It is a river vast, both wide and deep that corrals out joy and sadness; lulls to sleep the fretful child, and transforms the darkest landscape of a man depressed into a golden glowing cape.<\/p>\n
It is not just the spice of life, but our very life blood, perhaps the central issue in human and animal wellbeing, giving complete absolute freedom, psychologically, inwardly, then outwardly, through singing, dancing or playing instruments.<\/p>\n
It arrives with humour, typified by Enbie Blake, the ragtime pianist who, when asked, aged ninety, by Alastair Cooke, for his \u2018Letter from America\u2019, what he attributed his longevity to, replied: \u2018I guess it was them French fries\u2019. Or Jimi Hendrix, who before he died at twenty-seven quipped: \u2018Once you\u2019re dead, you\u2019re made for life\u2019. Likewise Thomas Beecham, the internationally acclaimed British conductor, who once suggested at a choral recording: \u2018if the ladies will look more closely at their parts and see where the gentlemen come in, it will make for better reproduction.\u2019<\/p>\n
It also inspires poetry, such as the \u2018Dance and Provencal Song and Sunburnt mirth\u2019 of Keats\u2019s \u2018Ode to a Nightingale\u2019 \u2013 \u2018While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy\u2019<\/p>\n
As my friend Jan Skrdlik put it: \u2018Music is a special language to communicate everything from the heart\u2019. Just hear him and his consummate pianist Petra Besa play with a passion, almost unheard-of in contemporary Classical music, to see how valid is that epigram.<\/p>\n
Go back two hundred years to the Rev. Sidney Smith, who the American ambassador called \u2018the wisest man, if he had not been deemed the wittiest\u2019: for Sidney music was \u2018the only cheap and unpunished rapture on earth\u2019, the former unfortunately no longer, considering the price of a ticket to Glastonbury Festival, or Grand Opera.<\/p>\n
It is a dazzling world, from the first known song, the Hurrian Hymn no. 6 from 3400 BCE in Syria (would they have song now instead of bullets) to the 1264 pop variants of 2018 AD; if those first singers<\/a> could see the variety of the folk\/ethnic\/jazz\/blues\/soul\/RnB\/Classical\/electronic spheres they would surely gasp in awe. How quickly did it grow?<\/p>\n Of the three main strands, Classical and Rock come from the folk of cottage and hut. Classical Indian ragas, arrived well before the monastic parchments of Europe, which engendered late medieval composers like Lassus (listen to his glory on the Christ Church College Choir recordings, conducted by Simon Preston).<\/p>\n The stream of the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque era of Bach (1650- ) and Handel\u2019s legendary Messiah, a river flowing into the torrent of the Classical Age of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (c. 1800); surely the latter brought us to the high water mark of musical expressiveness.<\/p>\n I wonder had any among the thirty thousand who flocked to Beethoven\u2019s funeral heard all nine of his symphonies (including the 9th<\/sup> with its \u2018Ode to Joy\u2019), the last five string quartets (Op. 135 the final one, with a slow adagio<\/em> movement that arrives from no where, has a beauty so simple and pure that perhaps only the Busch, Amadeus and Hollywood quartets have captured its sublime essence in a recording), or his piano sonatas, thirty-two in all with the Op 111 at the end giving one a vision of Paradise, as played by the Jewish-Austrian Artur Schuabel, whose preeminent gifts were expressed in his comment: \u2018the notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes \u2013 ah, that is where the resides.\u2019?<\/p>\n