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MUSIC: a way of transcending
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MUSIC: a way of transcending
Here are some of the instruments I like playing. The instrument in the foreground of the picture to the left is a harpsichord that I built myself. It's modeled after a harpsichord originally built by Hans Moermans in Antwerp in 1584. At the back of the room is a Yamaha grand piano. I constructed both the Flemish harpsichord and the double-manual French harpsichord, shown in the photograph below, in the early 1980s while working in Mozambique. For the latter instrument, a harpsichord built in Paris in 1769 by Pascal Taskin served as prototype. During that same period in Mozambique, I also built a couple of clavichords and a guitar. Building a lute is an never completed project started that same period. Other priorities moved it to the backburner where it has remained since. I may take that challenge up again.
Creating something new, using one's hands to do so, is always a great pleasure. However, building your own musical instrument and then playing it is a delight that can hardly be described to those who never went through the experience themselves. I never before had the feeling to be so intensely closely connected to the sounds that my touching the keys produced. Making such instruments is also a unique opportunity for bringing together one's artistic and scientific faculties with sound craftsmanship in efforts that extend over periods of at least a year.
- that
- he saw in music not just a combination of sounds, but he understood the fact that
- every musical masterpiece is, as it were, a conception of the world. And the
- difficulty lies in the fact that this conception of the world cannot be described in
- words—because were it possible to describe it in words, the music would be
- unnecessary. But he recognized that the fact that it is indescribable doesn’t mean
- that is has no meaning.
- The above notion comes close to my own appreciation of music, whether I play music myself or listen to music performed by others. Music transcends - or rather it helps me transcend - the much more limited states of mind I would be adopting while engaging in any of the multiple endeavors I regularly undertake, should there be no music. For me, therefore, music never stands on its own. It is intimately interwoven with and an essential extension and enhancement of my existence in other modalities of being. It is the ideal way to overcome my limited self.
- Music, perhaps more than anything else, creates a sense of continuity within the larger context of the flow of events over the course of history. One becomes part of the feelings of one's ancestors of the late 17th century by listening to the music of Sweelinck and Buxtehude; moves into the 18th century with Bach and Handel; progresses in time with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; relives the early part of the19th century while playing Schubert and Chopin; moving gradually further forward in time with Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Franck to appreciate the later part of that century; transiting into the 20th century with the likes of Mahler, Debussy, Bartok, Ravel, and Schoenberg; finally having Strawinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev to provide the bridge to one's own era.
- As music is continually being recreated, its appreciation never leads to perceptions like "Oh, how cute, this is how they did it in the 18th century." Quite to the contrary, one is very much aware, even in the case of performances that involve the use of period instruments, that one is recreating the past in the present, leading to a heightened sense of integration over time, making Bach's music as relevant now as it supposedly was in his own time. In fact, it seems to have acquired enhanced relevance, knowing how it influenced composers and interpreters who came long after him.
- For reasons that I don't quite understand, the possibility to connect particular musical creations to other events in history, is somehow able to lend the latter an enhanced meaning. Thus, it seems to matter, at least to me, that the publication in 1690 of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding coincided with Johann Pachelbel's famous Canon in D or that Brahms finalized what is now known as his Piano Quintet in F Minor in the same year when James Clerk Maxwell presented his equations to the Royal Society. It doesn't alter the reality of science, music or philosophy, but all of them seem to gain from the fact that they are part and parcel of the more integral human experience.
- Finally, I am fascinated by the associative power of music in how it is able to prompt the recall of all kinds of memories, such as of events that coincided with when I first heard a particular piece of music or books that I read as a child while listening to my mother playing the piano. Because of that associative power, music functions for me also as a potent means for fostering reflection.