Ranting about Music

It case I haven't made this point entirely clear yet, music -- creating it, sharing it, immersing in it, crafting it -- is such a beautiful joy in life. Sometimes it is a mere three hours of unadulterated music-making that can etch a blissful simper on my face for days, if not weeks. Yesterday evening was one of those sessions that has left me in such a state; Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and wonderful musicians with whom to share such great music. Some of my happiest moments this past year have been music-related. Music: in its beauty, its pain, its unrestrained exuberance, its longing anguish -- how can it be anything but perfection?



The dull hours spent sitting in my office are kept buoyed by such memories, by such hopeful strivings.

Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:
The silence of pictures. Language where all
languages end. Time
standing straight up out of the direction
of hearts passing on.

Feeling, for whom? O the transformation
of feeling into what?— into audible landscape.
Music: you stranger. Passion which
has outgrown us. Our inner most being,
transcending, driven out of us,—
holiest of departures:
inner worlds now
the most practiced of distances, as
the other side of thin air:
pure,
immense
no longer habitable.

-Rilke (who else?)

And an encapsulation of another wonderful memory -- Mozart clarinet quintet: