Quotations of the form “Music is . . .” are a dime a dozen, but meaningful, provocative, thoughtful ones are scarce. The best turn out to be the shortest. Here are three.
Exhibit A: “Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work.” This is Lewis Thomas, somewhere is his collection of essays, The Medusa and the Snail (1979). There’s more, but my point (for the moment) is that more is less. Here’s the whole paragraph: “Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. ‘The Art of Fugue’ is not a special pattern of thinking, it is not thinking about any particular thing. The spelling out of Bach’s name in the great, unfinished layers of fugue at the end is no more than a transient notion, something flashed across the mind. The whole piece is not about thinking about something, it is about thinking. If you want, as an experiment, to hear the whole mind working, all at once, put on the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ and turn the volume up all the way. That is the sound of the whole central nervous system of human beings, all at once.”
Exhibit B: Music is “a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.” This is George Crumb, an American composer (born 1929). How annoying to have an intriguing definition from someone whose music is (for me) almost entirely unapproachable! What is one to make of a score which looks like this?
. . . or this?
This second one, by the way, Black Angels, is a piece for string quartet. A performance of it is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5a2RXA2Jn8
I enjoyed it, up to the 1’10” mark. OK, so there’s a gong, and quotations from the Dies Irae and Death and the Maiden, and bits of glass harmonica played with bows instead of moistened fingers, and four earnest players dressed in serious black giving it their all, but, finally, so what?
Exhibit C: “Music is a place.” This is Philip Glass, an all-too-approachable composer whose music is, for me, pointless. But his definition (for me, for now) is the most suggestive. Music is a place one goes to, a place one has to go to, often. “Enter the silence as often as possible; remain there for as long as possible” says Robert S. DeRopp (in his book The Master Game (1968)). A good rule for a good life. And another would be “Enter the place which is music as often as possible; remain there for as long as possible”.
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