Musical Purpose

I'd like to write a book one day about music that is not unlike 'The Great Tradition' by F R Leavis (which is about Brit Lit). It would be about the aim and purpose of music. Leavis is much too dogmatic, but when he leaves his snapflash judgements aside, he is right about many, many things. Music is not just itself, and if it's used as just itself, it's a pursuit that will only sap people's quality of life rather than help it. Music, art itself, has a moral purpose. The purpose is not instructional, but at its best, it's about morale. Even at its darkest and most pessimistic, the world of music and art is about showing people in their darkest hours why life is not worth giving up on, and fostering connections between humans who otherwise would be isolated. We use music to express those things that foster connection. A lot of people say that music can't express specific things and is 'not about anything....'

Stone them. Charge them with war crimes in show trials and kangaroo courts. Make sure their atrocities appear in every major newspaper in the world every day, put their trials on television, and make sure they're kept in glass cages while they're tried like Adolph Eichmann so that no one assassinates them before they're executed on television.

(note to facebook algorithms, I'm being ironic.)

The purpose of music is to express the world of the soul, and whether the soul exists, the world of the soul very much does. There is a truer world out there of deeper meaning. Music is our only reliable evidence that this world of greater meaning exists, and this greater world of photons, air and light exists everywhere on earth. Every moment has the potential to glow in a space of spiritual purpose, meaning, and blessings. Life flows onward, event by event, instant by instant into the broader flow of time and memory.

I find it impossible not to hear all that when I hear the music of Monteverdi, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Dvorak, Mussorgsky, Faure, Janacek, Mahler, Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, Ives, Cowell Gershwin, Weill, (yes, they all belong), Bartok, Shostakovich, Kurtag, Berio, Schnittke, when I hear the conducting of Walter, Monteux, Busch, Fricsay, Kubelik, Harnoncourt, I. Fischer, Stenz, or when I hear the pianism of Firkusny, Solomon, Lili Kraus, Moisewitsch, Schnabel, Cherkassky, Curzon, Stephen Hough, Helene Grimaud, or when I hear the violinism of Kreisler, Enescu, Thibaud, Gitlis, Huberman, Janine Jansen, Rachel Barton Pine,... when I hear a whole gaggle of opera singers (amid so many terrible ones...), or the songs of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, John Prine, Jacques Brel, The Beatles, I, personally, feel connected to something very near us that is clearly not material we can perceive, and I wouldn't believe anyone who says that's not what everybody else feels too.

Meaning, stenographing the many seasons of life, is simply what they do. What they provide is a multi-dimensional mixture which can be understood differently upon every new acquaintance - the glow of space and the flow of time, optimism and pessimism, sophistication and naivete, high sublimity and street vulgarity, street noise and the sounds of nature, sincerity and irony, distant worlds and immediate conditions, time fast and time slow, space great and space narrow, past and future in a present that is more than what we know.