French music is rich in allusion to nature, representing rigor before freedom. Any artist must know the points of canonical departure before taking liberties. We must know our musical lineage - our superposition. What is a sentence without its antecedent? What is a phrase? Music theory? Everything is made known only after the fact. “Musicality” or something musical might just be a term given to the practice of music. It has nothing to do with the music itself, as music is everything contained within the palette of the one who chooses to hear. Music is all-knowing, telling, and more privy than any of us. To understand, we must educate and search for the enlightened state that the greats before us found for themselves, by themselves. We must develop a third ear.
As life unfolds, its affirmation is through its “Leiser Ton.” These signals are often whispered, but always fortified from within. The adult world in which we foolishly joust is one that does not speak to us directly of what need be done; others do not tell. This is the duty of the parent/mentor and eventually, the self. In this age, many emote in the face of what they might think, but are all-too-timid to speak! Life parcels reminders - some harsher than others. If needed, it will remind us even more drastically in the face of hubris.
Life is often ironic, especially when the world demands that we act a farce. But so it stands - the coincidentia oppositorum. We may enjoy it all a bit more if we embrace the absurdity as a sort of game. Our confidence in friends, family, and mentors is paramount. The laboring world may not be so receptive - this is the system we have built in the westerly world. Alas, to teach and perform is an offering.
A Devout Heresy - words born of Stravinsky’s lifelong honing of an elusive aphorism, much at the prodding of Robert Craft:
For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention - in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.
- Igor Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie.
J.W.M.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better.
T.S. Eliot