Music is not just a living language;
it is a violently contorting, writhing beast which thrives on the tensions it introduces into itself.
Music is a physical force. It moves through the body, looking for a suitable home.
It teaches the body the rhythms of the moment.
It captures the movements of the mind with a subtlety that astonishes the mind.
Music plays with time; music demonstrates the elasticity of the moment.
Music functions as a mirror for society.
In the explosion of genres and sub-genres one sees the fragmentation of an uncertain and indecisive world.
In the rise of popular music one sees a violent reaction against an aristocracy grown stale,
a reaction to intellectualism which implies disillusionment with the pursuits of the mind.
One hears the voice of the times.
Music, above all else, provides the spectacle to go with our actions:
protest songs for our protests, worship songs for our prayers,
noise and grime for our indifference, thumping beats and sleaze for our promiscuity,
even instrumental suites for our silence.
Through these, we see our glorified reflections and feel justified in what we have done or failed to do.
For many of us, music is the purest language for spirit.
It takes the rhythms of the universe and ennobles them and perverts them.
It evolves, it enters into dialogue with itself, it tells jokes about itself, all without ever leaving its abstract alphabet of limitless sounds.
It is absolutely free, until it needs an audience to amuse.
Music carries our memories, music colors our ages, and music stands alone, one foot in our world and one foot in eternity.
Music attains purity and majesty as we pour or passions or our peace into it.
In itself music is something terrifying, a confession of our desperate search for novelty, a perpetual flight from silence.
But music allows us to experience all of life's horror and beauty from a safe distance.
Music can condense all the pathos of a memory into a single gesture.
It allows us to re-experience overwhelming emotions as an abstract form, a pattern easily digested by mind and body.
But what is music? Where are the lines drawn in the sand?
Perhaps this is the ultimate glory of music:
when we look for the limits of its domain it grows and grows and grows until finally...
everything is music.
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