Music as Sacred

Bruce Salem to my own blog:

One of the central ideas of Positive Psychology is to bring the sacred, the transcendant, into the commonplace. This is often done as a maditation on the divine in everything, but I have experienced this recently by making my favorite music, which is a large chunk of the serious music repretiore, a part of my day to day routine. I take it everywhere I go. It is not reserved for a special time like it was when access to it was reserved to a radio concert or to time spent in front of a bulky immovable hifi system. The point is not what iPods and CD players allow for mobile music but how having the pleasures of such wonderful art brighten moments that would have been just ordinary or oppressive with worry in the past.

There is more to this than memory of places or music past, but of present and form in the present as the music forms themselves impose a rhythm and a ritural on ordinary tasks. I used to wonder about religious people who had to go to services everyday, but now I understand. For me hearing and thinking about some favorite music everyday is like that. It is a pilgramage to the heart, something that may come out of last night's dream or out of the wonder of hearing a piece for the first time, or rehearing a work known for decades, but anew somehow. Of course there is an intellectual stimulation of learning facts that surround the nusic, its history and form and technical details, such as examining a score or learning a part, there is something wonderfully present in being intimate with such a thing of beauty which requires a good memory of it
and then marvaling that one can do that, remember and savor the whole thing
not knowing why one is so blessed.

Your past on the Internet never dies

I have been meaning to update my blog, but when I Googled myself, I found my history up to the moment on the Internet excruciatingly detailed, including lots of debates I had on the USENET newsgroup talk.origins from 1988 to 1996, and found these posts referenced and echoed in several places. This is alittle disquieting not because I would recant the substance of things that I said back then or that my basic views about those things have changed. It is just that I had moved on to other things and my approach to things, the tone I take, has changed.

Now, I have no doubt as to the correctness of organic evolution, or cosmic evolution for that matter and the antiquity of the earth and universe, nor have I revised my conclusion about the essential moral authoritarianism of the "people of the Book" religions that all trace to the prophet Abraham, remembering that the followers number close to 2 Billion people, but spiritual truths take many forms and no one faith or approach to wisdom has a monopoly on the truth. Also, many of those who fervantly believe in one of these three great traditions are people of toleration and good will who can see past rhetorical positions that conceal base motives. Nothing in human strieving to be better should disavow the evil that is always close at hand especially in the zeal to have authority and control.

I want to write in posts to come here soon about all the work I have been doing on Franz Joseph Haydn, whose Symphonies and Piano Sonatas have had ny attention for the past couple of months. When I have something intelligent to say here. I will pick up that topic.