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<\/p>\nEvery night I hear piano practicing in the house\u2014my son, Sam, and my daughter, Camilla, working tirelessly. Sometimes Chopin, sometimes popular songs my daughter likes to learn and quietly sing to. And over the last few months, almost nightly I hear the sound of the small plying voice of my boy, exploring old Beatles classics on his not always perfectly tuned guitar. Just last week I was in Nashville for a conference and a friend and I made it into one of the night clubs to hear live blues music. It was so loud we had to shout to make ourselves heard to one another. But the music made me so happy I wanted to cry. Earlier this winter I flew with my son to Los Angeles just for the chance to hear two Mahler symphonies performed by the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra with my brother, Bill. At the conclusion of Mahler\u2019s 2nd<\/sup> Symphony, one of the more extraordinary pieces of music ever composed, the choir sings words that Mahler composed himself, riffing off of lines first written by the poet Klopstock.<\/p>\n\n<\/p>
What was created<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nMust perish,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nWhat perished, rise again!<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nCease from trembling!<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nPrepare yourself to live!<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/span><\/i><\/p>\nO Pain, You piercer of all things,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nFrom you, I have been wrested!<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nO Death, You masterer of all things,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nNow, are you conquered!<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nWith wings which I have won for myself,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIn love\u2019s fierce striving,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI shall soar upwards<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nTo the light which no eye has penetrated!<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIts wing that I won is expanded,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nand I fly up.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n\n<\/p>
Sam felt shaken by the experience although he didn\u2019t quite have the words for it. Neither did my brother or I, although we were joined in a surfeit of emotion. Music does this trick with thoughts, expressing them not as ideas, at least not at first, but as sounds, and as sounds, they are abstractions, feelings, pulses felt in the blood. Ideas seem secondary to rhythm, to moving and complimentary tones that must first seduce us into a certain mood into which ideas gently drop as their setting. That is not to say that ideas do not matter or that all of truth could be summarized as feeling. But as the Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno says in his marvelous book, The Tragic Sense of Life<\/i>, \u201cthe end purpose of life is to live, not to understand.\u201d Music enables such living by reminding us of the full bodied medium in which language and ideas take place\u2014in mouths and in ears, with tongues, beating hearts and breathing lungs, flowing blood in the veins\u2014 which is why so often we are content with wordless sounds. Perhaps we enjoy being relieved of the burden of thought without being relieved of the privilege of deeply knowing and trusting. Perhaps music reminds us that there is no salvation without a body, no heaven without earth, nothing more important to yearn for except that which we already have.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>
What are these wings that Mahler feels takes him heavenward, these wings he has earned somehow through the \u201cfierce striving\u201d of love? Why does the wing expand, increasing his ecstasy, as he prepares to live? Why must one die in order to learn to begin again, to finally, truly be alive? Is music somehow taking us through this journey, teaching us to die a little so we can prepare to live? Critics say Mahler is characterized more by his search for God than for his declaration of having found Him. Does it signify a mere metaphor to call it, as we do, his Resurrection Symphony? Why is this striving for God so deeply moving if it is based on an agony, a striving, rather than on arrival? Why, for that matter, would the raw, off-key sounds of a boy copying popular refrains or the quiet joy of a girl at her piano feel like a kind of gritty poetry of the soul? Why can\u2019t I distinguish any longer between the joys of an old Gibson guitar and the soaring ecstasies of dozens of violins moving in unison, between the otherworldly refrains of sacred music and the earth-stained strains of love songs? Call me greedy, but I want all of it. Music makes me feel that I just might be so fortunate.<\/p>\n
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Every night I hear piano practicing in the house\u2014my son, Sam, and my daughter, Camilla, working tirelessly. Sometimes Chopin, sometimes popular songs my daughter likes to learn and quietly sing to. And over the last few months, almost nightly I hear the sound of the small plying voice of my boy, exploring old Beatles classics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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