Musical Notes

In the beginning was the deed not the word. But before that was sound. Do we ever have access to that hidden origin, is it possible to speak about the impossible? Is life anything but the search for that unseen centre, anything but the attempt to translate the mystery back into words, culture? We think about it, conceptualise it but music -like life-flows on, saying everything and nothing. Life without music would be a mistake.

Is music anything more than pleasure? A way of forgetting or a way of remembering a deeper past? And she holds beauty and reticience, the enduring and the ephemeral, the physical and the metaphysical in both hands.Harmony is beauty and number, passion and discipline. A sound thought. Where does thought begin and where does it end? Music doesn’t start with the first note, but rather from the silence from which it emerges. Something always precedes the origin. What is the relation between 0 and 1 except one of strict discontinuity. But it is, paradoxically, a relation neverthe less. Is this relation a ‘law’ or does it follow its own trajectory with any freedom? who can answer such a question. All one can say is that if the note is not sustained then it will ‘fall’ back to nothingness. Without an effort of will and memory it dies and this is the beginning of a tragic story. Gravity and grace, snakes and ladders…the old themes.

Music is always in the process of becoming: it never is ; its fleetingness is an escape from the world, all that is not present, but it is also an evocation of what can be or what was and points , therefore, to hope and memory.

Possibilities: All music is generated from the same twelve notes, the same fundamental structure; the universe is composed by some combination of them. We instinctively grasp the mood of some music because we too are a series of such notes. Unity and diversity. The hands, heart and mind work together in a blessed state. Humaneness is not a completed score, but a performance. Structure and logic, without the human touch, descends into the totalitarian and all that stifles creativity. That ‘giving’ , the human quality par excellence, is what helps a note as it is about to die; it is why a note can transcend life. Is music an attempt to control time, to find that special moment, that peaceful place, and freeze it or is it a striving to be time itself, to unlock closely guarded secrets and unbind the will.
--from Daniel Banenboim