Music Will Survive You

MUSIC NEVER ENDS REVISITED

MUSIC WILL SURVIVE YOU

Music is an adventure. It can choke your life out of touch with the world. It can build around you and in your mind a world that is so real you may even forget to breathe. And music is at its best when voices tell a story haunted by the music itself. I even think that ballet is even more powerful since it offers the audience the bodies of the dancers for this audience to admire them, dream of them, desire them within the shrine of the dramatic story told by the voices and wrapped up in the music itself.

And a silence comes in this sound world. The voices just suspend their gliding in the air and the dancers freeze in suspended movement. In such an instant of total suspension the mind, the soul, the senses, all are thrilled into admiration and ecstasy. And the silence comes to an end. Bliss comes back. Blessed be the music that never ends and only suspends its flight for one beat or half a beat.

In the following numerous pages, whose number grows every quarter or so and will go on growing forever, or at least till death us parts, the newer pages are often at the top and open the collection. And this time it is John Adams and his operas that give the first opening salvo. More will come later. I am on Stravinsky right now. That will come later and I…