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.