An exchange
with a friend, during a performance of Schubert’s 9th (7th?) symphony:
J: If music this beautiful can exist, the world can’t be such a bad place.
Friend of J: You know, it was written a long time ago.
But it still exists. Life is beautiful.
July 16th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Good perspective. I’ve thought about this — the role of music — since I’ve been making a concerted effort to experience and learn about classical music lately. I’m tending now to believe that beautiful, sublime music confirms that “life”, in general, and in potentiality, is (can be) beautiful despite one’s particular experience of it at the moment or in one’s lifetime. When the present reality and/or prospects aren’t beautiful, music is one hook helping to hold up the lifelines of our hopes, ideals, and sanity. Sometimes, with luck, there’s a confluence of the ideal and the lived beauty in your life, and music can then allow you to better experience, express, and celebrate it.
I like reading musicians’ thoughts on music in the larger context of life. Not being a musician myself, but deriving much life-affirming value from it, discussions of technical aspects of compositions are a foreign language, one that I’ll not be learning in this lifetime, and they leave me where I was. They have their value, of course, to other musicians and sophisticated listeners, but including an occasional tidbit on relations to larger contexts, “philosophical” reflections, would be most welcome. Watching your online video interview (re the Schumann recital), reading your few written online interviews, including your first post here, and your liner notes for your Schumann CD, I’m liking how you think, your perspectives and your approach to music. Keep it up. I look forward to checking in now and then.
July 26th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
At this moment (10:25 CST 7/26/07) I’m watching the part of the Barenboim on Beethoven DVD’s where you, Jonathan Biss, are finishing up the movement you played for the Master Class. It sounds great!