Sunday, September 3, 2017

My Years With Proust - Day 555

   The andante had just ended on a phrase filled with a tenderness to which I had entirely surrendered.  There followed, before the next movement, a short interval during which the performers laid down their instruments and the audience exchanged impressions. A duke, in order to show that he knew what he was talking about, declared: "It's a difficult thing to play well." Other more agreeable people chatted for a moment with me.  But what were their words, which like every human and external word left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing?  I was truly like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality.  And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.  It is like a possibility that has come to nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. But this return to the unanalysed was so intoxicating that,m on emerging from that paradise, contact with more or less intelligent people seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance. 
Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 260

I think this is one of the most beautiful passages on the primacy and magic of music that I've ever read.  Proust's point is that music can take us places so sublime, that it is jarring to leave the purified realm of the ethereal and return to the mundane and coarse. Proust writes, "But what were their words, which like every human and external word left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing?  I was truly like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality." I've told the story of the days when I took the Link bus into Burlington when we lived in Barre, which presented a perpetual scheduling challenge but which also gave me the chance to read uninterrupted.  Except that I seldom had the chance to read uninterrupted because, even though I had a copy of Bleak House open on my lap, people would interrupt me with all sorts of inane comments/questions, mainly because, I'm sure, in their minds the thought of reading was a horrible necessary evil and that they were doing me a favor by giving me a break.  No matter there rationale, I often found it painful to leave not just the story, but more importantly the transcendent space where I was hiding.  However, this abrupt and unwelcome return to the mundane is but a distant pale shadow of the pain that Proust is describing.  His argument, essentially, is that music is a language much richer and purer and unsullied than the written and especially the spoken word.  As we know, the medium is the message, as I often tell my students when explaining that the fact that I grew up reading - as compared to growing up communicating using texts or tweets or Instagram or Facebook posts or any of the various versions of instant messenger (and I'm not pissing on those entirely because at one time or another I've used, and still use, all of them) - and how that changes not only the speed of which we gather information but what we do with it and our joy in finding it.

This made me think of the works of music that had the most power to draw me into their world, and which, in turn, made returning to this world most difficult.  Essentially, which were the works which if I were listening to them and someone distracted me I'd have to toss them quite energetically out the window.  Some of them are clearly my favorite songs, but in this case I'm focusing on the ones which just take me to a place where I'd prefer to stay - and asking me to take off my headphones is not appreciated.

Edward Elgar, Cello Concerto in E minor.

Neil Young, Expecting to Fly.

Bill Evans, Young and Foolish.

Peter Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6 (Pathetique).

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme.

Miles Davis, Stella by Starlight.

REM, Flowers of Guatemala.

Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else.

Bill Evans, Waltz for Debbie.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Partita no. 2.

Miles Davis, So What.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no. 9 in D minor.

John Coltrane, Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Cello Suite no. 1 in G.

Bill Evans, Some Other Time.

Neil Young, Helpless.

Not surprisingly, considering Proust's original point, the majority of these are purely musical, that is, they are no words, which means that I have a lot of jazz and classical.  That said, a couple songs made their way in because they, despite the words (and not that the words are counterproductive, but I'm trying to remain true to Proust), elicited a feeling and took me to a place where it was painful to leave. I suspect they survived the cut because they were meaningful at certain painful or transitional times of my life so they exist in their own worlds as passages that take me someplace within seconds and maybe I don't even hear the rest of the song.  If Proust is right, and not just giving into a flight of fancy, then the words would corrupt the purity of the music, but in these instances I think the words are as evocative as the music and hence it doesn't sully the experience.



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