musical mastery and his defiance of Soviet repression.
Rostropovich stirred souls with playing that was both intense and seemingly effortless. He fought for the rights of Soviet-era dissidents and later triumphantly played Bach suites below the crumbling Berlin Wall.
In his last public appearance, at his birthday celebration in the Kremlin on March 27, Rostropovich was frail but still able to show his capacity for joy and generosity.
"I feel myself the happiest man in the world," he said. "I will be even more happy if this evening will be pleasant for you."
Spokeswoman Natalia Dollezhal confirmed Rostropovich's death, but would not immediately give details. The composer, who returned to Russia last month after years of living in Paris, had suffered from intestinal cancer.
After a funeral in Christ the Savior Cathedral on Sunday, he is to be buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, where the graves of his teachers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev also lie. The arrangements echo the prestigious farewell this week that Russia accorded Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of post-Soviet Russia.
President Vladimir Putin called Rostropovich's death "a huge loss for Russian culture" and expressed condolences to his loved ones.
Rostropovich, who was known by his friends as "Slava," was considered by many to be the successor to Pablo Casals as the world's greatest cellist.
A bear of a man who hugged practically anyone in sight, he was an effusive rather than an intimidating maestro, a teacher who nurtured Jacqueline du Pre among many other great cellists.
"He was the most inspiring musician that I have ever known," said David Finckel, the Emerson String Quartet's cellist who studied with Rostropovich for nine years. "He had a way to channel his energy through other people, and it was magical."
Rostropovich's sympathies against the Communist Party leaders of his homeland started with the Stalin-era denunciations of Shostakovich and Prokofiev.
Under Leonid Brezhnev's regime, Rostropovich and his wife, the Bolshoi Opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, sheltered the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in their country house in the early 1970s.
"The passing of Mstislav Rostropovich is a bitter blow to our culture," Solzhenitsyn said Friday, according to his wife, Natalya.
After Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Rostropovich wrote an open letter protesting the official Soviet vilification of the author.
"Explain to me please, why in our literature and art (that) so often, people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word?" Rostropovich asserted in the letter that went unpublished.
The by the cellist and his wife for cultural freedom resulted in the cancellation of concerts, foreign tours and recording projects. Finally, in 1974, they fled to Paris with their two daughters. Four years later, their Soviet citizenship was revoked.
After arriving in the West, "he was like a little boy, laughing, shouting, pinching himself to make sure these really were the streets in Paris," the late violinist Yehudi Menuhin recalled in the 1996 book "Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later."
Still, exile took its toll on Rostropovich.
"When Leonid Brezhnev stripped us of our citizenship in 1978, we were obliterated," Rostropovich recalled in a 1997 interview in Strad magazine. "Russia was in my heart - in my mind. I suffered because I knew that until the day I died, I would never see Russia or my friends again."
Indeed, he was unable to attend Shostakovich's funeral in 1975.
But in 1989, as the Berlin Wall was being torn down, Rostropovich showed up with his cello and played Bach cello suites amid the rubble. The next year, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and he made a triumphant return to Russia to perform with Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director from 1977 to 1994.
When hard-line Communists tried to overthrow then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, Rostropovich rushed back to Moscow without a visa and spent days in the Russian parliament building to join those protesting the coup attempt.
In his early to mid-70s, he still had the energy of a middle-age man. He recorded the six Bach solo suites for the first time when he was 70. Five years later, he performed 16 concerts in 11 cities in 28 days, crossing the United States twice and logging nearly 10,000 miles.
Asked by The Associated Press during the 2002 tour about his sleep, he replied in his accented English: "Normally ... four hours for me (is) absolutely enough."
Finckel recalled that after the release of the Bach recordings, Rostropovich celebrated with a feast at a hotel until 2 a.m., then reserved a meeting room for 4 a.m. in order to practice his cello.
Ever the bon vivant with a big smile and twinkling blue eyes, he was known for his love of women and drink.
"He is a passionate man, and he has a real lust for life, and his marriage is stronger because of it," his daughter Olga said when asked by the Internet Cello Society in 2003 about his loves in life. "What they have together is very precious, and nothing can destroy it."
Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was born March 27, 1927, in Baku in then Soviet Azerbaijan. His mother was a pianist. His grandfather and father, Leopold, were cellists. One memorable photo shows him as an infant cradled in his father's cello case. He started playing the piano at age 4 and took up the cello at about 7, later studying at the Moscow Conservatory.
"When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice - my voice," Rostropovich told Strad magazine.
He made his public debut as a cellist in 1942 at age 15, and gained wide notice in the West nine years later when the Soviets sent him to perform at a festival in Florence, Italy.
Life magazine reported the 24-year-old "stirred the audience to warm applause." The New York Times critic said his music was "first class. His tone was big, clean and accurate. ... His musical style seemed to be ardent and intense."
He developed close musical relationships with contemporary composers, inspiring some 100 works, from Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten - as well as from some not-so-famous composers.
During the 2002 interview with AP, he spoke about Shostakovich, who endured part of Nazi Germany's siege of Leningrad during World War II and battled for individual expression in Josef Stalin's Soviet Union.
Suffering is essential for art, Rostropovich said. "You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life. If he (is) only happy with his life, I think that he (does not fully) understand what is happiness."
Rostropovich's work for humanity didn't stop with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, he and his wife established the Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation to help improve health care for children in former Soviet states.
Rostropovich received numerous awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987 and a knighthood conferred on him that year by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II on his 60th birthday.
On the cellist's 80th birthday, the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta published a letter Solzhenitsyn wrote in May 1973 after the author and his wife moved out of the Rostropoviches' house.
"Once more I repeat to you and Galiya my delight at your steadfastness, with which you endured all the oppression connected with me and did not allow me to feel," Solzhenitsyn wrote. "Once again I am grateful for the years of shelter with you, where I survived a time that was very stormy for me, but thanks to the exceptional circumstances I all the same wrote without interruption."
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1955, survivors include their daughters, Olga and Elena.
Recall that the complete developmental template for classical education consists of the three stage sequence of the Trivium (Grammar to Dialectic to Rhetoric) followed by the four-pronged Quadrivium (Astronomy, Geometry, Music, Arithmetic). These are the Seven Liberal Arts. The first three account for our grammar, middle, and high schools (language-centered, not child-centered); the last four for our four-year university program. The Thesis project was traditionally completed (and orally defended) between the two, but has since moved to the very end. The entire template has roots in ancient Greece, and was modified variously through the Middle Ages and through the 19th century. The mastery of Latin and Greek are central; its overall aim might be summarized as developing the internal freedom to learn how to learn as well as how to live a contemplative, philosophical life. The side-benefits, as you might imagine, are enormous.
That brutally short summary is pretext for this passage (pp. 7-8, paperback) from the fantastic biography of JS Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff, my current pleasure reading:
For Bach, schooled in seventeenth-century thought, the concept that music formed a branch of the liberal arts quadrivium was still as valid as it had been for Johannes Kepler, who promoted the view that music mirrored the harmony of the universe. Music, then, with its traditional mathematical underpinning, provided an especially rich field of operation for a composer who was increasingly infected with scientific curiosity, totally uninterested in "dry exercises in [musical] craftsmanship, but throughly committed to advancing "true music," which Bach defined as music that pursued as its "ultimate end or final goal ... the honor of God and the recreation of the soul."
Taken literally as a metaphor (which I believe is traditional and proper way to treat such statements), how, exactly, is this inapplicable to the composition of tonal music today? I'd say it is entirely applicable. For tonal music has profound mathematical underpinnings (see Harmonic Experience, by W.A. Mathieu), and contra the postmodernists who claim that theology must overcome "postmodern insights" (it doesn't, for there are none), there is no reason whatsoever why today's composers cannot fashion music with a purpose to deepen the understanding of the character of God. Nor a reason why they can't do so in an entirely contemporary, resonant manner that speaks to regular people's expectations of musical mimesis.
In part because, well, "Bach did it", such is why I believe the sturdiest manner to overcome the widespread malaise of "postmodernism" (i.e., the cultural consequences of those 'gooey scramblers') and fashion a restored tradition of genuine art, is to reinvest the education of both children and adults in the Liberal Arts, through a classical education updated where necessary to contemporary concerns. This is the premise of "Great Artistry". One such update that I've previously suggested is to fold in certain principles from Waldorf education into the Trivium/Quadrivium (which we plan to do with our children). I imagine other such integrations are possible, as well.
One of the world's great musicians ...posted by MD
... plays a Washington, D.C. subway stop. The fascinating, multi-angle account. I have a feeling this isn't the last you'll hear of this particular story, at least at POLYSEMY. Stay tuned.
Over at Smithsonian Global Sound, you can listen to tracks of mbira music from Zimbabwe and Zambia, streamed in their entirety. Fantastic stuff, and highly recommended.
It is called Sky Blue Sky. It will be released May 15. I've been lucky enough to be able to listen to the entire album, several times (it is on my iPod). I'm actually listening to it as I type; I will also purchase it when officially released.
I think it is a very strong album, as strong as any of their last several releases — Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born, Kicking Television — each of which are fantastic in their own ways. With this one, what I've noticed is that Jeff Tweedy's vocal style is more distinct, more melodic, more skillful than before. Also, that the whole band is gelling together, with each song's arrangements very interesting, surprising, and markedly mature.
This band is steeped in the American folksong tradition, the roots of 60s and 70s rock, very agile with their instruments, tastefully improvisational, lyrically soulful, conversant with several rock sub-genres, imaginatively full in moments both raucous and tender — in other words, they are the best band going for a reason. They are a jamband, by far the best ever.
Music education is for the experience of music — in the muscles, in the bones, in the mind, and therefore in the soul. That happens not by merely listening closely to music, in an environment that allows for close listening, as important as that is. Rather, it happens by actually singing music oneself. Singing is a yoga (a "yoke", or binding agent) that unites body, mind, and soul each and every time a melody is consciously sung. All of which most people take for granted, and for that reason, must be continually reminded so that music remains a living tradition, sustainable for future generations of our children.
In every kind of educational environment, singing ought be the primary practice for understanding musical principles — individual singing as well as singing in small groups. Principles of melodic construction, counterpoint, harmony became principles because tone itself, and not arbitrary theorists, dictates. Sea always meets shore, and only singing shows us where. But you would never know that reading most music textbooks, and listening to most professors.
Music is less about rules, and far more about its living tradition. Due to the industrial age, "progress" in music is profoundly overplayed in the schools. Progress exists in the sense that its inherent syntactical structures have developed with increasing formal complexity (such as, plainchant eventually evolving to fugue). But the qualities of beauty, integrity, and resonance don't evolve. And music, no matter the structural complexity, cannot live without those. Because those are more fundamental to music than structure, education must not only begin but also continually return to these basics. It is actually possible to study beauty, integrity, and resonance. They aren't merely subjective, relativistic responses.
The main formal study of music ought be a graduated series of courses, each studying a particular composer and his or her work. The history of music is the history of individuals and small ensembles of individuals. Every major composer, and many minor ones, provide near limitless food for thought and study. Because music is an art of choices, understanding how different composers have made choices is most of the story of music.
One important series of courses is, of course, the history of musical construction. Over this series, one begins with the study of plainchant, such as the composer Hildegard von Bingen (the first composer for whom we have a biography). The series continues through the grades of polyphony — from monophony into organum, homophony, and then the kinds of counterpoint and fugue (i.e., Perotin, Machaut, Josquin, Palestrina, and finally Bach). Bach himself would require at least three courses himself, to deal adequately with the enormity of his musical output.
Almost all music that we can learn from falls somewhere in the chain of musical construction from plainchant to fugue. What we now call "pop music", for example, is essentially homophonic, where a single melody is free unto itself, with other subordinate voices that work together as accompaniment. A singer accompanied by a guitar is a kind of homophony. Pop music's "newness" comes primarily in its orchestration (another important subject, though always tied in with particular composers). Yet in the history of musical syntax, pop music as a structure is quite old.
Yet the structural development of music structures is not the only mode of instruction, or even the most fundamental. Too often in music schools, music studies is merely looked at on the page, or merely listened to in excerpts. No, music has to be experienced in the body, and the only way to do that as deeply as is required is to reinstate singing as the primary practice to study music. Anyone can learn to sing in tune. Learning how exactly to sing in tune is, and to know you are singing in tune, is tragically underplayed in music education, yet is the real meat of understanding music, in toto. Singing well, for the purposes of performance, is another matter, and not essential for musical education. And when music is studied through the singing of it, the internal logic of its form reveals itself. Tones, the ear, and the body determine how musical phrases (whether melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic) begin and end, rise and fall, stretch as well as multiply time, and how these mix together over the course of a work of music in all the wondrous ways these happen.
For instrumental pieces that cannot be sung, one learns a second instrument (the first being the voice). The initial purpose of learning this second instrument is to deeply study and then perform a singular work from the canon (the selection of musical works that have demonstrably inspired other works). Too often, people assume the first steps of instrumental study mean creating something original. While beauty can be evoked under this approach, sustainability over the centuries and generations is not. What some people don't like to hear, but what all must understand, is that originality must be earned.
The other kind of series of courses fundamental to music is the study of music as a phenomena of sound (specifically, as a phenomena of tone). As classically part of the Quadrivium, the harmonic principles of overtones and reciprocal tones can be presented to explain nearly all of music's tonal properties. Music must always be regarded as a tonal art; non-tonal or atonal sound is not necessarily music. "Sound art" might or might not evoke beauty; yet it is distinct, even dissociated, from "Music art". Though potentially enjoyable and pleasure, all of what we hear live or on the radio or recordings is not music. Music is the play of tones in time. Creators of music, in order to earn such a title, must understand tone in its most discreet, elemental, and naked essences. Most people don't understand this; thus most of what we are told is music is, in fact, not.
What people find when they study music's harmonic principles (or, in this narrow sense, "music theory"), is that music provides a template for how we think about truth, the contextuality of truth, and whether truth itself even exists (it does). Music theory provides a microkosm of all of life, local as well as universal. The decline of the understanding of music parallels the rise of what some call "postmodernity" (a term I loathe and think ultimately meaningless, but nonetheless refers to the flood of misunderstanding that is deracinated "postmodernity").
We say things are "sound" (as in, this machine is "sound", working well) for a reason. Everything works musically, or it barely works or does not work at all. Understanding how much of humanity is reflected in music is profound and essential to understanding what actual music is. If we don't "experience our own life" in a piece of music, then it is not music, pure and simple.
Manuel Rosenthal, the late composer-conductor who was a student of Ravel, talking about his teacher:
One day he was speaking to me in glowing terms about Puccini. And being the silly, impertinent young man I was, I started to sneer. At that Ravel flew into a towering rage, locked us both into his little studio at Monfort l'Amaury and sat down at the piano. He then played me the whole of Tosca from memory, stopping about 50 times on the way to ask: "Have you anything to complain of about that passage? Look how good the harmony is, how he respects the form, what a clever, original, and interesting modulation there is in that tune." Finally he took down the score to show me how perfect the orchestration is. He said, "This is exactly what I did with Le tombeau de Couperin: this economy of means by which two solo instruments in Puccini's orchestra produce such an impact — that is the mark of a great artist."
If this dictum (from Mullah Abdul Rauf, of the Herati Mosque in Kabul, quoted in April 2006):
Music is not banned in Islam but to get enjoyment from music is banned.
... in fact actually explains quite a lot, on a profound level. I mean, historically speaking, it is obviously inaccurate, on all merits. No, the profundities to which I refer have to do with it entirely as a modern phenomena, of the particularly rigid sect of Islam that gets so much play today. Even if this means that only "sacred contemplation" of music is permitted, that still is deeply disturbed. To forgo the most immediate effect of any kind of music — namely, it's capacity to first entertain (and then, possibly, educate and enlighten) — is to go against what I hold to be fully-embodied perception. In other words, it goes against the grain of humanity.
I mean, common sense-wise: do you know anyone healthy who gets no enjoyment from music, whatsoever? Would you wish that "condition" on even your deepest enemy? And wouldn't that, honestly, actually be Hell incarnate, that state where there's no enjoyment whatsoever from the play of tones in time?
4. Rezitativ Wo die Genügsamkeit regiert Und überall das Ruder führt, Da ist der Mensch vergnügt Mit dem, wie es Gott fügt. Dagegen, wo die Ungenügsamkeit das Urtel spricht, Da stellt sich Gram und Kummer ein, Das Herz will nicht Zufrieden sein, Und man gedenket nicht daran: Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan.
4. Recitative Where contentment rules and holds the tiller everywhere, there a person is satisfied with that which God brings about. On the other hand, where discontent speaks its mind, there grief and trouble appear, one's heart will not content itself, and this is not kept in mind: what God does is well done.
"...[Music's] expressive power is revealed in its ability to compel ... metaphors from us, and to persuade us that they fit exactly. Of course, it is a mystery that they fit. But the mystery is immovable. Every metaphor both demands an explanation and also refuses it, since an explanation would change it from a metaphor to a literal truth, and thereby destroy its meaning."
"...the mountain of the muses is to be reached only by a very precipitous path. There is no craft — however modest it may be — to which the novice does not have to serve an apprenticeship of at least three years. What should I say then about music, which not only surpasses the simpler crafts and arts in ingenuity, difficulty, and richness, but, in fact, cannot be rivaled by any of the liberal arts? The benefits of your efforts may bring you; the hope of success; the facility in writing which you will gradually acquire; and finally, the firm confidence that what you are writing is well written, may encourage you."
— the teacher, Aloysius, from J.J. Fux's Steps to Parnassus
"1. Declare your intention to create a 'composition'.
2. Start a piece at some time.
3. Cause something to happen over a period of time (it doesn't matter what happens in your "time hole" — we have critics to tell us whether it's any good or not, so we won't worry about that part).
4. End the piece at some time (or keep it going, telling the audience it is a 'work in progress').
5. Get a part-time job so you can continue to do stuff like this."
"Deconstruction, in the ideas of music of John Cage and Cecil Taylor, for example, has long been afoot in the land to melt down and recase working assumptions, but seems ultimately to have the effect of retooling and remodeling rather than razing and bulldozing. Composed music as an agent for feeling whole constantly needs new definitions and new material to work with. The more adaptable and spry and exchangeable is the stuff of the body, the more the spirit inside has a chance to live."
What is musical about music lies waiting, patient and quiet, within the sounds, within the combination of tones in some arrangement in time. The study of what's musical is the study of deep vibration. Vibration of this kind is the essence of life, and all of life's activities; what's musical about music permeates any activity if properly tuned. When those that are properly tuned to their own deeper vibrations want to express those deeper energy currents in themselves and in all of life, that expression becomes musical, even if expressed in a medium other than sound. Poets use music, dancers use music. So do filmmakers, sculptors, actors, and painters. Architecture, Goethe said, is frozen music. Music expresses our deepest being-in-the-world, our deepest perspectives. As we radiate vibrations into the world using words, actions, thoughts, and love, we radiate ourselves — not as contracted ego-persons, but as the living voice of music — as the living voice of the deepest vibrations that live not in time, but which create time itself. We love and need the vibrations of music because as tones manifest in time, as mimesis lived into, we see ourselves in what's musical. We feel our deepest vibrations. Boundaries disappear, and music shows itself to itself, as music. As life. As vibration. Song is gloriously our own deepest harmony, our own spirit. Music is us; us is music — purely embodied, infinitely interrelated, and in perfect tune.
Here's some weekend reading, from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, an article called "Music as a Divine Art".
After a survey of history of the idea, the article ends with this:
Today the old ideas of music as a divine art have disappeared, and can at best be completely grasped in the course of an historical understanding of older music and musical perspectives.
Is that true? If so, how would we change that, to restore a strong sense of divine to music? Does holding music as divine require a new metaphysic? Or the restoration/updating of an older one?
Or an allegorical understanding of what "divine" means?
A couple years ago, I wrote a short essay that, while it needs some updating itself, relates to this topic, so you might check that out: "Musical Temperament".
And how might this relate to classical education? Is it a matter that involves learning about music in its theoretical, intellectual, and philosophical dimensions? Because after completion of the Trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric), students in Medieval times (and even through the 18th century in some places in Europe) were taught music as part of the Quadrivium (along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy), as a matter, it was said, "of numbers in time". (See this article for some background.) The decline of classical education appears to broadly simultrack the loss of the idea that music is divine.
Would the restoration of an updated Liberal Arts (Trivium, Quadrivium) in the education of our children lead to a more common understanding of music as divine?
The world, and not just the music world, 
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