angel of music

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the note in itself has no meaning. It could be any note in isolation, it doesn't matter, doesn't convey any feeling. But put two together and now there's a story. A tension maybe, a harmony perhaps. Now add another and you have a chord. A chord can be sad, can be happy, can be strange, can be jazzy. It's the relationships between the notes that give it meaning. The distance. A semi-tone, an octave. And then add a melody, separate them in time, play them sequentially, add another relationship. The timing, a quaver, semi-quaver, ghost note. How long - how short, what you decide will give the song another quality, another dimension. The scales are the fundamentals. Now I realise why. There are certain structures that resonate with us. Certain distances that just feel right. Major scales, minor pentatonic scales, Dorian. We give them names, the same way we name plants, children. There's a feeling of having discovered them instead of invented them.

No matter how lovely you can sing / play a single note, how much vibrato, how strong, how clear. It's the relationships between people that give life meaning, and getting the distances right, practicing your scales, learning to play your instrument well enough to play with others, that fill it with music.

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maybe listening to this kind of music doesn't make you a better person, but maybe it helps you realise that you could be one, maybe even that you want to be one

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it's mind boggling to think that a human came up with this piece. That at some point these notes were just ideas in an individual's head, and then notations, scratchings of ink on a piece of paper.

When you encounter something as elemental and pure as this, it's difficult to imagine that it ever existed as something other than perfection. When you get into the middle, to the rolling, rushing, cascading waves of emotion - it's as if there was nothing to be translated. You forget there is a pianist, a composer. There is only the music - the timelessness of it leads you to believe that it must have predated its inventor, just as it has outlived him.

It's hard to believe there was ever an intermediary between forces of nature and the analogue signals coming from the piano. There is no evidence of human striving, it doesn't feel calculated, contrived or engineered. It feels as natural as sunlight, as the tides, as breathing.

How does this music make you feel? And how did Debussy feel when he wrote it? Which came first - the music or the feeling? And if the feeling came first, where did the feeling come from? Are all our acts of creation simply a transcription of what lives within us? If so, how did it get there in the first place? If the source of all our art is internal, then how is it that we appreciate its beauty intuitively, universally, the same way our ancestors who, without ever having to explain to each other, understood what it meant to stand alone in the reverential night and gaze at the moon.

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"you know, it can be soul crushing - but in a way that's soul expanding when you stop being crushed - but sometimes it's hard to find time to stop being crushed."