We form our deepest emotions at a time when our inner life is rather dreamlike, that is when were such small infants that we cant speak and we arent part of society yet, and I think that music has some of the power it does because its able to tap some of those deeper layers of the personality and bring back to us some of the intense and extremely sharp but also archaic and unfocused emotions of childhood. So in that way it is more able than is a lot of literature to jolt us out of our sense of normalcy, our sense that were just going about in the world using language in the usual and habitual way. So theres a way in which music pierces like a beam straight to the most vulnerable parts of personality. When Mahler was conducting his own work he described this experience saying, a burning pain, crystallized. And thats the experience I think I often have with music, that there is a kind of pain in the personality somewhere buried to deep for words, and music doesnt just reproduce it but in some way does crystallize it, it gives it a form, but a form thats not the form of daily conversation, and its precisely for that reason that it has the power that it does.
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:09:11 +0000