Music and Attention and Intuition

Searching, pausing and recognizing the good and beautiful in art and life

Recently I’ve fallen in love, once again, with the music of J.S. Bach.

I go through periods where it seems all I listen to is the Goldberg Variations or the Brandenberg Concertos or the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Classical music grabbed hold of me from a young age.

As a child, I spent many hours in front of a large speaker, a speaker then larger than me, listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, the waves of symphonic harmonies washing through me.

These were foundational experiences. I was transfixed by the movement of the sound and how I too was moved. I had few words then to describe the effect of the music.

And now too, words fail me. It’s as if music is a world you enter into that outside language, within our being, within the world.

“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Music communicates and resonates with aspects of our human experience more fully than words. Music reproduces within our being the emotions associated with our experiences in life.

Sorrow, joy, surprise, delight, softness, harshness, water, wind, breathing, walking, all rediscovered in the world of musical composition and performance.

There are moments when music sends a warm chill through the body. The hair rises on the neck as melodies chime bells within that we didn’t know existed. Musical performance at times seems to reach through our bodies, transforming our bodies into extensions of the musical instruments. The sound of beautiful music strums our bodies like the musician strums the strings of a violin.

Consonance is a universal experience of music as beautiful and harmonious. Dissonance too is universally recognized and all human cultures have musical traditions that meditate on the dissonant and the consonant. Those pieces of music that most resonate are always the consonant. And consonant music is what forms musical traditions.

What makes music consonant or dissonant? Why is musical harmony experienced as beautiful?

While musical notes can be represented with all manner of notational methods, and while the nature of musical harmony can be described in language, neither the notations themselves nor the words used to describe the effect constitute the power of music.

Just as the world can be described and measured through math, math did not create the world.

So it is with music.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations is an education on beauty and harmony. Perhaps one of Bach’s most well-known compositions, the Goldberg Variations are meditations on beauty and the multifaceted ways that beauty is experienced.

Comprised of 30 variations of an aria, a single musical theme, Bach explores the many ways that a single idea can be represented. Each variant demonstrates Bach’s mastery of musical forms and styles, and each variant has a unique character, underscoring the diverse ways a single idea can be explored.

Listening to them doesn’t require any musical understanding to appreciate. Glenn Gould’s recording is a rapturous experience.

All of Bach’s music are a reflection of his belief in God and beauty and his compositions are meditations on the eternal Truths.

The Goldberg Variations as a work is a reminder that beauty is worthy of continuous reflection and attention. The experience of beauty is represented as the most worthy pursuit.

Mixing together prayer and play and variety, grounded in a practiced, honed musically technical excellence and with room for personal expression through performance, Bach points to the transcendent beauty that centers our existence. Each listener is invited to experience the great diversity of musical beauty and beauty itself in all its delightful variations. Each performer is invited to inherit the compositions as form and reform the music with their own musical expression.

You can listen to one excellent performance of the Goldberg Variations here:

The Goldberg Variations remind me of the Katsushika Hokusai series of drawings, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the most famous view being The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Both Bach and Hokusai take a single subject, Bach an aria, Hokusai a mountain, and reflect on that single subject from many different viewpoints. In variety, in diversity

Both bodies of work together are examples of technical mastery of craft, but much more they both represent compositional and narrative mastery.

This is the highest form of artistry.

To demonstrate superior technical and creative ability is one thing but the capacity to place those abilities into service of something greater, a story, is something else together.

The practice of channeling intuition through craft into a work of art is beautifully presented in the work of Bach.

His work is inspiring, educational, instructive and humanizing.

There is something about a great work of art that encourages one to be more of oneself.