“The field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void.”
~from “Swann’s Way”, Marcel Proust
I love this, partly for what it says: how certain musicians have the power to claim us, to defy those inner places we think will never be broken open; and partly because it’s composed as one sentence only.
I love it for its myriads of textures.
A writer’s kind of music. It sings in so many, many ways.
While in the depths of aching loss, beauty weeps and rises¹:
And in far different vein, this²:
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¹May, B. (1986). Who Wants To Live Forever. [Recorded by Queen + Adam Lambert, Live at The Isle of Wight Festival, 2016].
²Webley, J. (2010). Map. [Recorded by Jason Webley].
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