Beyond Words

An orchestra conductor and friend of mine knows more about music than a thousand others combined. Today is his birthday, and this is my tribute. 

“Music is to be made, not talked about”, he will often tell me. “Talking is but pointing at the moon.”

And yet, he has taught me so much, “pointing to the moon”  in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Mahler’s 7th symphony. 

Another friend, having graciously invited me for dinner at “The Little Moon” in Paris asked me this question: 

Why does music elicit such powerful emotions? 

He and his wife had just returned from the Verbier music festival, inspired by violinist Stephen Waart’s premier performance there. Having spent my entire life musing over this question, I felt honored that he ask, and also relieved that he did not ask one of the other two questions that have so long confounded me, namely:

What is the meaning of life/death?

Why are men so incurably keen to peek beneath women’s skirts (even when they know what’s hidden there)? 

When it came time at last to speak my truth about music, one finger pointed at the moon while another held a spoon pointed toward my tonka bean rice pudding dessert. 

My answer was pudding-like in consistency,  leaving a taste of inadequacy that I could not manage to dissipate. 

This month’s full moon kept me awake and shone its light on the question of music’s power over us. Without reference to what other musicians or philosophers have answered, without asking AI, I contemplate my thirty-year ongoing love affair with the abstract entity called music, and in particular classical music. I eschew labels and categories, and simply qualify the music I love as emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually nourishing. I refer to music as “she”, not so much because it’s her grammatical gender in all major Romance languages, but because it somehow legitimizes my love affair with her. Almost all of my musical references are Western classical works. I don’t evoke other musical traditions (in particular Indian classical music) simply because my knowledge, like the years of my life, remains too limited, and the subject too vast.

What began as a simple attempt to answer the question stated above, ended up as a collection of 36 contemplations, and a persistant feeling of incompleteness. As to what can be said about music, there is no beginning and no end.

1 Beyond words

By the light of that celestial sphere, I saw that music and the moon are the same in that they are reflections of something else. The moon reflects the light of the sun. Music reflects the transcendental reality to which every human soul is drawn. Yogic cosmology describes different planes of existence, from that of pure consciousness down to our own physical and material plane of lower consciousness. The immateriality of music acts like a bridge between our own plane of existence and one that is more subtle. Music can be elevating, but can also be base.  She is both entirely of this world yet strangely beyond it. Music is the finest and most subtle expression of human emotions in their infinite and individual manifestations. She is beyond words. 

2 Divine grace

Where unshakable faith and devotion are most often only accessible to saints, music acts like a gift of divine grace to those lost in the illusion of their material existence. 

The fact that Bach’s cantata ending in “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” has become as well-known as a billboard hit does not diminish its comforting melody, offering to any sinner with ears a temporary sense of sainthood. 

3 Falling in love

The music of love, like the feeling itself, is as unmistakable as a juicy mango to the palate. Billions of humans have fallen in love, and that experience has been an inexhaustible source of musical inspiration. At the age 73, Leos Janacek captured those sweet and stormy emotions as none other, with the freshness of youth mellowed by mature art, in his second string quartet (Intimate Letters).  

We are unescapably touched when two voices join together and sing to one another in love (and in tune). It is a form of lovemaking that we are authorized to display and vicariously enjoy. 

Operatic duos such as Puccini’s ‘La bohème’ – ‘O soave fanciulla’ are the best known for this heart-melting feature, but such sweetness is also present in instrumental works. The Noturno  from Borodin’s String Quartet n°2 delights us with dialogue between the violin and cello. 

Monteverdi’s Duo Seraphim from Vespro della Beata Vergine SV 206, arranged for two celli by Sonia Weider-Atherton, is another such jewel.

4 Romance

The troubadours of southern France developed the idea of romantic love in the High Middle Ages through a repertoire of ballades composed in the vernacular. That ideal has never left us. 

In the late 19th century, “romanticism” emerged as the dominant aesthetic across all of the arts. Composers from the period are referred to as the Romantics. All of their music is characterized by “romanticism”. It is the emotional quality, more than the grace and formalism of the classical period, that appeals to us. The musical form called the “Romance” offers an intimate, sweet quality that speaks readily to those in love while often obfuscating those who are not. Beethoven wrote two Romances for violin. Wieniawski’s Romance from his second violin concerto is one I know by heart. Post-romantically, Korngold included a soaring Romance in his violin concerto, Gerald Finzi wrote a well-known “Romance”, and Ned Rorem a Romance without Words.

The violin became the romantic instrument par excellence.

In reality, one can hardly count the number of famous works that could qualify as “Romances” even though they do not carry that name. A sampling as random as any, should you ask me on Monday, might include the Adagio from Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, the Adagio Cantabile from Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-Flat Major, Khachaturian’s Suite n°2 (Adagio) from Spartacus, Villa-Lobos’ Bachinas Brasileras N°1, and Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio)

5 Tenderness

Music is a source of unfailing tenderness, the arms that hold you close to her bosom. That is what the music of Brahms has so often made me feel, such as in the Intermezzo from his Opus 118 (Sechs Klavierstücke), or the Adagio from his Piano Concerto n°2. 

4 The Violin

The violin is my instrument. The beloved one. It might also have been the viola or the cello, but they really are the same, simply on different registers. The draw of their vibrations remains something of a mystery. 

It has been said that they imitate the human voice, but were that the case we would be just as content to only have the human voice. They can do all sorts of things the voice cannot match, such as playing several notes per second or playing two notes simultaneously. It is not their virtuosity that moves me most, but rather the quality and depth of sound. 

They have allowed musical moments that sound like a voice crying out in the wilderness, piercing to the confines of the universe, full of the longing of one or a thousand souls. 

This is the solo violin of the Sibelius concerto, or the final movement of Britten’s Violin Concerto.

Their intensity of emotion seeks expression at the very limit of the instrument’s capability, and it is that limit which devastates us.

6 The Wandering

She leads us wandering and returns us home. 

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.” - TS Eliot

The poetry of Eliot’s Four Quartets could no more be understood in his time than Beethoven’s Four Final Quartets. 

Two minutes suffice to encapsulate the exploration and return home in Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E minor. 

Bach’s Chaconne from the sonata for solo violin in D minor will take you on a journey of 64 variations in 16 minutes, to arrive where you started and know the place for the first time.

7 Sublimation of sadness

Music is the sublimation of all sadness. We say we want to be happy, not sad, but the sadness expressed in great music is of such beauty as to make one feel happily sad. There are so many examples, one knows neither where to begin nor to end.  With Barber’s Adagio for Strings? Its beauty and its sorrow are equally overwhelming. With Rachmaninov’s ever so delicate Vocalise Op. 34 ?

With the inimitable melancholy of the Adagio assai from Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major ?

With Mahler’s tragic, heart-ripping, 6th symphony?

8 Sweet death

Sadness and sorrow are incapable of containing the nuances of emotions for which words fail, at least in a single language. Der Liebestod is at least closer to what Wagner was expressing in Tristan and Isolde. What is the feeling of “the love death”? Our own lives may never lead us to feel it, but in Wagner’s Tristan we do. Indeed, we experience as real something that does not materially exist.

The strangely peaceful draw of death can also be experienced in one of Richard Strauss’ Last Songs, Im Abendrot, which captures the essence of a final sunset as well as Ravel the original sunrise. 

9 Transience

The unspoken truth is that we want to be happy, but are incapable of experiencing the greatest of joys without contrast in the form of sorrow. Music constantly reminds us of the transience of all emotional states. There is no such thing as static music, although there are works that seek to capture the sense of circular stasis, such as Avro Pârt’s Tabula Rasa. 

Music, as life, only flows. Mozart possessed such finesse as to capture the delicate flux between consonance and dissonance as effortlessly as a passing cloud. He does this within the lightest of musical forms, such as his Divertimento in F major K.138 and the Adagio from his Piano Concerto n°21. Hardly has the minor tear had time to fall that it’s cleared away by C major sunshine.

10 The Dance

She is often called a dance, but is rather the impulse from which dance arises. The dance is embedded in the music, even in the stillness of the body.

From the baroque period, many dance forms--Minuet, Sarabande, Courante, Gigue– remained even as the dances disappeared. 

 In folk traditions, music and dance were inseparable. When none are left who know the steps, the music lives on in Béla Bartok’s Roumanian Folk Dances, the final swirling fast dance of which is uncannily akin to Aaron Copland’s “Hoe-down” in his Rodeo Ballet suite, albeit in an entirely different cultural garment.  

You may not know the steps to the dance, but you know there is dance. And there will be music to dance us to the end of love. 

11 The Magic of Three

Music makes magic from three: rhythm, melody, and harmony.

The magic of harmony is also three notes together forming a chord.

Three notes per beat is a special kind of rhythm, that can be felt before we even understand what has happened to us. Classical compositions alternate between binary and ternary rhythms. Such transitions can produce a delight, as if your body suddenly lightens as it lilts. Even if you are sitting still, something inside you wants to move. 

The masters wove such effects into musical phrases using the occasional triplet form, in addition to composing entire movements in ternary rhythm. The third and final partita composed by J.S. Bach for solo violin is almost entirely ternary. Composed in the bright key of E major, it is a moment of grace. The hypnotic Allegro from Bach’s Brandenburg concerto n°3  dances its way through a subtle major/minor modulation that reverts to major at the end. 

The musical magic of three is deeply embedded in the relationship of tones within scales of notes. Each note forms a triad with two other notes, resulting in a chord. Within the system of 12 tones, there are six pairs of tri-tones. When the 12 tones are arranged in a circle of fifths matrix, the relationship of the triads results in perfect symmetry. Abstract when theorized, it can be naturally felt in music. Music is a special joining of the heart and mind unlike anything else we know. 

12 Breath

Breath contains the secret of life and death. It serves as the subtle, energetic link between body and soul.

The mystery of breath is also the mystery of music. 

Music is a celebration of breath and breathing, which sustains life in our bodies. The origin of melodic music is song, and song is consubstantial with breath, and breath with life in this body. All true musical expression is therefore “living and breathing”. 

May life ripple through you like the rapture of music, and may it lead you to the breathing of light. (Breathing Light by Nitin Sawhney, performed by Hélène Grimaud)

13 The Still, Small Voice 

Sound makes possible the experience of silence, and only in silence can the unknowable secrets of life be approached, not to satisfy us but to awaken us. 

“God was not in the whirlwind, but in the still, small voice….” Mendelssohn, Elijah, No°34 “Der Herr ging vorüber"

14 The Sound of Silence

Music allows silence to arise, as silence also allows for music. For this reason, silence is both embedded into music, and is necessary before and after. The Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde opens in silence followed by a motif that swells into an unresolved chord, like a question that cannot be answered, then silence. The pattern is repeated three times, each time at an interval of a third above the previous. Three short fragments of this motif are then asserted, followed by another pause, before the music breaks into an impassioned validation of the unanswered question.

15 Music as silence

Music can be the silence itself. That may sound like a paradox, but if you find yourself in a place with no sound, you may still have the “noise” of your mind. Music as silence is thus the experience of what you might feel were you totally silent in your mind. You can touch on this by listening to the Sarabande from Bach’s 5th suite for cello. Maybe also Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel.

16 The Unanswered Question

It is better to have an unanswered question than an unquestioned answer. 

Music may ask questions in a figurative sense, bui it does not answer them.

It dissolves them.

No man has seen God, but in the living presence of Love, there is no longer any question to be asked.

Some composers, in a state of disarray,  dissolved questions into a frustrated dissonance (Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question). Others dissolved them into beauty, as at the end of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.  

17 Architecture

She is like a liquid, time-constrained architecture, creating feelings of spaciousness and grandeur, yet outside of any space dimension. The use of a massive orchestra may amplify the effect, but its origin is in the structure of the music itself.  As proof, you have only to listen to J.S. Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. It does not matter whether you listen to a solo organ performance or an entire orchestra. The cathedral-like structure is embedded in the music, and the resulting emotion is awe. 

18 Representation

She is a mysterious representation of the visual world on a different plane. I say mysterious because I don’t know if this proceeds simply from association or from some more fundamental unity (as suggested by Kandinsky who equated colors to musical keys). The Lever du jour from Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé inspires a sense of elation. Is that because it faithfully describes a sunrise? Or is it rather that Ravel has transcribed in a musical form the essence of the sunrise, which is none other than elation. In the same way, we are roused by the glory of “The Great Gate of Kiev” in Mussorsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, not because we picture the gate that served as its inspiration, but because the music itself embodies glory. 

19 Musical declamation

There are works of music where there can be no doubt that the composer is speaking through music, not because it contains words, but because its rhythm or meter are clearly suggestive of emphatic speech. Beethoven was a master of this, and not only in the operatic sphere. The work that immediately comes to mind is the Andante con moto of his 4th piano concerto.

In an entirely different register, you can hear the reassuring repetition of “Blessed are they…” of “the Beatitudes” in the work by Vladimir Martynov of that same name. 

20 Super-condensed emotion

She offers a super-condensed form of life experience. We are drawn to stories because they condense someone else’s life experience and reproduce within us the emotions of that experience. Every great work of music is a condensed life experience that serves to augment our own life experience. This is also true for literature, but music is more condensed, more abstract, and more emotionally intense. Its closest cousin is poetry, which can aptly be described as musical.

In a few minutes, you can experience, repeatedly, the feeling that a particular work evokes in you. How about the feeling of exaltation? You’ll find it condensed into the Finales of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite or Mahler’s 2nd Symphony.

21 The encoded message

She encodes a message and draws us to decipher it. That message may be universal, but also deeply personal. There was a moment in my life when I was binge-listening to the Molto adagio movement of Beethoven’s 15th String Quartet in A minor, opus 132. I couldn’t quite grasp it, but I sensed there was something to grasp. I detected the musical idea that germinated, then developed over several iterations, separated by a different theme, until the entire phrase would be completed at the concluding iteration. When I finally heard the entire phrase, and understood it as the completion of what had only been impartially uttered until that point, I broke into tears. It was the moment I realized I had never really told my mother that I loved her. I would later tell her, and that love is now immortalized in the string quartet. 

22 Patterns 

She is an immaterial tapestry woven according to the same, often fractal, patterns that form the fabric of all existence. From the simplest idea, she develops into a masterful complexity that can nevertheless be grasped. 

The final movement of Mahler’s 9th symphony opens with a motif that is hardly more than a very slow turn (gruppetto) followed by four notes that descend in scale toward a modulated destination note, offering what sounds like a new beginning. Absurdly, it required more words to describe this than the notes that bring the music into existence. My words convey zero emotion, whereas the notes, played by the strings in unison, suspend your breath and clutch your gut. Still, it’s only the beginning. The same motif–that simple turn– will be elaborated, modulated, labored upon as in the crucible of a human life, swelling towards a dramatic climax. 

In the final turn, the drama will dissipate and the opening motif will fade into breathlessness.

To understand human life on earth, for a soul who never had a chance to incarnate here, this music would suffice. 

23 Mind the gaps

Music is all about intervals, the basic patterns of which are called scales and modes.

The variations upon these patterns are infinite

If the starting question for my contemplations was, why does music elicit such a powerful emotional effect, that question can also be asked about the very patterns that comprise it.

There seems to be a suggestive emotion (or mood) for any given key, major and minor, as well as any given mode. It’s not intrinsic, but culturally acquired by association. Modes used in early church music sound as if from another time. Modes more familiar to Eastern music sound exotic  (as if from another place). And so that is how we relate to them.

What often generates both delight and discomfort is when an expected pattern is disrupted, such as a resolution postponed or disrupted. The atonal movement led by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern sought to abolish the notion of a tonal center, thereby liberating composition from its traditional structure. With every note in the 12-tone chromatic scale given the same importance, the listener would be permanently frustrated in his/her expectations of what note would follow. This creates an instinctive barrier for those who rely on what to expect. Indeed, the certainty that comes with fulfilled expectation is like a dopamine hit, and may explain why people enjoy music on the surface.

For those willing to leave the comfort of certainty, music with no tonal “home” can have its own, somewhat more ethereal beauty.  The supremely lyrical violin concerto by Alban Berg, “for the death of an angel” is one of the more accessible examples. 

24 A Major

The key of A major (La majeur) is uminous with clarity of ring.

Lighthearted, it will make you want to sing.

To feel this key, you could start with the A major Prelude & Fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach. From there, you could la la your way down through the ages in A major:

Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet and Concerto, Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No 9, Schubert’s Piano Sonata D. 959, César Franck’s Violin Sonata, and Bruckner’s 6th Symphony with the supremely sunny ending of its Adagio movement.

25 Dreaming

Music, like a dream or a hallucination, may connect you to what would otherwise be unimagined and unknown. Prokofiev’s 1st violin concerto has such a quality to it.

She may also connect you to what you have already imagined, like the revival of some ancient memory within you, or nostalgia for a world long gone. Making extensive use of the Phrygian mode, the Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaugham Williams does that to me.

26 New worlds

A composer is, at times, a creator of worlds. From the pure imagination, he may bring into being a musical world that has never before been heard, or through music, the idea that a new world is being born. 

Wagner, Lohengrin Prelude. 

Strauss, Also Spracht Zarathoustra. 

Hindemith: Symphonie Mathis der Maler : Engelkonzert

Messiaen: Turangalîla Symphonie

Said Messiaen: “I am convinced that joy exists, convinced that the invisible exists more than the visible, and that joy is beyond sorrow, and beauty is beyond horror.”

27 Wholeness

Our ears detect sound, and our hearing interprets it, our brain is integrally stimulated by it, but music is an experience that unites our entire being. It operates simultaneously on the level of the most sophisticated intelligence while also activating hormonal and other physiological responses on a primal level. We instinctively want to feel whole, and music is an integrative phenomenon. The extent to which it is integrative is perhaps one of the measures that distinguish base music from great music. 

One of the most apparently simple works of classical music ever written is the Prelude in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier by JS Bach. It is so simple that I can play it on the piano from memory even though I’m not a pianist. Upon hearing it, I never fail to feel happily whole. 

28 Communication

Music is a communication of human emotions between humans: composer, interpreter, and listener. Remove any one of these, and the music no longer exists as such. Not because AI cannot compose music, maybe even the most well-crafted music, but because 

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep of a life does it spring.” (Ulysses, James Joyce)

This is why using AI to compose music marks the possible end of music and of humanity.

29 Unity

Music unites humanity.

When football teams representing different countries come together, they compete. It’s better than going to war, no doubt. When musicians of different countries come together in a single orchestra, even if their countries are at war, the music suspends that war because the musicians are unified in the music, and where there is unity there is peace.

30 Gratitude

Music is gratitude. Of all the emotions that can most uplift us in this life, gratitude is perhaps the greatest. Music labelled as “sacred” is directly concerned with God-offerings. For this reason, it may within it a spirit of gratitude. 

Mozart : Laudate Dominum from the “Coronation Mass”

Lauridsen : O magnum mysterium

Even as music can inspire gratitude, it is also the natural expression of gratitude.

“You will go out with celebration, and you will be brought back in peace. Even the mountains and the hills will burst into song before you; all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” 

- Isaiah 55:12

Much that in the category of profane is also sacred, because all that we are given to experience ultimately leads back to our source. 

31 Emergence

Water emerges from the interaction between “water molecules” that do not, on their own, have the properties of water. 

Consciousness emerges from intelligence that is not conscious in and of itself.

So also, music arises from a deliberate organisation of sound in time. 

What emerges cannot be reduced to that from which it emerges. It becomes something entirely 

32 Mirror of life

The structure of music reflects our human experience, bounded by time and a sense of quasi-determinism. Every musical masterpiece is constrained within the frequencies of audible sound and time, yet there remains an seemingly endless reservoir of possible variations.

We enter into a piece of classical music as into a story: we know it will end, we have a vague notion about how it will end, yet we are enthralled by the suspense. 

33 Boundlessness

Music is the closest thing humans can experience to pure and boundless creation, meaning creation that has virtually no material requirements or limits. 

Our drawings, our buildings, and our crafts have material limits. 

Even our stories are limited by what we understand to be possible. 

Music is only limited to the range of audible sound, on the one hand, and to time on the other.

The temporal limitation exists because music is intrinsically modeled after life, which is likewise bound by time. Beginning (birth), development, and end (death) are contained in each note as they are in each musical form, from song to sonata to symphony. 

34 Pricelessness

Unlike a work of art, she cannot be possessed and remains therefore priceless.  In plenty as in lack, in sickness as in health, she will never leave you or forsake you. She will be with you intimately, and with all the same who seek her. 

35 In the beginning

In the beginning was the Word…

In the beginning was the sound AUM. The source of creation, before sound and beyond sound, sounded the cosmos into existence. Non-musicians refer to this as a bang.

Vibration is the quintessential phenomenon of that cosmos. It’s all vibration. Music is a vibrational apotheosis.

36 In the end

Après la destruction des choses et la mort des êtres, the immaterial, incorruptible, indestructible sound of music will continue to resonate through spheres beyond our own.