Whence Comes the Music?

All my life I’ve felt that a certain kind of music reveals a doorway to another dimension, a different form of reality. When I was a landscape photographer, I used to stand on top of a mountain or sea cliff and try to ascertain where the doorway was. I never did. The closest I ever came was through listening to that certain kind of music.

It’s pretty impressive when the human brain works out an equation, or formulates a philosophy, or invents a space rocket, or designs the latest piece of mind-bogglingly complex piece of technology. But these things are largely created by a pragmatic, albeit very clever, process. That’s what advanced brains are good at.

A beautiful piece of music, however, just appears from nowhere via the mind of a gifted composer, and you find yourself wondering ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ Well, maybe it came through the doorway. Maybe it didn’t come from the brain at all, but from some other aspect of mind in touch with a region beyond the material. That’s why I’ve always believed that music is the most precious of the art forms, and why I’ve become intolerant of music which is self-consciously clever.